Co-creating happiness
(Nimue)
Once upon a time, rather a long time ago there was a man who told me that he could not bear to make others unhappy. He went on to explain that this meant if he upset me, I should not tell him. I did not have many further dealings with him after that.
It would be very nice if we were all naturally perfectly happy with everything everyone else did, but clearly that’s not realistic. Even when everyone is trying their best, differences in needs, and preferences mean we won’t be perfect for each other. That diversity matters, and it means that we all have to deal with some discomfort now and then.
Happiness is not something we can co-create by demanding that everyone is, or pretends to be perfectly happy. Shutting down someone else’s scope to express their feelings is a really unhappy-making thing to do. Room for a bit of honest misery is less miserable than having to pretend to be happy, in my experience.
So much more is possible when we’re prepared to be imperfect together. Compromise is possible on those terms. Finding the middle ground, the options and possibilities to make the best of it for everyone starts from being ok about the imperfectness of being human. None of us is going to be perfectly happy with everything all of the time, but when we cooperate we can radically increase the scope for everyone to be happier more of the time, and that’s an excellent goal.
Justice can seem like an abstract idea, something cold and hard and perhaps intrinsically painful. It doesn’t have to be. My journey along the Druid path has had me thinking about justice in terms of how it relates to everyday life. Seeking to be just in our everyday doings is so important. Big philosophical principles are meaningless if you can’t put them into action. Who gets to be happy and on what terms is a question of justice. It calls for the fairer sharing of both resources and responsibilities, and for treating everyone’s time with equal value. To push someone into a life that denies them joy is a deeply unjust thing.
To co-create happiness, we have to be accountable to each other. We have to find ways to balance needs and preferences, and be alert to our own power to limit others. My desire to be comfortable should not translate into my feeling entitled to cause harm to someone else. When I get something wrong, I want to hear about it so that I can learn and do better. If we’re too self protective, if we refuse to be accountable, we cannot participate in creating collective happiness. That in turn reduces a person’s scope for being happy – so there’s an aspect of enlightened self interest to this, too.
Perfectionism breeds misery. The desire to be seen as, or treated as perfect actually makes it harder to be happy. It’s a path that does not allow a person to act fairly, creating new cycles of unfairness others might criticise and new opportunities for discomfort that must be shut down. This is not the road to anywhere good and the desire for short turn discomfort avoidance can betray a person into harming their own best interests.
