cbforever

All these things I'm looking up are obsessed with happiness. I can't figure out which one doesn't care about happiness.

Happiness is awesome, and any philosophy that doesn't actively pursue it is a waste of time.

Happiness is what staves off self-annihilation. Humanity needs happiness in the face of crushing nihilism, and every philosophy that has ever been thought up has been an attempt to codify and trap it. If you want philosophy that has nothing to do with happiness, just, like, read Lovecraft I guess?

Why do you feel happiness is unimportant?

You were talking about philosophies. In my view, a philosophy (to really badly oversimplify) is something on which you try to base your actions on, but understanding that, it doesn't always means we're all day/every day checking everything we do against a list (I mean, sure, some people do that, but seriously?)

But see, you're describing states (love, anger, melancholy, wistfulness) that certainly influence behavior, but those aren't philosophies in themselves. They're all just variables, stimuli, subsets. So, say I get angry: I might act out in anger in a way that might negatively affect my happiness down the road... but I try not to do that. That's the point. My philosophy is to act in certain ways that increase my happiness (and for me those "ways" - and even ideas of what "happiness" looks like - might be very different than your own) but I'm also not a robot, so sometimes I'll act contrary to that, but part of my personal philosophy of happiness is to also not beat myself up over that. It's just life. We grow, and we learn, and (for me at least) we attempt to make ourselves ever more into the image of what it is we think we ought to be.

But that's MY philosophy of how to be more happy, and MY opinion that any philosophy worth following is one that values happiness highly. You are welcome to disagree with my analysis. You're welcome to follow a completely different path leading to a completely different definition of happiness. You're even welcome to just disagree entirely and follow something entirely different - or to choose not to follow anything at all!

...though whatever it is you do, ultimately, if you're going to do anything, no matter what it may be, it's probably because you want to, or, in other words, it makes you in at least some small way, "happy."

:D

Well I'm just wondering if other philosophies have names or even exist. They all seem to just be "I think this is what the world is like and this is how you can be happy in that world" which isn't particularly interesting.