Human beings are simple, regardless of our race, culture, religion, nationality, income, education or anything that defines us, fundamentally, we all aim for the same thing, the same thing unfortunately that is so hard to find, so precious that the journey of pursuit itself can sometimes become legendary. That thing is, happiness.

Human beings are complex, both as individuals and as collectives. We are so complex that we have numerous ways of defining happiness. Wealth, power, youth, respect, family, health just to name a few. Although we are all after happiness, we seem to manage to bring pain and conflict not only to other people, but also to ourselves when we try to find it.

We have learnt how to write a poem, compose a piece of music, fix a car, manage a business, run a country, and yet despite that we have been told many different versions of happiness in our lives, we rarely learnt how to find happiness for ourselves. If we are lucky, we might stumble on it, but for many, we would press on with life as best as we could, never pause for a moment and ask ourselves, am I happy? I mean, really?

This is not surprising because our happiness is dependent on our inner selves as well as our social networks which could start from our close family and extend all the way to our universe. The problem is that we are living in an ever faster changing society which is becoming increasingly unrecognisable compared to what we learnt from text books and our previous generations who have supposedly been tasked to pass the wisdom on, and yet we are subject to a brain that is so stubbornly following the same rules that our ancestors have learnt in the jungles billions of years ago, because our so called modern civilisation is probably one line in the encyclopedia of evolution.

We may have developed our prefrontal cortex, and proudly claim the king of all species because we can think, and yet our amygdala still call the shots when it comes to how we feel. We can rationalise with our brain why we shouldn’t feel jealous when our partners speak to an attractive opposite sex, or why we shouldn’t love someone, or why we shouldn’t feel resentment to some complete strangers, but we do nonetheless. We can’t explain why we just can’t quit smoking, can’t go to bed early, can’t implement our new year resolutions, knowing too well that we should.

This is because we have been hijacked by the part of our brain that is not in our conscious awareness and control, the part of ourselves that we share with our foremothers and forefathers, the part that is deliberately designed by mother nature to be slow to change, and work for something that will last. For example, we may still need to be more alert to dangers than we are to joy, because the cost of ignoring danger could be much more than that of ignoring joy, but we rarely encounter as many life threatening dangers in modern society that we did in the juggle. Tasting an unknown fruit could poison us in the juggle, tasting an unknown cuisine could only enrich our knowledge, regardless if we like it or not. It was wise to follow the same route when our ancestors went out hunting, it might not be so clever to do so in our urban living as you may be stuck in the traffic forever.  Below is a simplified version of how our brain is made up.

Our modern society requires us to be open minded, to learn, to adept, and yet, our evolutionary brain is quietly telling us that changing is dangerous, and we should stick to what we know. Our body and our mind are wired to feel pleasure in social interactions, and yet our modern society is teaching us competition, profit maximising and the winner takes it all. Mother nature defines two distinctively different genders to ensure the survival of our specie, and yet our modern society is making the line increasingly blurring.

We are painfully torn between what is the new reality and what we are equipped to deal with. Our cognition is fighting with the invisible emotion. And we wonder why after achieving all what we are told to make us happy, we are still as confused as ever.

We are in a tug of war that neither side could or should win, therefore, let’s find truce, and the first step would be, invite both sides to the negotiation table.  And let me help you with the negotiation.