Discussing our seeking of happiness

    Broadly speaking, the aim of a human living in the world is to leave pain and be happy. Everybody hopes to be alive because death is painful. We will become to want more happiness when we have the ability to make a living and temporarily avoid the fear of the painful death; we will want to eat more delicious food after we have enough food to keep our basic living; we will begin to save money to prevent the pain of hunger in the future; furthermore, we will start looking for sex mates when survival is not a problem: in addition to avoiding the pain of loneliness and insecurity, we also do that for the happiness of sex; and then in order to have the happiness of success, we begin to care about our reputation, wish ourselves to be successful, and want to be praised by others. The types of our seeking of happiness become more complex and diverse along with the development of society; people begin to pay attention to health and exercise in order to avoid the pain of illness; care products are produced in order to avoid the pain of aging; in addition, Entertainment is booming to meet the needs of our happiness of senses.

    If we simplify our life to the extreme, all activities of our life are to get rid of pain and to obtain happiness. But, is there anyone succeed in leaving pain and obtaining happiness? The answer is ‘no’ from the perspective of a lifetime. Because everyone finally will experience and will not be able to avoid the pain of birth, old age, sickness and death. And, let's take a closer look, do we truly leave pain and obtain happiness if we have delicious food everyday, own a perfect mate, accumulate amazing wealth, are praised by everyone for success, or have supreme position and power? The answer still is ‘no’.

    Why does that become an unattainable goal or an impossible goal to leave pain and obtain happiness even if it seems very simple? The Buddhist view is that because everything in the world is impermanent. What is impermanence? Everything in the world is changing all the time, and nothing is everlasting. People are toward death step by step from the time they are born; things are constantly changing and decaying from the present second to the next second; our thoughts, feelings, and consciousness always arise and disappear continuously, and they cannot exist forever and stay there; the feeling of happiness is also impermanent, no matter how delicious our food is, we will eventually be hungry; the perfect mate will eventually grow old; the happiness brought by wealth, sense of accomplishment, reputation, and power will eventually disappear, not be able to last.

    Then, looking for the way to leave pain and get happiness finally become a life issue;  Even if we seek happiness with our whole lives, we still may be unable to know what the real answer is when we die! So we should seriously face this issue related to ourselves. No matter what answers others say, they are the answers of others; we must genuinely seek and understand by ourselves so that we can be worthy of our lives. Don’t ignore the impermanence of happiness anymore, and wrongly seek unreal happiness; even if you exhaust your whole life to find an answer, it may not be enough. So, should we stop other things and take this issue seriously?