Happiness is not made of small moments of ecstasy

I never liked the widely assimilated idea that happiness is made of little moments of… happiness🇧🇷 As if it were a small interval made of fireworks between periods of boredom (these, therefore, most of life).

In a very confusing phase of life, one of those where you are sure you just made the wrong choices and pray to find a step-by-step self-help formula to be happy, I ended up stepping into the world of philosophy.

I found out how incredible the science that studies thought, morals and ethics was, among so many other concepts that we deal with on a daily basis and that have such an impact on our existence.

I vividly remember a teacher who explained to me the importance of reflection. “Reflection is like driving thought,” she said. You insights, epiphanies, quantum leapswhatever you call those moments when our mind manages to see a situation in a different way, it’s as if that impulse gained the propulsion of a spring.

At that time I also discovered that the concept of happiness is an object of ancient study. Since long before the magic formulas of self-help books, Plato, Socrates, Aristotle and a bunch of other philosophers from other times discussed what it means to be happy. Definitely not living small moments of euphoria.

For Aristotle, for example, happiness comes with virtuous conduct. That is, happiness would be a daily achievement backed by the development of values ​​that are recognizably fair to everyone. That is, it depends more on us than on circumstances that we have no control over.

Why talk about happiness now? Actually, for three random reasons, two of them being something that resonated in my life and yours.

The first was the approval of the Family Statute, a bill by federal deputy Diego Garcia, from PHS, Paraná. As I had never heard of this party, I went after it to find out more. It has existed since 1996 (!) and the acronym PHS means – here is the maximum capacity for distorting the meaning of words – Humanist Solidarity Party.

You see, those who consider themselves humanists and solidarity want to create a law to determine that family it’s just a man and woman with a signed commitment paper and their offspring – myself, I am the daughter of parents who never did that.

According to this logic, orphans raised by uncles, for example, have no family. Neither do children of same-sex couples. Incidentally, not even grandchildren brought up by grandparents have a family under the law that this group of “solidary” people wants to create.

Hard to believe that a text like this was written by adult men. How can it be possible to live for years and years and have such a short view of what is important in life. What must happiness mean for Deputy Diego Garcia?

The second was the outcome of “Verdades Secretas”, the TV Globo soap opera that has become a national addiction in recent months. In the plot, the main characters gravitated (as did we) around the seven deadly sins: lust, avarice, anger, pride, laziness, envy and gluttony.

The idea of ​​capital sin is a determination of the Catholic Church, which also created capital virtues, including temperance and generosity. I am not interested in resorting to sins and virtues from a moral point of view, but to the polarization between them (for example, on one side we have lust and pride and on the other chastity and humility).

These two extremes make me believe that the middle path would be the shortcut to be happy🇧🇷 And that was what was missing from the lives of Angel, Giovanna, Fany, Anthony, Alex, Pia, Eziel, Larissa and Roy in Walcyr Carrasco’s plot. The rest is history.

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Finally, the third reason was watching the delightful film “Hector and the Quest for Happiness” (2014), which was never released in theaters here, but has just been released on NOW (NET’s on demand service).

Hector is a psychiatrist who feels that he is not helping his patients to be happier. Worse than that, he feels like a fraud. “I speak of things I have not lived”. So the doctor decides to travel the world in search of experiences that show happiness.

The journey yields a small compendium of phrases about these movements that are common to all of us. “Avoiding sadness does not mean seeking joy”, “We need to be less concerned with the pursuit of happiness and more with the pursuit of happiness”, or “Being happy is being loved for who you are” are some of them.

On the way, Hector lives different situations of fear, joy, freedom, prison. None of them, however, would be worthless if he wasn’t smart enough to observe them in depth and then transform what was once an “experience” into happiness. How about reflecting more on this?