On Happiness

Given modern American culture isn't the ideal petri dish for growing happy humans (and I assert it is a given) then we have a few tasks at hand:
1) Understand what does make humans in general fulfilled, joyful, at peace
2) Understand what makes you in particular fulfilled, joyful, etc
3) Align your behaviors based on your understanding of what makes you truly happy
4) Advocate for social change based on your understanding of what supports human happiness in general

I've been fascinated by the exploration of what makes us happy since I was a child. Many people would disagree, but being "happy" (for me, fulfilled, playful, safe, open to pleasure) is my answer to the question of the meaning of life. I don't believe in an afterlife, and I don't believe we were "put" on this earth for a purpose. I would worry that being happy is a selfish lifetime goal, but thankfully, it turns out, it's hard (impossible?) to be truly happy without actively working to support other people. Why? Because, as even a cursory glimpse at human "prehistory" (those first 190,000 years) proves, humans are, down to our very essence, social creatures.

Why did we evolve the way we did? Why did we lose the physical power and defensive body features of our primate ancestor in favor of soft flesh and bigger brains...especially given we evolved into predators? Our bodies are not the fastest, strongest, biggest, best camouflaged, or best defended, and yet we still successfully moved to the top of the food chain...because we did social relationships better than any other animal. (Picture the small group of human men, working together with a plan communicated in advance, to take down the mammoth.) So instead of evolving speed or brawn, evolution has polished our social skills for millennia. Not only did we perfect tongue anatomy and brain capacity necessary for complicated speech, we also have positive feedback loops of socialization in our DNA. Because the better we became at cooperating, innovating in groups, communicating, and offering loyal, "I've got your back" relationships, the more we thrived as a species. So the genetic mechanisms that provided internal motivation (pleasure, laughter, happiness, etc) for socialization have been singled out and rewarded by evolution for a hundred thousand years. 

And living in single-family homes in groups of 4 instead of tribal clans of 150 hasn't changed our DNA one bit. We are still hard-wired to feel good giving to others, to laugh more in groups, to feel safer and less anxious as we create and maintain loyal friendships. And yet the "American Dream" is to own a home and live in it without extended family, to never need the financial support of friends or family, to "pull yourself up by your own bootstraps." The American Dream is founded on the principal that the INDIVIDUAL is solely responsible for his or her own happiness...self-reliance is idolized. And the important flip side of this paradigm is that the Individual has very little responsibility to anyone else (the taxes-as-horrible-affliction-on-society philosophy is one offshoot of this perspective).

Clearly, we need to act intentionally, to swim up-current,  to cultivate meaningful and mutually supportive relationships in this culture. But it is possible, and it is worth it.