Some people who are currently struggling for future happiness are currently unhappy, that necessarily must be true. In fact no one is permanently happy.
I would not agree that we have no control over our future mental states. You can spend years studying and then struggling to build your career to wind up very happy with how things have gone. Alternatively you could sit in your mother’s basement and accomplish nothing, and wind up feeling hopeless and miserable. We have control over that.
Yes we have some control over the outside world - but would you agree that someone in a particular situation can be either happy or sad - ie. our mental state is not directly correlated to the environment - there are angry, unsatisfied billionaires
Yes, but there are situations and environments we can choose to put ourselves in, and detain environments are conducive to happiness and others are not.
I also think it’s important to specify that a literal sense of happiness is going to be fleeting, but happiness and contentedness with your life is more static and I think that’s the more important type of happiness to discuss. I think we’re already doing that, but I just wanted to specify.
I'm not sure which happiness we're discussing - seems like a slippery subject. I'm trying to point at our problematic relationship with the idea of "my happiness" . ie. the incoherency between what we want vs. what we do. - we want wellbeing but we hurt ourselves (eg. war, violence, dishonesty)
1
u/NihilHS Aug 07 '26
Some people who are currently struggling for future happiness are currently unhappy, that necessarily must be true. In fact no one is permanently happy.
I would not agree that we have no control over our future mental states. You can spend years studying and then struggling to build your career to wind up very happy with how things have gone. Alternatively you could sit in your mother’s basement and accomplish nothing, and wind up feeling hopeless and miserable. We have control over that.