Revisiting Satisfaction and Happiness

As outlined earlier, I am stuck in an ethical debate that is somewhat abstract. Specifically, I am trying to analyze and come clear on which major criteria I should set for myself between satisfaction and happiness. I noted before that part of the problem in the debate could lie in the fact that happiness is so difficult for me to define - even on a personal level! Aside from holding dear some notion of happiness that I might share, I cannot even dig within myself to separate what might be considered happiness from mere satisfaction. But before I get too deeply into discussion of both factors, I first wish to point out what seems to me an important difference between the two notions - that difference that spurned my thinking in the first place!

During so many endless hours of physical exertion that was cycling training, I could not help but feel the excitement and joy that my training was constructed to obtain. I approached the sport from the ground up, taking a moment of informed inspiration to construct a plan, an edifice, whose topmost point would allow me to reach my lofty goals. Now, on any given day, my training called for any manner of difficult to insane amounts of training as a matter of course. But each day it was as if the entire structure, the whole plan - anywhere I touched it - became as grand a feeling as the endpoint it was set forth to achieve. What I found was a distinct happiness - that suffering could not serve to taint the purpose or goal with the chords of laziness.

Here was clearly a beast not akin to satisfaction. Nothing about the brief satisfaction of an end to the temporary suffering could actually motivate me to step on my bike the next day. Whatever it was that drove me so intensely toward my purpose, its form was something very different from satisfaction. Perhaps it was satisfying to be riding. But that conflicts heavily with something I took as a principle of my plan - I was simply not doing enough unless I had breached the bounds of comfort. Though there was certainly satisfaction in the act, my plan would hardly have been successful if not for every moment it could push me beyond my limits.

I am chasing something here, and what I've come to call it is happiness. Perhaps there is a better word (insanity?) to define the nature of that feeling, of that enabling ability. Whatever it is, I can already see that it should play a leading role in my life. I only hope to define it better through the coming posts and to continue teasing out the parts that define it. Upon completion, I hope to see how I can then take this chiseled notion and apply it to my own direction.

What to do? (reprise)

As I begin to contemplate the type of trajectory to take through my life, I am always confronted with what at first seems to be a superficial consideration. I am currently wrestling with whether or not to use money as a point of departure for my decisions. Alas, after some thinking and consideration, it occurs to be that there is a fundamental difference between at least two ways of looking at it. Do I want to be happy, or do I rather wish to be satisfied? Without an easily intelligible framework for tackling happiness, the types of justifications I wrestle with often bounce back into the realm of satisfaction or monetary compensation. I cannot even define what it is that might be considered the object of my happiness – indeed, staking my happiness upon an object seems to me the foremost incorrect way to go about it.

The problem revolves much around my personality. I am utterly astonished at the breadth of possible vocations, hobbies, acts, sports, and so on that have contributed something I could only refer to as hedonistic happiness. In some ways I have certainly felt a deeper happiness, but unfortunately, there is no common denominator among those rare occurrences. Perhaps I should look to a specific example, say, one of leadership. There have been experiences in my life where the success of my leadership has registered incredible highs. I cannot quantify (dare I use so brusque a word?) the relationship of such an experience to either my own selfish fulfillment or some altruistic good. In fact, I only roughly discern that there is a loophole through which my capacity to be selfish might have slipped. I would call upon altruism as justification, but it appears fuzzy. Therefore, at this point I might simply count such an experience against myself.

I am certainly deep within some manner of ethical debate. Before I can adequately root through the breadth I spoke of earlier, I must convince myself that I see it rightly. In other words, to pick and choose the right vocation requires that my criteria for selection are not themselves questionable. And thus, the distinction among perhaps the foremost of those criteria of satisfaction and happiness is of paramount importance.

So what are the terms of this debate?