The core ontological fundament of the devletist school of thought is that everything is part of an objective truth. Even the concepts that we believe are subjective and flexible in accordance with our own preferences are part of a larger universal truth. Our feelings are no exception. This article establishes a new framework for the concept of happiness. It is one of the most prominent of our feelings and constitutes the highest maxim of being for many people. Naturally, the question quickly arises of what happiness is in the first place if many perceive it as the ultimate purpose of life. Commonly, happiness is viewed as something subjective, and whatever makes a person feel happy is the purpose of this person. As we will see in a bit, this is only partly true. Happiness can be categorised and defined within a theoretical framework. We can identify types of happiness, and the individual actions that bring happiness to people can be placed within those categories. This new approach includes one form that represents the true purpose of life. However, the remaining forms of happiness lay outside of this highest form of happiness – even though it is commonly assumed that we are happy when we feel that way in the context of our own tastes and preferences. Only because many people perceive the achievement of any form of happiness to be the purpose of life, this, of course, does not mean that this reflects the objective truth. In other words, there are different types of happiness, and different actions and contexts within those types trigger positive emotions within us. Those positive feelings reflect different levels of intensity of happiness. Truly encompassing happiness is only achieved through reaching the highest type of happiness.
Maslow’s Hierarchy: Needs, Expectations and Happiness
As with most concepts, happiness must generally be viewed in the context of another concept, too. Much of our perception of happiness is tied to our expectations in life. If we desire to own a material good, our happiness is tied to our expectation of whether we are able to obtain this good. If it is very unrealistic to obtain, we feel more happiness when obtaining it, and, of course, the other way around. Similarly, if we love someone, we expect this person to love us back. As long as we do not know whether the person loves us, the hope of fulfilled expectations in the future keeps our happiness alive. When this is realised, we actually experience this happiness. When the other person, however, does not love us back, we are unhappy; our expectations fail. This begs the question what are our expectations made of? Abraham Harold Maslow, a Jewish psychologist, answered this question in 1943 with his groundbreaking concept of the “hierarchy of needs”. He categorised the needs of human beings in a pyramid with five distinct fields of needs. He assumed that there are qualitative differences in what we desire, which leads us to prioritise between those desires. At the bottom are the most fundamental needs (physiological needs) that arise from our survival instinct, such as food, air, shelter, reproduction and water. Fulfilling those needs is essential for our survival, individually and as a species. Once those needs are satisfied, we seek consolidation of our mode of survival, as well as some sort of risk management against falling back to the first level of needs. The need for safety comprises the security of our health and body, resources, our family, property or employment. It is important to fulfil those needs as a buffer against moving back into a mode of survival. After fulfilling those needs, we direct more attention to the emotional aspects of our being. At the third level (need for love/belonging) in Maslow’s hierarchy of needs, we seek healthy and harmonic friendships, love and family affairs, as more material needs are no longer of primary concern. This also continues in the next stage (need for self-esteem), where we start to value our career, personal achievements, respect in society and a positive self-perception. At top of the pyramid, the final stage of the hierarchy of needs (need for self-realisation), our needs transcend the material dimensions, our environment and personal emotions. Here, we start to value abstract concepts and strive for a better understanding of aspects of our being as a whole, such as morality, culture, art, science and society.
Naturally, our needs are closely connected with our expectations. If we need something, such as water, we also expect to receive it. The same holds true for all of the other forms of needs that we have explored above. This is because of the entropic nature of our being: Everything that does not die is forced to move forward. In other words, the singularity of time and space inherently forces us to move forward. In the context of the hierarchy of needs, we have a natural tendency to seek the next level of needs once the previously achieved level is consolidated. Of course, we can actively decide to remain within one level of the pyramid, but this entropic creates a natural pressure of moving forward. This pressure forms our expectation to further move up within the pyramid. Connecting these findings with happiness, we can say that a part of happiness is moving up within the pyramid of needs as a result of alignment with the entropic nature of the universe. If we constantly seek to fulfil the needs within a stage of the pyramid and move on to the next stage, we will not only experience happiness within those stages but will also derive happiness from moving unidirectionally between those stages. This is because we are fulfilling our natural needs and the naturally arising expectations by subordinating ourselves to the entropic flow of our being.
Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs
Essydo’s Hierarchy of Happiness
Essydo’s Hierarchy of Happiness
Essydo’s Hierarchy of Happiness
This finding leads to the emergence of a new concept to visualise happiness: Essydo’s Hierarchy of Happiness (see illustration above). If our needs and our expectations to fulfil them due to the unidirectional pressure within the hierarchy of needs are natural, then it must follow that there is also a hierarchy of happiness. There must be different forms happiness that correspond to the different stages of needs within the hierarchy, and there are. Within this newly established hierarchy of happiness, happiness is the overarching concept for a range of positive feelings that we have. However, there are qualitative differences between those positive feelings; there is not one “universal happy”. At the lowest stage, analogous to our physiological needs, there is contentment. It expresses the feeling of being content with being able to satisfy the most fundamental needs that enable us to survive. Even though we cannot judge the intensity of this form of happiness as it is heavily context-dependent, we can say that it is a low form of happiness as it is the response to the ability of mere survival. Moving onto the second stage, the need for safety, we define the form of happiness that corresponds to those needs as gratification. Creating a consolidated buffer against threats of survival is a relieving mix of feelings between gratitude and relaxation. Now, turning to the more emotionally based needs, such as love and friendship, the happiness experienced here is less driven by relief to have successfully sustained survival but rather by the proactive experiences with other human beings. We call this level of happiness joy. Again, the intensity of those feelings is not up for debate. However, the nature of the feeling is fundamentally different and, of course, of higher value than the previous two stages of happiness. As the needs are slowly satisfied at this level, we move up again to reach satisfaction. We start to turn ourselves into a respected member of society and acquire means far beyond our minimum material needs. Factually, we are complete in every material and emotional dimension, which is why our experienced happiness at this stage is dominated by the feeling of being fully satisfied.
