The Pursuit of Happiness - Part 2

In the previous blog I mentioned that the first step to happiness involves becoming free of your ‘tribe’ – whether that tribe is your family culture or society at large. By free I mean the ability to have your own freedom of thought and values within your tribe. Now some tribes are progressive and encourage growth and free thinking but all too often the tribe evolves far slower than its individual members, weighed down as it is by the speed of all its members.
Slower-evolving tribes tend to still see the world in terms of ‘us’ and ‘them’. As such the main purpose of the tribe at this stage is cohesion and maintaining the status quo. Consequently, invariably the dominant fear among members becomes ‘what will other (members of my tribe)think?’. The quest for approval overtakes the thought of whether we are living the way we want to in the first place.
The aim of the tribe is to create a conveyor belt of conformists to the status quo so that the status quo is never threatened. Non-conformists have the hardest times here because they are continually pressurised to stop being themselves and instead fit into a pre-packaged model. It’s like fitting a circular peg into a square.
Breaking free of your tribe creates the necessary space so that you can lead an authentic life without interference, which is the second stage to happiness.
What is an authentic life? An authentic life is one where the individual:
• is able to express their individuality and their own unique personality
• is able to find an adequate match for their creative desires and aptitudes in their environment
• is able to decide and choose their values and follow a path that moves them in the direction of these valuesr
I do not believe in a one-size fits all approach because we are all individuals and so by definition we must all find our own individual mix of things in life that match our own mixed personalities.
Unfortunately in too many cases the aim of many parents and community leaders is to create clones of their selves rather than to delight in the variety and differences of the little beings they bring into the world. How boring would the world be if we were all just clones of each other?.
Having said all that, as with so many other things in life, a yin and yang balance needs to be struck. Overall people are happiest when they live in some kind of civic minded community where there is mutual respect and tolerance while also a spirit of belonging. A civic minded community calls for some shared values, so the trick is to share enough larger common values which allows a spirit of civic mindedness to exist, while also respecting individual differences. Too much focus on community creates the ‘us and them’ mentality, and too much individuality prevents any community feeling in the first place, and just become a collection of individuals doing their own thing. The balance needs to be just right. What can be done to create such balance is to educate individuals to foster community by encouraging them to explore their shared values, or to educate overly tight-kit communities into the benefits of more individual expression. It seems mental health rapidly goes up among members the closer they get to this kind of balance.
In the final part of this discussio
I will explore in more detail what you need to do to create your own internal happiness compass.