A reply to Aldrin (see previous comment)
"Happiness through fulfillment is not a present happiness because fulfillment happens at some unknown point in the future. satisfaction can happen now..."
I must object Aldrin. I was vague in my entry to be sure. My title was indeed "Is fulfillment the right word?" But even so fulfillment is an emotion (well actually I'm not sure I would define it as such, but anyhoo) that one feels, ergo one must feel it in the present. I think the problem with the feeling I'm trying to describe is that it's not really triggered by one incident. An example.
I want to be in shape and I enjoy playing sports, but I have more pressing matters to attend to (i.e. finding a job). Now I will be happy if I play basketball (for a short time), and I probably won't be happy if I look for a job, but again this is the short time span. If I lengthen my p.o.v. a bit then I can see that I will be extremely happy when I find a job, not only that but I will be happy to have money so I don't have to live with my folks, I'll be more independent, etc. Note though that none of these alternatives (basketball, lookinf for job nor getting a job will make me 'fulfilled'. Which brings me back to, how does one achieve this sense of peace with the world.
(before I forget, I should talk some about Buddhism. The opposite of fulfilled is wanting. Buddhism says that this wanting is what makes people unhappy, their solution? Want nothing. Well that ain't gonna happen. I want to live. Time for a new solution)
I had a nice (drunk) talk with Michael Moewe. He was all 'happiness is the meaning of life', and I was like "Dude, I just thought that until last night." After some discussion I learned that Moewe was defining knowledge as happiness. Which is completely wrong. Knowledge and understanding are just that, knowledge and understanding. They may lead to happiness. Now I'm saying that knowledge and understanding probably are happiness, to Michael, and understanding does give that clarity that I associate with fulfillment and happiness, but that is not the ony way to go about achieving that happiness. It's like saying that if you can't understand nano-physics than you can never truly be happy. Well I know a few people who are happy (as Michael would say, fulfilled as I would), and I'm sure that there are dozens more scattered around the world and I'm also sure a small minority (if any) understand their own personal development. But that's ok, because they are happy.
So I think fulfillment (because you can be at peace, without being happy. e.g. if you were captured by terrorists and they started to saw off your head) comes from a way of life, a sustained pattern of living. Not just one event, but how you decide to live your life, the rationale (rationale also not a good word) that dictates how you will respond to any stimuli, and ergo any response and any and all events that you actually do. I'm thinking of re-reading The Seven Habits of Highly Successful People, I think it addresses this issue somewhat. Happiness is a way of life.
ok, that's enough for now. I can't wait for more criticism. I love arguing, especially when no one can be right.
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 |  finding that which is worth living for...
 strfisher
2004-06-16 18:32
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I don’t believe we are ever truly fulfilled, nor do I believe that we are ever truly happy. That’s the fundamental tragedy of human existence – that we are always left unsatisfied. You can experience momentary happiness or fleeting fulfillment, but that moment is always tempered with the awareness of its impermanence. The moment you recognize that you are fulfilled is the moment you recognize that you are lacking, and the strongest and most “real” feelings of happiness nearly always have twinges of regret. Happiness and also, I suppose, fulfillment are some of the most precarious positions to be in because you constantly have the specter of their inevitable end hanging over you.
But I guess that doesn’t really pertain to the whole “meaning of life” thing you’ve got going on…unless you switched over to the idea of fulfillment. I don’t know. I think either way, the main thing you have to do to accomplish any of those things (happiness, fulfillment, satisfaction) is to do something you believe is worthwhile. As you said, for some people, that might be the pursuit of knowledge. For those people, knowing everything would be the ultimate happiness because it would be the achievement of the thing that they believe to be most worthwhile in life. Or in your case, the reason you would be more fulfilled by pursuing a job and becoming independent than you would by going and playing sports is probably because you believe that finding a career and attaining independence is more worthwhile than just being in good shape but still living at home. I suppose you could say that you do what is worthwhile because it makes you fulfilled, but I think it’s more the other way around – you feel fulfilled because you have spent your life doing what you feel is worthwhile. It isn’t so much that there is one thing that holds the “meaning of life”. The pursuit of knowledge isn’t any more valid of a lifestyle than a life spent helping others. Even a life spent on decadence might leave you just as fulfilled as a life spent on writing the great American novel, if you believed that the pursuit of pleasure was the most worthwhile thing to do with your life. I’m not exactly comfortable taking the whole moral relativism thing because I don’t want to believe that a serial killer can live a life that’s just as fulfilling as a philanthropist’s, but at the same time, if this is the only life we get, and we are only responsible unto ourselves…well, moral relativism seems like the way to go. At the same time, I do think that most people believe that it is worthwhile to love other people and to cultivate relationships, to broaden their minds, etc etc.