The Highest Form of Happiness
Finally, the entropic nature of being forces us to move up yet another stage, and if we are open to it, we will proceed to satisfy our needs at the spiritual level. Maslow has described this as the need for self-realisation, where we strive to accomplish ideals beyond the material and emotional dimensions. It is the act of living in fully alignment with the purpose of our existence: genuine knowledge production. Self-realisation can be viewed as the process of reaching a mode of genuine knowledge production. By realising our inherent talent, our special trait, we fulfil our need of the highest order as we explore the world beyond known knowledge borders. Naturally, this evokes a certain feeling that we can categorise in Essydo’s corresponding hierarchy of happiness. It is the highest form of happiness a human being can sense: fulfilment. It is the feeling that emerges when engaging in genuine knowledge production. Yet again, the intensity varies in different horizontal contexts. For example, the more developed the mode of genuine knowledge production of a person is, the more one can isolate this state of mind from the interference of lower forms of emotions. This underlines the superiority of fulfilment to the other forms of happiness and all other emotions in the vertical comparison.
Happiness and Unhappiness
Another dimension that opens up through the establishment of this new concept is also the explanation of the concept of unhappiness. Due to the entropic force that leads us to, at least unconsciously, expect the achievement of the next stage of needs, we can also derive that there must be an inherent drive to seek the next level of happiness, as both concepts are analogous to one another. Full achievement of those expectations equals continued happiness. We feel the specific type of happiness at the respective stage where we have fully satisfied our needs. Then, we feel happiness in the transition to the next stage of needs and its corresponding type of happiness, given that we fulfil our natural expectation of success in this transition at all times. Finally, we experience the new type of happiness within that newly achieved stage of needs.
Unhappiness, however, stems from failed expectations. This can be short-term happiness within a stage of needs, as they are often not all fully satisfied at once. Another source of unhappiness arises when we experience an asymmetrical transition period to the next higher level of needs and the corresponding form of happiness. This, too, is a very realistic scenario and often another short-term phenomenon as long as we show continued effort to move up within the hierarchy of needs. Once we have reached the new level of needs and experience the corresponding type of happiness, there is always the chance that falling back into the lower tiers of needs and happiness creates a more intense feeling of unhappiness. This can be due to changes in our circumstances or through internal (mental collapse) and external shocks (unfortunate events). If we manage to overcome those setbacks and move up again, such fallbacks can be compensated. If we remain in the lower tier that we fell back into, our unhappiness is vastly amplified as we have experienced higher forms of happiness that we are unable to reach again. Such situations are very dangerous as they negate the happiness produced through fulfilment of needs at the stage that we fell back into. However, another very destructive form of unhappiness arises from failed transitions to higher tiers of happiness. If we are unable to fully move from the fulfilment of one stage of needs to another, we have experienced parts of the higher form of happiness without being able to fully enjoy it. On the one hand, this reduces the joy of already experienced happiness at the lower stages because it is put into relative perspective with the new experiences of the higher form of happiness. On the other hand, the little experiences with the higher form of happiness are not extensive enough to outweigh the now less worthy experiences of happiness of the stage that the person tries to move up from. This creates dissatisfaction as we know what can be experienced continuously, but due to the inability to fully move up in the hierarchy of needs, we only get a small portion of that higher form of happiness.
How to be happy
The beauty of conceptual theory is that we can derive pragmatic solutions for our lives. In this case, we can now clearly identify what it takes to be happy. It is very important that we constantly seek to satisfy our most pressing needs and do so consciously and sustainably. Whether they are physiological needs or our need for self-esteem, we must be disciplined in bringing everything related to those needs into order and consolidating this state. Once this is done, we must subordinate ourselves to the order of our being and strive for more. To make things easier: Always be satisfied with what you have, but never with what you are. Following this principle, we will move up the hierarchy of needs and, accordingly, experience new and higher forms of happiness. The ultimate goal is to achieve fulfilment through genuine knowledge production. It is the highest possible form of happiness. Structurally, it is so much different from all other forms of happiness as it truly amounts to the purpose of life, not the feeling itself but the act of engaging in genuine knowledge production. In the beginning, it was outlined that it is often mistaken that happiness, in general, is the purpose of our existence. This is not fully true. The purpose of our existence is to engage in genuine knowledge production. We then feel a form of happiness that is called fulfilment, which is not directly the purpose itself but a reflection of how being aligned with this purpose feels. Considering this and always striving to achieve this mode will always make us happy, regardless of which level we are currently at. Surely, there will be setbacks that pull us back to lower forms of happiness, and not every transition between the stages of needs and happiness will be smooth, creating unhappiness. However, this is part of the process. In the end, it is important how we structure our lives in general. As long as we strive towards the ultimate goal of genuine knowledge production with the help of our entropic nature, happiness will be an integral part of our lives – in every possible way.
Essydo’s Hierarchy of Happiness © 2024 by Emre Şentürk is licensed under CC BY-ND 4.0. To view a copy of this license, visit https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nd/4.0/
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