In the fifth season of the television show “Mad Men,” Donald Draper — an adman whose business is shaping and manipulating the imaginings of men and women — exclaims, “what is happiness? The moment before you need more happiness!” Indeed, it seems like we go through our lives waiting for the next moment of satisfaction and, when it finally arrives, we anxiously await the next one, possibly before the current one is even finished. Ask yourself: when was the last time you were happy? Not momentarily happy, like eating your favorite food, but truly satisfied? The answer for most of us is probably not recently.
In fact, for most of us, we’ll go through a significant portion of our lives without ever truly feeling fulfilled. We’ll string together moments of happiness, moments that are completely independent and separate from one another, look at the edifice we’ve built and call ourselves happy. But the key to our happiness is not constantly looking for the next fix of endorphins. The key to happiness is finding the unifying factor that keeps you happy, even in the “in-between” moments.
To most of us, our lives proceed lineally, with bubbles of happiness and satisfaction here and there, dispersed throughout. On the lines of our lives there are also moments of sadness, pain, fear, regret; in between these interruptions are our “in-between” moments, those days of our lives that seem like filler space between the next moment of happiness or pain. We view our lives like this because, as humans, we have the unique capacity to imagine. Our complex brains give us the ability to picture in our heads, in our “mind’s eye,” what the future could look like, what the past looks like, what it could have looked like if we had done one thing and not the other.
We spend more time in our own heads than we do outside of them. When we daydream or hope or imagine or regret or fear, we are playing a game with ourselves, a conversation that exists nowhere else in the universe except within our own minds. and, in doing so, we miss the present moment entirely. Through our imaginings, we make ourselves horrifically unhappy.
Most of us will never become monks, lost in a sense of supreme satisfaction and completely detached from our thoughts. But the trick is not to rid ourselves completely of our unhappiness — that’s a goal few of us will attain — but to spend more time in the present moment, recognizing that our pains and our thoughts are things that happen to us and not things that are us. We feel sadness and emotional pain and anger because it is hard to become master over the conversation that takes place perpetually in our heads; the trick is to silence the noise.
Look around you now. Your experience exists in the present moment entirely and nowhere else. Look at this page and then look away. That moment of looking at this page before looking away now no longer exists except as a memory and it has been replaced by the present moment. The significance of this, once realized, can be life-changing. When we dwell on the past, on the future, on what happened or what could have happened, we are thinking about nothing at all. We miss the present moment of experience for a time long gone, or in the case of the future, a time that never existed. This isn’t to say we shouldn’t dream about the future to inspire us to do better in the present moment, or think about our mistakes or successes in the past in order to make better choices, but that we cannot let these thoughts envelop us completely.
We must be spectators in the land of imagining, but we must not dwell in it. To do so is to sacrifice the real for the sake of the imagined. And that is no way to live.