In my view, happiness is a state of mind. It is the background noise in the brain and the lenses through which we perceive the outside world. Other states of mind could be filled with everything from peace and harmony to anger or sadness. When I am happy, it doesn’t really matter whether I am on vacation with my friends or alone at the library studying, there is always enjoyment. The feelings from the states of mind pierce through real-world experiences. Wealthy and poor, old and young, men and women, and people from every part of the world all experience states of happiness, sadness, anger, etc. Those who have interacted with people in really sad states of mind know that it is virtually impossible to make them happy no matter what you do, and the opposite is true in happy states. Certain experiences may induce a state of mind, but our happiness fundamentally depends on how we perceive the world, not how the world actually is. 

This is an amazing insight. To make people happy, we don’t need to paint the whole world green, we just need to give everyone a pair of green lens glasses. It may even be sufficient that people just remove the red ones they’re already wearing. For instance, it is difficult to be happy if the head is filled with anger. First of all, it is crucial to internalize the problem of being angry. If someone behaves poorly and I respond by being angry, I am only punishing myself by imposing a state of anger upon me, while the person I am angry at remains unaffected. It is undeniably in my own interest to minimize the time I spend angry.

One way to remove the glasses of anger is to simply derive free will. It is the subject of another paper, but with the insight that free will does not exist and people are merely physical algorithms reacting to external input, it is really difficult to be angry at anyone. Ultimately, if I had the same preconditions (genes, soul, particles), the same experiences, and were under identical circumstances, I obviously would have behaved the same as the person I am angry at. It is one thing to be logically convinced, but when truly intuitively convinced about that, it is impossible to get angry.

Newspapers reporting wild animals attacking people rarely invokes a state of anger within us. Why? Because we perceive wild animals as beings without free will. The bear attacked the person because that’s what bears do. Imagine if we got angry each time an animal behaved poorly, there would be so much to be angry at we would have no space left for happiness. Just as any other animal, people behave in certain ways because that is how people behave, not because there is an evil soul within people. And even if there were, with the same evil soul, you would have behaved exactly the same. Imagine how much space there would be for states of happiness if we could clean out all the anger we experience.