Having a lot of drives - a person sees his task in realizing each of them. This assumption of the possibility of satisfaction of all their desires gives us the definition of happiness.
The initial definition of happiness is the purpose of human goals. All our desires are dear to us, and we would like to realize each of them. But the richer and more meaningful our desires are, the more time and effort they require for their realization. - It is no coincidence that we need strength for happiness. - However, the measure of human life is not infinite. The average life expectancy of a person is only about 30 thousand days, 24 hours a day, 365 days a year. Therefore, from the whole palette of their desires, a person has to choose only those that are closest to his or her interests and most significant for him or her in terms of their creative output. And this means that for the sake of realization of some of their desires a person has to put aside others for a while and completely forget about the third ones. In order, for example, to reach the heights of figure skating, athletes have to refuse themselves in many ways.
It turns out that happiness understood as the goal of man, is unattainable. In the course of our lives, we abolish this understanding rather than affirm it. Still, we never agree with ourselves. Life is constantly changing, some drives are realized, but others appear. Therefore, it is not in vain that the wise man Solon said in ancient times: "To call a man who still lives happily is like to declare a winner of a man who is still fighting.
As a result, the initially assumed completeness of the realization of all drives gives way only to some of them, but to those that are most dear to us and that is realistically implementable. Thus the essence of the concept of happiness becomes close to the etymological meaning of the word with-fortunately. A happy man is one who lives with the part of those urges which he was able to realize and which, therefore, were also in demand by society.
As for those desires, which we have to part with hope for realization, at first, this loss causes us bitterness. In retrospect, however, we are beginning to realize that, although much of what we would have liked to see has not materialized, it is because of this that we have been able to do what we have done. The same figure skaters admit that, despite all the limitations, it was the years of performance in the ice arena that were the happiest period of their lives.
The endless contradiction between nostalgia and the euphoria of hopes for the future is removed by the positive attitude we have towards the present, to which we come according to the formula: "It is not enough to be happy, one should know about it.
The true winner in this inner struggle of a man with himself for his happiness is the realization that the very possibility of choosing one's desires is true happiness. Real happiness, not imaginary happiness, lies in the freedom to choose one's desires, in the possibility of an independent determination of one's life path.
Freedom is no longer an arbitrariness. Arbitrariness comes only from the subjective content of a person's will and does not care about the justification of his choice, whereas freedom has its necessary condition for reasonable justification of choice both from the side of the subjective nature of a person (his inclinations and education), and from the side of objective circumstances of his life (the needs of society). Arbitrariness becomes freedom only through the connection of a person's desires with the needs of the society in which he lives.
Freedom. In the history of mankind, no other concept was distinguished by such uncertainty of meaning as freedom. And at the same time, it was under the banners of freedom that people created their history: they fought and put up with it, built and destroyed, swore and betrayed, suffered and went to death. So what does the word freedom mean? We are interested here not in any particular cases of its manifestation (freedom from something or for something), but in its general concept, considered in its pure form.
The human spirit is the unity of the soul and consciousness manifested in the form of intellect and will. The human spirit cognizes the world as an intellect, transforms it as a will. Both forms of activity - intellect, and will - are based on thinking, which is always free in itself. No matter what straitjacket a person wears, no matter how shackled he is, he is always free in his thinking.
Since all the conscious activity of a man - both theoretical and practical - is based on thinking, which is always free in itself, insofar as the man himself should be free. The concept of man is inseparable from the concept of freedom. In other words, being a thinking being, a human being is meant to be free.
This is the essence of the concept of freedom as such. Animals are not able to think, so there is no freedom in the wild nature. There reigns a cruel necessity. Each individual receives his or her type of certainty from birth and remains subordinate to him or her for the rest of his or her life.