Prisons of happiness

I read a few articles recently debating whether the purpose of life is happiness or usefulness/leading a worthwhile life. The Aztecs as well as contemporary thinkers favour the latter. I am not convinced though. For starters, I think ‘purpose’s is something our consciousness insists on. The world will go on without us, it is for us to derive a sense of meaning for ourselves. And since it is subjective, I’d optimise for happiness/avoiding discomfort (I’m bunching it together for now) simply because my usefulness/being worthwhile to others around increases when I am happy.

This is a topic I have been circling for a while now – There is no middle path? was a take on happiness vs avoiding discomfort, for instance. A favorite line of thought from “And the Mountains Echoed” has been coming back to me in various forms from various people in the last fortnight. “..but most people have it backward. They think they live by what they want. But really what guides them is what they’re afraid of. What they don’t want.” That is essentially avoiding discomfort.

But I found a nuanced view of discomfort in a conversation in Munnariyippu, a movie which might have ended up underwhelming if not for  Mammootty’s stellar performance and the uniqueness of his character’s philosophical outlook. He plays a recently released convict with very radical (nihilistic?) points of view on life, death, freedom etc. In a bar conversation, he expounds his idea of freedom, and how freedom means different things for different people. For instance, he prefers life in prison to the life outside, where people try to make him do things he’d rather not.

It isn’t that the prison isn’t a discomfort, but it works well in the trade off the character makes. It is also not the kind of choice one would intuitively make. But he is happier there. The thought therefore, is that we can perhaps find a middle ground between happiness and avoiding discomfort if we are very clear about the ‘prisons’ we choose to occupy. We could choose to move away from conformity and make deliberate choices that make us happier than the alternatives. By catering to our own conscious choices of freedom, and trading off some other kinds of freedom, we create our own ‘prisons’ of happiness. That, I’d say, is the middle ground between optimising for avoiding discomfort and optimising for happiness.