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Playing at the intersection of science, art, and philosophy. Trying to be less wrong.
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Jul 13 · 7 min read

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The Simple Art of Not Being Miserable

. . .

In Herman Hesse’s novel Siddhartha, the title character and his friend
leave home, disowning all possessions, to seek spiritual enlightenment.

They decide to live on the road, homeless, journeying away from the
known towards the unknown. It’s not a life of ease, but it is one they
embrace.

When they are hungry, they fast. When they are unoccupied, the
meditate. When they are looking for answers, they wait. And as they
move from place to place, they get more and more xated on their goal.

Eventually, however, they separate — it occurs due to their meeting

with the Buddha himself. After hearing the legends about the
Enlightened One and then seeking him out, they are both impressed
with his calm poise and the simple profundity of his teachings. The
friend, Govinda, stays behind to become his student, while Siddhartha
— although appreciating what he has learned — decides to continue on
a more individualistic pursuit.

This pursuit takes him through both space and time: He settles down in
a city, falls for a woman, and over the years, becomes a successful
businessman. This, of course, doesn’t ful ll him either, so he leaves. His
next stop, his nal stop, is a small home by a river where he lives with a
ferryman.

The ferryman is a simple, quiet man, but he possess an unspoken

wisdom that entrances anyone who meets him. Living in his presence,
after many more years of unrest and su ering from all the seeking,
Siddhartha eventually, in a sudden moment, nds himself at peace.

At the end of his life, Govinda, who is still searching for enlightenment,
hears about an older ferryman who people whisper has the answer.
This ferryman is Siddhartha, who has now taken over from his old
mentor at the river.

When Govinda tells him that he is still a seeker, his old friend — right
before the book ends — shares what it is that he has learned after all
these years:

“When someone seeks,” said Siddhartha, “then it easily happens that his
eyes see only the thing that he seeks, and he is able to nd nothing, to take
in nothing because he always thinks only about the thing he is seeking,
because he has one goal, because he is obsessed with his goal. Seeking
means: having a goal. But nding means: being free, being open, having
no goal.”
The Problematic Zone of Fixation
The story of Siddhartha and his friend is set in a world far di erent
from the one we occupy. It’s a simpler world, one with fewer forces
swaying minds.

Their quest, too, is not the unhealthiest one you can pursue. Aspiring
towards ful llment is, generally speaking, far better than many of the
things that occupy our desires in modernity — think money, status, and
pleasure.

The core problem, though, is the same. It’s the root of all self-in icted
misery.

Happiness — or more accurately, a lack of unhappiness — is a product of

the relationship that exists between our subjective expectations and the
objective reality. Over the long-term, a feeling of peaceful contentment
comes down to the objective reality giving us more than our subjective
expectations.

We all have some in uence on what this reality has to o er, but
ultimately, many things are out of our control. The only solution, then,
is to adjust our expectations by managing our personal desires.

In some spiritual traditions, like Buddhism, the answer — broadly

speaking — is to minimize, and if possible, eliminate desire. Not just the
desire of vices, but also the desire that leads to the unending process of
seeking that both Siddhartha and Govinda spent their lives in pursuit
of.

Unfortunately, the likelihood that the average person will forgo desire
and nd enlightenment is a small one. That said, what anyone can
learn to do — which is a healthy step in the right direction — is expand
their zone of xation.

We all have things we want, and we all have things we look to achieve.
But many of these things are far more negotiable than we make them.

Sure, making more money may make your life better o , and of course,
winning that prize or capturing the praise of someone you admire can
be life-a rming, but if there is a world of people who can live
completely in peace without these things — and there almost always is,
no matter what it is you desire — the chances are that you can, too.

When we desire something, we xate on it. We commit our time and

our mental energy, and in the process, we develop a one-sided
obsession that leads to misery any time reality doesn’t correspond. This
is as true of the desire to be more self-con dent as it is of seeking a
speci c pleasure.

The only way not to fall into this trap is to expand the zone of your
xation when the time arises. It’s to loosen the de nition of your
desires so that they can accommodate the feedback given by the
objective reality. And that’s only possible if you’re willing to step back
and let go.

To zoom out and adjust your subjective expectation is to be free of

a iction.

Better Questions, Better Life

One reason we xate on things and then have a hard time letting go is
because we start o on the wrong foot: We begin by asking the wrong
questions.

Almost everything that motivates you to take action starts with a

question, whether you realize it or not. The simple reason is that before
you desire an answer, you have to rst de ne what you are looking for.

Most things we seek come from borrowed ideas. Depending on the

culture we grow up in, we are molded by socioeconomic forces that
shape our mind before we are mature enough to know better. By the
time we grow up, many of these ideas are so deeply embedded into us
that we don’t even realize it.

The question of meaning, for example, is one such case. In the western
world, we are growing increasingly secular. Religion is on the decline.
You may see that as good or bad, but either way, that opens up a
question: What is the meaning of life? What, in fact, is meaningful at
all? Why?

In a predominantly religious environment, the answer to these

questions are so obvious that even if they occupy your mind from time
to time, they don’t really cause misery because your existing belief gives
you an answer. In a secular environment, however, these questions lead
many into a spiral of nihilism, the belief that nothing matters. This
xation, then, more often than not, causes a lot of undue pain.

Now, here is a third approach as formulated by Alan Watts:

“If the universe is meaningless, so is the statement that it is so… The

meaning and purpose of dancing is the dance.”

By rede ning the context, as shaped by the expression of the question,

we completely negate a problem, which in this case is the potential pain
of living in a meaningless world. As Watts implies, who are you to xate
on meaning in a world that is simply just here? A world that you don’t
even understand? Maybe the frame you’re looking through is the
wrong one. Maybe your brain isn’t even capable of asking the right
question.

Questions create context; context de nes boundaries; boundaries

determine xation; xation, then, limits or enhances your subjective
ability to live in a way that either invites or repels misery.

The solution to most problems isn’t to ght them, but to ask better
questions.

The Takeaway
Both Siddhartha and Govinda spent their whole lives seeking
enlightenment, but it wasn’t until they simply stopped looking that they
found it.

The question they had xated on was the wrong one, and their inability
to consider the possibility that they may have to rethink their initial
premise forced them through a path lled with years and years of the
wrong answers.

Humans are biologically programmed to desire things. It’s encoded in

the survival machine that we refer to as our body. This process of
desiring, however, leads to a narrow zone of xation that stops us from
experiencing reality in a way that is conducive to avoiding misery.
To ght this, we have to develop the exibility to reshape the content of
these desires as we obtain more and more information from the
objective world.

We have to learn to let go of the incompatible subjective expectations

that we rigidly anchor to reality so that we can recast new ones in a
more suitable direction, slowly getting away from the seeking to the
nding.

It takes a lot of work, and even more courage, to look at yourself and
decide that maybe it’s time you saw things from a di erent angle, with
a di erent question, but it’s precisely this kind of work that is rewarded.

Avoiding misery isn’t easy, but it is simple. It’s on you to take the right
steps.

. . .

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