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“Happiness is the ultimate goal of stoicism.”
You see this, and then you look at the stone busts of Stoicism’s leading proponents: Seneca, Epictetus, Marcus Aurelius. All seem dour and foreboding. They don’t look very (if at all) happy, you think.
Which prompts the question: what does it mean to be happy? Is it found in the fabulous vacation pictures on a friend’s social media feed? The glamor of a celebrity flitting down the red carpet, trailed by scores of paparazzi?
You know your friend is in debt up to their ears because of those vacations. And, while you may not know celebrities, you read enough about them to know that for them too, happiness is a transient state. Can anyone be truly happy all of the time?
Part of the problem of the current condition is what we perceive happiness to be. In The Conversation, Rafael Euba, Consultant and Senior Lecturer in Old Age Psychiatry, baldly states happiness isn’t a natural outcome of the human experience.
Euba describes happiness as a “mental construct” that has imprisoned many, causing them to believe that they have failed because their lives aren’t blissfully happy 24 hours a day, 365 days a year.
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