jung on happiness

“Ah,” he answered, “the secret of happiness – those who seek happiness can never find it. You should wait till it comes, like the arrival of a guest later in the evening.” [http://www.karsh.org/#/the_work/portraits/carl_jung/]

4 thoughts on “jung on happiness”

Came across this today as I skimmed Jaen Baudrillard´s Simulacra and Simulation. “Someone who feigns an illness can simply go to bed and make believe he is ill. Some who simulates an illness produces in himself some of the symptoms.”(Littre) I think the same goes for happiness. It can be simulated. Happiness, love…what is it? Is it what we think it is? Maybe we don´t even know what it means, these terms generated by questions and answers only. There was a stage when the words love and happiness irritated me, used so freely, so unsparingly. It´s awful, I know, but when I get mails that end with “happy days” or ” love and light” it creates a real “aaargh” situation and I end up feeling like some kind of skeptic.

I’ve never, ever seen love and happiness as companion words… That’s a Disney fabrication. Happiness is an incidental by-product, not an end-in-itself. In my experience, if you look at it that way, you can tolerate far, far more pain without wishing you were dead, because you don’t equate the absence of happiness with lack. You feel quite a bit less unhappy when you don’t worry about whether or not you are happy.

I just felt this strange surge of relief and recognition when I read the quote of Jung’s on this photographer’s website. I relate to thinking of happiness as a guest. And yes, somehow love is an entirely different thing altogether, I can’t think of love visiting – in those terms I can only imagine it resident, like a smell, or in the other sense of visiting, like a hurricane, effortlessly churning a whole lifetime’s neurotic assemblage into dust.