Assignment 3 S.

No-6
Kaviti Sai Saurab - 12349

How can I be happy? This is a question which isnt asked enough, as often as it should be
anyway, as all our life essentially revolves around it. Like Srikumar Rao points out, everyone
has so deeply rooted mental models as to what constitutes its answer that one fails to see it for
a flawed mental model as opposed to something that is representative of actual
what it is - just
reality. Every established school of philosophy or theology has answers to this question and the
answers are surprisingly similar and diametrically different at the same time.

A point of recurring similarity , regarding what leads to happiness, throughout the course and in
the realizations of the people in the videos is to not tie ones happiness to the outcomes of ones
actions. In the Bhagavad Gita, Krishna says - Dont be attached to the results of your actions
and dont be attached to not doing your duty. Srikumar Rao says that the key to being happy is
defining and investing in your process and not in the outcome. How have we learnt to be so
attached to outcomes - learnt to be unhappy as Srikumar puts it - and why do we fail to come
out of it despite having experienced first hand that getting what we want does not elevate the
baseline of our happiness? I think this is partly(or maybe majorly) due to the structure of the
society we are in today. Todays society is primarily fuelled by the economic machine underlying
it. It is the fundamental driver of our daily activities. Economies flourish when greater trade
happens. And for greater trade to happen, everyone should need more things. Not taking into
account, the nature of those things is, I believe the root of a lot of harm. For eg., sex, drugs etc.,
are base and powerful influencers of human behavior. So they naturally sell a lot. These things
whose uncontrolled sale was completely shunned in the previous ages are becoming less
restricted now to fuel the economic machine. Educational institutions which mainly focussed on
developing students with high philosophy and values in the past have now completely discarded
values and have lumped them into a tiny, inconsequential part of learning called humanities.
They instead focus on developing technology which big companies use to sell more of the base
commodities that I was mentioning earlier. So the highest intellectual centers of our generation
are more and more concerned with propagating and fuelling our basest desires. The rise of the
advertising industry is another indicator of this trend. The goal of advertising is to convince you
that you are unhappy now and you can be happy by getting the commodity which the seller is
trying to sell to you. The technology giants which are seen as the pinnacle of this generations
achievements - facebook and google - derive their revenues primarily from advertising.
Smartphone companies like apple and samsung have to convince you why your phone from last
year is completely inadequate and why you need a new one. This constant addiction to the
latest new thing has lead to an exponential increase in the wastage of things. In earlier times,
people knew the ins and outs of the things they had used. And there was such a phenomenon
as passing things down generations and fixing and reusing broken things. But today, even the
adage - loving things more than people no longer holds as even things are ruthlessly discarded
when a new version of it comes out.
The mindset of an individual is heavily influenced by the mindset of the society he lives in. It is
not impossible to escape or transcend it, but it makes it that much more difficult and it makes it
so that so many fewer people get to do that. When we as a society want the next greatest
technology, the next smart city, next faster train etc., that seeps down into the people wanting
the next new phone and it is a vicious cycle. This may have turned more into a critique of
capitalism and may seem off topic but I think the place of accelerating material and economic
progress of society as an absolute need for the society stands uncontested and we are suffering
the consequences of the same. How can I focus on the process when I have no incentive to do
so? My incentives are based off of the results that I produce and not the process that I pursue.
In earlier times, someone like Harischandra would have received great admiration from people
for his unflinching dedication to his values but today he would be discarded as stupid because
that led him to becoming penniless. A stark example of this fact is that the kind of story which
inspires people the most today is the rags-to-riches story quite like the one of Steve Jobs or JK
Rowling. People of all sections of the society admire Steve Jobs because he became rich. This
is true because most of them do not know his contributions to the computer industry as they are
simply not technically equipped to know. So here again it is the outcomes and not the process
that we are focussing on. Donald Trump was a hugely inspirational figure in the United States
because he was a billionaire. But now that has changed as he has entered into politics. If it were
his character that had inspired people in the first place, that wouldnt have changed. But sadly it
wasnt. It was only his money.

How to get out of this vicious rat race? Like Steve Jobs has said focussing on our mortality is a
great way to reframe our perspective. In fact more important than how to live is the question of
how to die. What happens after death is a question everyone has to ponder about. Life here is
extremely brief and the only way it can potentially be of any meaning is if it serves some place in
the great journey that we have across lives, if there is such a thing as a
cross lives. But that
should be our primary focus, more so than how to be cozy and comfortable here. Because all
comforts here vaporize at the time of death. We are contributing to the progress of humanity
someone might say. But humanity is something that one shouldnt care more than humans.
Because it is humans who have experiences and not humanity. So is what you are doing
contributing to long term happiness of humans? That can definitely not be said of the direction
our society is headed in. We like to celebrate humanity's progress but the humans today are
more miserable than the previous ages. The greatest barrier to human happiness surely is
death. Can you solve that problem? The solution to that problem is not of course how can we
become so healthy and advanced in gene manipulation that our bodies can regenerate and so
on. Because fundamentally, in principle, our bodies are things that can and do decay, so they
will decay. Hence they wont serve as the solution to the problem of death. The solution to the
problem is to find out and attain the state of existence which is in principle undecaying, in
knowledge and in bliss. This is in fact our original unadulterated nature as explained in Vedanta.
This is a goal worth pursuing because even in failure there is nothing lost, but in success the
gain is incomparably huge. This I think is the key to unlocking eternal uninterrupted and ever
growing happiness.