What is true happiness?

Question from the Internet:

“We are living in the wealthiest, healthiest, most educated, and most technologically advanced era ever. Why then are most people unhappy in the modern world?”

We are unhappy because what we fulfill ourselves with is not what we truly need.

Our basic “matter”, the engine that drives us, that gives us the sense of life is an insatiable desire for self-fulfillment. The fact that we feel ourselves alive means that in each and every moment we sense new, ever-greater, unfulfilled desires awakening in us, and our whole pursuit of life in each moment is trying to find the appropriate fulfillment for those empty desires.

While in the initial stages of human development these desires focused on physical survival revolving around food, sex, family, shelter, as humanity developed we also developed social desires like wealth, power, fame, knowledge, self-realization.

In our increasingly westernized, consumerist society we defined the purpose of life by chasing, fulfilling these “animalistic” and “social” desires with an ever greater focus on wealth, power, control over others, fame, and to a certain extent knowledge, while sex and food also remain high on our rank of interest.

So we think and we keep telling to ourselves and each other that we can reach happiness, satisfaction, the purpose of our human existence through such desires and their fulfillment. And while we have much more than even kings had a few generations ago, and we accumulate totally unnecessary physical wealth and possessions, we are becoming more and more empty, depressed, angry, and self-destructive.

And since our ever-growing, ever-unfulfilled desires we also try to quench at each other’s and Nature’s expense we also destroy everything around us as cancer.

The thing is, that unbeknown to almost all of us, by our original “Natural design”, program all our desires aim us towards a very different, much higher goal and fulfillment. In Nature’s deterministic, relentless evolutionary plan we are supposed to reach, fulfill a unique place role our inner, elemental desires pull us to.

We are supposed to become Nature’s only conscious, fully integrated, and at the same time independent observers, partners through purposefully integrating into Nature above and against our inherently egocentric, subjective, and individualistic nature, inclination.

We will reach true fulfillment, satisfaction only when we reach that state of “becoming one with the Universe” through becoming one with each other, rebuilding Humanity based on Nature’s integral template.

This has nothing to do with mysticism, religion, utopia, this is a very Natural, realistic, tangible, and practical process we have to go through according to Nature’s laws and evolution’s plan.

Above and with the help of all the already known, felt “this-worldly” desires we have to develop, acquire a completely different desire, need: to selflessly, unconditionally care for, serve others and the whole system. And by working with this desire, by actively trying to connect everybody else to the single, fully, mutually integrated system we also acquire a completely new fulfillment: the sense of developing balance, homeostasis of the whole system through our own efforts, activities.

This is like feeling the “joy”, recovering health, increasingly more optimal state of the Universe around us. Only this “Universal happiness” spreading through the whole system as a result of our own changes, positive actions can bring us true happiness.