Ornoth

Fourth of July is a time when Americans make a big deal about our freedoms. Freedom of religion, freedom of expression. Self-rule and freedom from oppression. Freedom of movement and career choice. Freedom to stockpile and use lethal weapons on one another. You’d think America would rank pretty high as a free and happy society.

But in reality, most Americans are neither free nor happy. And the reason is clear to see, codified for posterity right there in our Declaration of “Independence”:

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.

[Use of “unalienable” and lack of Oxford comma/semis are Jefferson’s. -o]

Paraphrased: We think Life is an inalienable Right. We think Liberty is an inalienable Right. And we think people are best occupied in an eternal, unending pursuit of more and better “Happiness”.

I would be reiterating a familiar refrain in pointing this out: forever chasing happiness will not lead you to the Garden of Eden; it’s better understood as a real-world manifestation of the eternal punishment of Tantalus. We’ve been taught from birth that no matter how much capital ‘H’ “Happiness” we obtain, we cannot ever be satisfied. We are compelled to eternally chase an elusive vision of future fulfillment that, by definition, cannot ever be achieved.

The mindless pursuit of more and better: do you call that freedom? I call that enslavement.

We are neither free nor happy because we are constantly cultivating unfulfilled wants, unrealized desires which society compels us are necessary before we can be happy. No matter how many “freedoms” we have, our nation’s economy and our individual lives are structured around our inability to ever achieve fulfillment. And no matter how many things we achieve or buy, our “Happiness” remains as distant as ever. This eternal hamster wheel of wanting something we don’t have is the very thing that makes us unhappy.

The Four Freedoms

You think our country’s forefathers granted you enough freedoms to be truly free? You forgot about the single most important freedom of all: freedom from want.

The solution ought to be obvious to anyone who thinks rationally about it: if the pursuit of something cannot ever be achieved, then the pursuit must be abandoned.

To be truly happy, you must give up our founding fathers’ “pursuit of Happiness” and learn how to be not just okay, but happy with what you already have, and with the world as it is, complete with all its myriad problems and imperfections. The conclusion is Zen-like in its simplicity and profundity: to gain the thing you want, you have to let go of wanting that thing, and eventually abandon the very impulse of wanting itself.

Old people grok this more readily than the young. They’ve lived long enough to have acquired and achieved great things, seen how short-lived everything they worked for really was, and realized how little lasting happiness those things produced in the long run.

I can’t say I’ve freed myself from desire, but through my Buddhist meditation practice I’ve made surprising progress. By learning how to be at peace with life as it is, rather than chasing after life as it could possibly become, I’ve been happier, less worried about my status, more secure, less jealous, and more compassionate. By reducing my wants, I’ve adopted a much more a minimalist lifestyle, become more environmentally friendly as a result, and (perhaps ironically) become wealthier by wasting a much smaller percentage of my income on ephemera that ultimately prove unfulfilling.

Most important is that I’ve been “happier”. Lasting happiness cannot be achieved by pursuing it more and more intensely, but only by abandoning the chase and allowing oneself to actually *be* happy, in this and every moment, unconditionally and without disclaimer. Or the other way around: you will never *be* happy if you define happiness as something you don’t already have that you must eternally pursue.

America can only become the land of the free and the home of the brave if Americans become aware of and reject our “unalienable Right to the pursuit of Happiness”, which is just a tricky code phrase for the unending cycle of consumption and desire that keeps us enslaved to our petty wants.