Now, perhaps I should go do work…problem is, I don’t believe that my work is worthwhile. I’m not even sure law school is worthwhile for me. That’s the struggle, I think, in life, finding what you believe is worthwhile. Finding what you want to live for. I think that for all that people want that, most people don’t actually find it, so they substitute fleeting happiness and corporal pleasures for the deeper fulfillment they would have gotten from pursuing something they truly believed in. Hello alcohol! Hello drugs!
P.S. now that you’ve read my treatise, check out this site: http://www.csupomona.edu/~jelerma/springfield/map/index.html
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| a less--drunk reply to Zac
(Anonymous)
2004-06-22 11:54
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Ok, I think in my drunken state I didn't quite explain my opinion thoroughly, nor understand your side. Yay alcohol. Even while sober, I tend to ramble, so bear with me. By "knowledge" or understanding, I wasn't refering to just knowledge of a scientific nature. I was refering to knowledge as an understanding of oneself and one's situation in life and the world, which to the extreme would almost be like a prescient state of mind combined with an understanding also of why events unfold as they do. With true understanding you would know what actions in life would lead to general suffering for yourself and what actions would lead to more desirable states for one's life. That to me is happiness, improving your overall state, so there's the time dependence. You can't be happy by just following spur-of-the-moment pleasures and enjoying them without context from your future and past. I think Socrates said something along these lines, that if a person truly understands the consequences of their behavior, they can't act in a way that would cause them to suffer overall. That's a pretty bold statement, but it does make sense. It would be illogical for somebody who, with full knowledge of the consequence of their actions and the workings of the world, to act in a way that would minimize their pleasure over the long run. Of course this type of knowledge is an idealistic goal, but I agree that the closer one gets to a sortof ultimate prescient/understanding state, the more returns one receives on it. So the idea of pure "catching a dandelion" happiness is naive and to me is pointless. True "happiness" for me isn't confined to one point in time or space.. when I drunkenly mentioned the "integral" of happiness, I meant it really in nonmathematical terms. I just meant that happiness can't be pinned down to one point in time, it really is more of a continuum where you know your future will bring a fair amount of more pleasure. What I see as my best chance for happiness is understanding my motivations and knowing how I can work them with the world, or work the world to them.
OK, so I think if I had to sum up that paragraph, it would be that "ultimate knowledge is happiness, because it is inextricably linked with happiness. When one achieves a state of complete understanding, happiness is a natural almost unavoidable consequence because one would know how to act in any situation to follow one's desires." In some cases it's a bad idea to seek immediate carnal pleasure, but in some cases its bad to constantly work and never take time to sniff a flower. To me, understanding more about life would lead one to have a better sense of how to balance life to get the most meaningful pleasure out of it over the long run.
And back to fulfillment, I think Buddhism seems to say that the state of being human is the state of wanting. It seems way too simple though to just give up completely on wanting. I agree, I want to live, and to me, not wanting is analagous to not even living. Wanting is life's purpose, and complete fulfillment is impossible because there can be no end to the cycle of grasping at things, because at that point you're not really living. So I think the important thing to take from Buddhism is that understanding of the cycle, and thus a person who understands that completely would not be as prone to cases where they achieve a goal, be it something lofty like becoming a doctor, or just the pursuit of material wealth, but feel empty and upset when they realize they still want more afterwards. So stuff like this, understanding yourself, the world, even though this example is just an insignificant fraction of it, I believe this sort of knowledge can lead to maximizing one's overall pleasure and minimizing pain and suffering. If you enjoy buying things or becoming a doctor but don't expect it to put an end to the feeling of wanting more (and the suffering that feeling sometimes causes) you can alleviate some of your suffering and even open yourself up to more pleasure.
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| a less--drunk reply to Zac part 2 (I exceeded the character limit)
(Anonymous)
2004-06-22 11:55
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And you sortof mentioned that people can be happy but also be completely ignorant. That's possible, but I feel that in the long run, having the aforementioned state of pure knowledge would give one a better chance for sustained happiness. Ignorance is sortof a passive way of approaching one's life, and ultimately life will fuck with you simply by the roll of the dice, and if you have no understanding of yourself, you won't know how best to react to maximize your pleasure or satisfy needs or what not, and for me at least, that state eventually ends up in suffering more often.
-Michael
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