the pursuits of unhappiness

A few days after Rajesh Khanna's death, we now have lots of articles pouring in which talk about his being just lucky in getting a super star status, his failure to manage his career, his failure as a politician, his fear and hatred of Amitabh Bachchan, how bad he was with relationships and his inability to handle success or failure.

The world is a damn competitive and ruthless place, where struggling for success in everything and maintaining a happy face have to go hand-in-hand. And if they don't lead to tangible achievements, you are simply lost. And if you do achieve success of the magnitude the world envies, you become the object of criticism in whatever you do. And if you are not in control of your emotions, and by controlling we mean suppressing them to an extent that they are practically non-existent, you will die of the immense stress the world subjects you to. So, you are either unhappy or incapable of experiencing any emotion including happiness. Success sucks. Even wanting it sucks. But without it life sucks because of limited resources. We are basically trapped in endless unhappiness or as emotionless dummies. My feeling is that emotionlessness is an impossible situation. At a practical level, what it means is that nothing happening in one's life is able to create any emotional change in the individual, and his/her mind is instead occupied by an endless emotion of sadness. That endless emotion could also have been happiness, but that happens only with spiritually enlightened people who reportedly existed only in 4th century BC and before. So, basically, it's all unhappiness. Only possibilities are the kinds of unhappiness - i.e., unhappiness coz of scarcity and physical pain or unhappiness coz of stress and mental agony or unhappiness coz of emotional suppression. We can choose which one we want to pursue. What we get is again not necessarily what we want. The pursuit of happiness is just a euphemism. We do want to be happy and often consciously indulge in many experiences that make us happy. However the pursuits of life, which we want to believe are pursuits of happiness, are really pursuits of unhappiness.

Intellectual Pursuits and Intellectual Growth

As we go through life, we learn a lot of things - most of them about dealing with human creations and humans. None of us knows where we, as a kind, came from and why we are here. We may be incapable of knowing that, or perhaps we'll know in future (or past if we manage to travel back). The restlessness in our mind arising from the lack of knowledge about our origins and the purpose of our existence is not as great as the instinct to protect our life and the desire to continue living forever without pain. I can imagine why Maslow must have come up with the concept of the hierarchy of needs, which broadly states that humans crave for satisfaction of physiological needs and such, before they seek filling their intellectual voids. However, from my own observation, I feel that human cravings come as multiple threads of parallel processes rather than as stacks of needs approached bottom up. And the intellectual growth of an individual is best derived and achieved out of struggle for what one would technically consider purely physiological needs. One may argue that it is accidental and not intended, and what Maslow is really talking about is the perceived and pursued need of an individual - i.e., a person will not strive for intellectual growth until he feels he has fully satisfied his physiological needs and is in a comfortable position to do that on a continuous basis, as physiological needs need to be satiated on a daily basis.

In a nutshell, I making two points here:

1. Human efforts to fulfill their various kinds of needs are not in a perfect hierarchy as Maslow put it, but are rather in the form of multiple, parallel complex threads of striving for everything. However, this observation still does not refute Maslow's theory, as I am sure Maslow realized the complexity of the human mind, and knew that his overly simplistic hierarchy of needs is really true at a broad level. For example, a man hanging from a window of a building on fire, would not really think about anything else but saving his life. A man whose life is going fine (i.e., enough food and water), would then look at his days more closely and contemplate about people and situations. And so on.
2. Intellectual growth of an individual is of the deepest and highest quality when it is drawn from the real struggles of and for life. All struggles of our lives are to work with and around people to get what we want to make our lives better. We are not born equal and so our struggles to grow also vary. Humans are selfish and self-centered creatures at a very basic level, and it takes immense amount of hard work and persistence to really make our lives work. The fight for resources is never ending. But the inequality, right from the moment we are born, and the greed with which humans want to amass and disproportionately grow and protect the resources they own and control, makes this world a ruthless opponent to fight with. It not only takes all the strength of the individual, especially those who are unfortunate at the start, but also demands that all their mental and intellectual resources be fully focussed on getting the best they can out of this world. And I believe the intellectual ability of the highest order is the understanding of human behavior and the ways of the world. Philosophy and meaning of life are ingrained in this ability, and the stuff in books written by scholars looking out of windows of their cozy cottages in snow is just confusing pieces of interesting literature which entertains and enchants coz it speaks of the ultimate truth, which neither they know nor does anybody. Drawing inferences based on assumptions is like assuming the inferences. It is through dealing with life's hardships that one learns the truth that is relevant to us. Beyond that, it's pure academics, which has huge respect but no utility.