Darleen Click has this Dennis Prager video discussing our moral obligation to be happy.
I'll use her pullout quotes:
1:30 “We are morally obligated to at least act as happy as possible. Even if you don’t feel it. You cannot be guided by feelings. How we act affects others.”
2:21 “No matter how unhappy you may feel or say you may feel at any given moment, it is a decision you make on how to act.”
2:50 “You share with your friend or your spouse, you share as much as possible about your life, you should share how you feel, but you don’t inflict a bad mood onto anybody.”
4:09 “We think that our actions should represent our feelings or be determined by our feelings, but the fact is that we can make our feelings respond to our behavior. How we act influences our feelings more than our feelings should be allowed to influence our behavior.”
4:37 “When you think of people who have done great harm in this world — historically, Nazis, Communists, terrorists — they are not from the happiest group of humans.”
Darleen takes a political tack on Prager's comments, but I think there's a deeper and wider application. In essence, happiness isn't an emotion; it's a behavior. This is not to say that your mood may not affect your behavior, but letting your mood run you is what children do, and we spend 18 (or more) years trying to train them out of that.
If you look at happiness as a moral obligation, it makes it easier to behave better even when we don't feel like it. It also makes us more pleasant people to be around.
|