We seek familiarity, not happiness. Just sit with that for a while.
Our brains, our bodies, our entire being is solely concerned with surviving this moment, then the next moment, and the moment after that. We fundamentally don’t understand how we work, or how our brains work. Our brains aren’t really for thinking—thinking about what to make for dinner or pondering the concepts of democracy or altruism. Our brains are for simulating the world around us, testing that against what we perceive, and improving our model. Our brains exist simply to help us move safely from this moment into the next.
In light of that, we seek familiarity because in the familiar, we know how to survive. We are designed to seek familiarity, not happiness. Of course, this helps explain why people stay in abusive relationships, or why we tend to surprise ourselves with choices that seem not to bring happiness at times when it feels like our whole being genuinely wants happiness. The self-help aisle of the book store is full of titles with happiness in them, not familiarity. Happiness is fun, sexy, profitable, familiarity is utilitarian and dull.
Of course there is not a single static “we” anyway. Ever-dynamic, infinitely connected to everything in existence, and complex beyond comprehension. We all have many faces, identities, components, all vying for their familiar so as to survive to the next moment. And we think we can read people’s minds….ha! We can’t even read our own.
But what happens when the familiar becomes the unhappy? I don’t know the answer to this, or really anything else for that matter! What if we keep finding ourselves, especially in an unconscious state like sleep, stuck in a cycle of night mares or panic attacks, for example? The familiar is sought because the self knows how to survive that condition, even though the condition brings on such unhappiness.
We all intuitively know what happiness feels like, but what exactly is it? Is it defined in terms of a relationship between two or more things? Can it be isolated? There are sadists and there are masochists and there are a whole bunch of others not in either camp. How can they all be happy, or in a state of familiarity? Most people like ice cream, fewer seem to like lima beans. But there must be some folks out there craving lima beans and shuttering at the thought of Rocky Road.
And of course happy is not content which is not pleasure nor exhilaration. Is familiar identical or routine or known or experienced? A tree is not the word tree nor the image in your mind when reading the word tree. Maybe there is only energy and everything else, baseballs and subprime mortgages are simply illusions or stories or shared beliefs. Maybe familiar is simply harmonics or multiples of a fundamental energy state. Maybe happiness is an Eigenvector. I think it might rather be a puppy. Puppies are familiar and very happy!
