Pragmatism

Modern society places a premium on performative happiness. The photograph showing you in the middle of your favourite hobby, the story you tell about that amazing restaurant you visited, the automatic "I'm great, how about you?" when someone asks how you're doing...

...but life isn't anywhere near as simple as that. Its currents ebb and flow, happiness and sadness are as tightly woven and as frequently changing as day and night - "this too shall pass" cuts both ways.

So in a world where we're expected to appear happy and yet are regularly exposed to circumstances which give us reason for sadness, how does one live?

Playing the Stoic

The easiest solution is to grab your nearest copy of Marcus Aurelius's "Meditations" and study the path of the stoic. Convince yourself that life is brutally hard, that you are not owed happiness, and that you are best served by learning to allow your emotions to wash off of you like water off the back of a Vancouver hipster's $1500 GoreTex coat.

You can guard yourself and your emotions from the world, never assuming that anything is more than what you can see it to be, and divest yourself of strong emotions. You can be free from the weight of expectations to be happy in the face of sadness by absolving yourself of responsibility to feel either.

Of course, you'll quickly find that employing this approach is likely to work well in your professional life while simultaneously eviscerating your close relationships. You're likely to find that the people who stick with you are those who value you for what you can give them rather than the person you are beneath the mask.

Playing the Optimist

Faced with the cost of stoicism, a person seeking to be seen and accepted for who they really are may instead turn to naïve optimism as a panacea. Embrace the beauty of the world, believe in good things and they will come to you, manifest the outcomes you seek...

Indeed, opening your eyes to the opportunities for truly magical outcomes will work: you will see the beauty in the world and feel far greater bouts of happiness than the stoic will ever permit themselves. You will find joy, and bring joy into the lives of those around you - and yet when employed without regard for the simple facts of reality, you're likely to find the most crushing sadness follows closely behind.

In contrast to stoicism, being the naïve optimist is likely to work wonders for your social life and relationships though, depending on the risk tolerance of your job and your skill at it, you may find it leading to some interesting career outcomes.

Playing the Pragmatist

In an ideal world, we'd choose the best parts of the stoic and the optimist - allowing us to maximize our happiness while taking the tumultuous nature of life in our stride. We'd acknowledge that asceticism steals our ability to appreciate the joy in what we have, while simultaneously acknowledging that our beloved idea for the future is unattainable.

Borrow the stoic's acceptance of the nature of reality - that it is not good, nor evil, it simply is true to its nature. Weave in the optimist's raging hope for something better and act with the courage you would have if you knew this to be guaranteed. Then temper them both with the pragmatist's recognition that we control only ourselves, and that the only true loss we will ever face is time.

Being a pragmatist is easy, it requires no special skills, just the courage to believe in yourself and trust that no matter what questions life poses, you will be able to find a reasonable answer.