Conversations For Transformation: Essays Inspired By The Ideas Of Werner Erhard

Conversations For Transformation

Essays By Laurence Platt

Inspired By The Ideas Of Werner Erhard

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Happiness 101

Cowboy Cottage, East Napa, California, USA

July 25, 2025

"You have to bring happiness to life. You don't get happiness out of life. What is there to be happy about? Nothing. When you can be happy about nothing. Just be happy. You know 'I am happy' - those words are sacred. It's like a declaration, it's like a place from which I come, it's like a stand I take upon myself. It's not I am pretending to be happy, it's not I am acting happy. No. I am happy!"


...

"Happiness is almost not worth talking about because the instant you turn happiness into a goal, it isn't attainable any more. In other words happiness isn't something you can work toward. It isn't something you can put someplace and overcome barriers to get to. It is something that happens in an instant. And the truth of the matter is that you can alter your state of happiness by simply choosing to be willing to have it be the way it is."


...

This essay, Happiness 101, is the companion piece to On Being Happy.

It is also the eighth in an ennead on Happiness:

in that order.

It is also the prequel to Happiness 101 II.

It was conceived and written at the same time as Happiness 101 II.

We the people devote a huge amount of time, energy, and resources chasing that which we believe will make us happy. Chasing that which we believe will make us happy, is something of a trap - and it's a pernicious trap at that. Chasing that which we believe will make us happy, especially chasing that which we believe will make us happy and not finding it, reinforces the belief that the conditions we live in and have access to, do not include being happy unless we add something to make us happy. Without adding something to make us happy, we believe our base state (if you will) is insufficient to being happy. If we want to be happy, we have to add something to be happy - of that, we're certain. We'll defend that belief even if (paradoxically) it costs us being happy.

That's one belief I've never enrolled in. It's seemed to me to embody something of a design flaw - a problem with being human at best, a failure at worst. I mean ... (as a voicemail to God) design creatures with skills and abilities with which no other species on our Earth is endowed, but just make sure that their base state is fundamentally unhappy, having no access to being happy unless the rest of their lives are hell-bent on chasing happiness? No, I don't think so.

And it's not just you. It's us. It's we as a race, we as a species who are so committed to chasing happiness out there that it's almost inconceivable for us to entertain the possibility that being happy or not, is just simply a function of declaring ourselves to be happy, no matter what is or isn't available out there.

<aside>

Be aware of the sequencing here:

it's not: first, be happy, then say (ie report that) you're happy;

it's: first, declare you're happy, then (ie as a result of declaring you're happy) be happy.

<un-aside>

It's only us who have characterized being happy as a state we don't naturally have unless we chase after and do something that will make us happy. We're certain being happy comes from something we do. We've got being happy pegged as something we do out there. Without a certain Zen context, the notion that being happy comes from speaking being happy, has almost zero leverage at all (the notion that being happy comes from being happy has even less).

All that having been said, it's truly a breakthrough idea that happiness is a result of declaring you're happy. Happiness is also a result of giving up the belief that you're unhappy, or of not giving power to (ie of not feeding) the belief that you're unhappy. That's easy to say but hard to get. It's hard to get because of an entrenched two-tiered belief system we have: one, we've come to believe our experience of this, right now, with nothing added and nothing changed, can't possibly be enough ever; and two, the belief that unless we do something to make ourselves happy, there's zero possibility of being happy, the latter embodying a certain spiritual disenchantment if you will / an existential absence of fulfillment - that means you're here, without a path to being complete.

If you tell the truth about it, that's pretty much the way we have being happy pegged. It's a distinctly human foible to hold onto beliefs in what makes us happy, rather than to give up our beliefs in what makes us happy, and be happy. We'd rather be right about what we believe makes for being happy, than be happy. We're attached to the belief that being happy is a function of what we do to make ourselves happy, and what beliefs we hold about what makes us happy, to the point where the enormous cost of holding onto these beliefs is never fully appreciated. We fervently believe that what makes us happy is out there. And even as we set out to find it, we're pretty sure (fingers crossed) it's going to be hard to find. Gee! I hope you get that: first we're convinced happiness is out there somewhere, then we're convinced it will be hard to find, both of which justify and protect not being happy - a real double whammy.

All this may sound dour and daunting. Make no error: it is. It's not that being happy isn't possible. It is. The leverage here is having being happy, be not so unreachable, and not having to rely on what's out there to make us happy. The truth of the matter is that you can alter your state of happiness by simply choosing to be willing to have it be the way it is (Werner said that), and that's a subject for another conversation on another occasion (Laurence said that).

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