Synthesising Happiness

We have been evolving since the last two million years , and one significant change that has taken place is that our brain has tripled in size. It was not just simple fat that was added but also the structure of our brain changed. The frontal lobe was added in which is something called the pre frontal cortex. The major function of the pre-frontal cortex is an experience simulator. With an experience simulator – you can have an experience of something before you actually try it out. Just like pilots have to go through flight simulators before they are allowed to actually fly a plane. So, you can experience something in your mind even before you actually do it. And by the way no animal can do this, no other species on this earth can do this and it is a unique quality which only the human species have the privilege to have.

Lets try out a simple experiment, I want all of you to imagine & try to simulate such an experience - 2 situations – 1st situation – You win 10 million (whatever currency you want) and 2nd – you meet with an accident and become permanently disabled. In which situation do you think you will be happy? I don’t think you will need even a second to decide your preference.

But there has been extensive research conducted on this and the results are very interesting. A person having actually won a large amount of money after about a year’s time and a person who became disabled after a year, the level of their happiness or unhappiness is more or less the same. So why is that? We need to understand two things – First what is called “The impact bias”. Now what is this impact bias. It is the tendency to overestimate the impact of future events. Let us take a few examples of future events - getting married, passing an exam, winning an election, getting a promotion – all these events have far less impact, less intensity and much less duration than what people expect to have.

Second is that we human beings have some kind of inner system that helps us to change the view of the world that they we find ourselves to be in. We can actually synthesize or manufacture or produce happiness but we are under the false illusion that happiness has to be found. Sir Thomas Browne wrote “I am the happiest man alive, I have that in me that can convert poverty to riches, adversity to prosperity and I am so invulnerable that fortune has no place to hit me”. Also Shakespeare has said “There is nothing good or bad, only thinking makes it so”.

Be the master of your own destiny, synthesise happiness, spread happiness -it's all in your hand.

Our Collective Responsibility

Our universe is about 14 billion years old, our planet is about 5 billion & the human species is about 200,000 years old and therefore as far as the evolutionary history of the universe is concerned, the human species is still in its infancy. For thousands of years we, human beings have survived due to the fight or flight response, but then this response became so well ingrained in us, we have now become the predators on this planet. But there is a saying – a permanently victorious species risks its own extinction. The time has come to replace “survival of the fittest” with the “survival of the wisest”. Predatory relationships have to be surpassed by symbiotic relationships if we have to move further into our next phase of evolution. It is now our collective responsibility to nurture the very web of our existence, our eco system.

Very soon, the playing field for violence will be considerably reduced; soon the superpowers will become irrelevant because conventional weaponry & warfare will not matter. As technology becomes more sophisticated in its diabolical creativity, a single individual with a mobile phone sitting in some remote cave anywhere in the world may be able to cut off electricity to some place, or hijack a plane or interfere with air traffic signals or suffocate people who are on pacemakers or cause the nuclear plants to leak – all this just by moving electrons inside a mobile telephone. Modern capacities and ancient habits is a devastating combination. This is a moment of crisis because we risk our own extinction. If insects disappeared from our planet then all life would stop within 5 years because insects are such an important part of our ecology that we just can’t do without them but on the other hand if human beings were to perish today, then life would flourish on this planet. And nature would simply say that “Human beings were a good experiment that didn’t work”. Technology by itself is neutral, it all depends on us what we do with the technology. We can use the technology to restore the ecosystem, to bring economic empowerment to the poor, eradicate poverty, to create cross cultural exchanges through fine arts – books, poetry, music, entertainment, to harness the power of collective intelligence.

So, now it is up to you and me and all of us to spread this message of becoming responsible for our planet, our eco-system and our environment. If all such like minded people connect and communicate with each other, then one day together they could form the tipping point from where mankind would take a giant leap forward and completely transform this world.