This is an absolutely brilliant and very succinct audio-visual essay on an endlessly complicated and nuanced subject. To take up these issues through the staged presentations of not just very real people but in a way where their realness (and the realness of their personal stakes in the issues) is absolutely self-evident makes this essay so easy to understand. Kudos to the filmmakers for finding such apt ways to visually stage complicated and somewhat abstract human problems/dynamics.

Love the gilded shoes/herald motif. Actually, the entire “Lee-cam” rig was pretty cool too. Lots of interesting looks from the sidewalks - not too many smiles - I guess happiness doesn’t run rampant in the general population after all. Provocative concept. I had a similar discussion with a mental health care professional where we explored the idea that “happiness” isn’t an attainable tangible or a reachable destination but rather a side effect of having our needs met. The eventual idea arising that the more dissatisfied we are with the “what I haves” in life ,the more needs we create for ourselves and the unhappier we become. So is happiness really just a wicked little “catch-22″ that keeps us grinding at the wheel of blatantly conspicuous consumerism and the more mercenary aspects of capitalism? Maybe. Sometimes I just get a headache from the whole thing and simply want to shield myself in the smiley face t-shirt and whistle past the cemetery like everyone else.

Lee, I feel good bada, bada, bada, bad! I think there is a lot of happiness in feeling bad too. Misery loves company. And there is that ironic kind of joy in finding common values in the human experience, both regardless and because of external influence. Thank you for phrasing the question is such a beautiful way.

It seems a certain polarity prevents us from maintaining our happiness at unsustainably high levels. Much like stocks and real estate there’s a certain euphoric greed for winning that gets us in trouble after we’ve taken it from others. That polarity keeps us going, refreshes, pushes and pulls. I believe it is hard to draw back in the heat of the moment of unbridled joy to realize at whose expense you are experiencing it. I think some of us can actually derive joy in being able to do that, I can’t. It would take all of the fun out of it! Polarity brings joy and sadness –

Here’s my thought digression on polarity – yin/yang, good in bad-bad in good…..
Happy – unhappy
Satisfaction – happiness
Compromise - happy and unhappy coexist
Satisfaction in compromise?
Democracy – compromise
Black – white
Democracy - Dictatorship
Right – wrong
Needs of the many – personal desire
Me – We
Share – horde
Good – bad
Selfish – generous
Purposeful – misguided, listless
Negotiate – Demand, Require
Consensus – unilateral
Impassioned – ambivalent
Degrees of happiness – unhappiness ….a sliding scale
Red – Purple – Blue
Unbridled – constricted, repressed
Equilibrium
Balance
Yin – yang
If ignorance is bliss then do we make ourselves miserable by thinking about it?
Or do we achieve happiness by balancing the extremes?
I think we’re way too caught up in getting the right answer - happiness!
Solace in polarity (us) – comfort in compromise (all of us)
City Mouse – Country Mouse
Democrat – Republican
Conservative – Liberal
Devil – Saint

I know this is a dumb list, but culturally we’re all about dumb lists, polarities, keeping score. It’s never about the middle, or just above the middle because that would be average. Average is stable, boring, ho-hum, culturally disdained. Average is bad? Statistically half of us are below it! Are the half below making the half above more happy by statistical superiority? But the half below are happier because ignorance is bliss?
Intellect - instinct
consuming – creating
Win – lose
Productive – idle
Fiction – truth
Truthful fiction – fictionalized truth
Happy – sad
Euphoric – Disconsolate
Semi euphoric – semi disconsolate

How do you convince yourself and your culture that a little above average is good enough? Is it? Great science, art and literature have come from profound pain. The polarity fosters inspiration. Can our bodies and minds handle the collision of the extremes? Do we need a test to determine who can handle the extremes and who should only venture to the mildly polarized? Is the resolution of those extremes, whatever the amplitude, Euphoric only when it is resolved above average?

Internal compromise – external over stimulation.

I’m much happier to be engaged that not.

Yes we build. Not with our hands, but with our hearts and our brains. Well sometimes with our hand, but someone like me doesn’t care if the nail doesn’t go in straight, just as long as it goes in and hold whatever together.

I help people build a better business for themselves and help them build a better business for their clients. This builds relationships for me and them, some which have become close friendships.

I do hope it all winds up somehow working toward peace if not for the world at least inner peace.

Lee,

You make a great point. Particularly in Baltimore, “How you doing?” is a greeting. No one really cares. Often the response is an echo, “how You doing.” It is a way to slide past strangers but leave a noncommittal friendly impression.

Happiness is so relative. The pursuit of happiness in the US may often mean unhappiness elsewhere. I’m happy being an attorney and helping my clients. Sometimes helping my clients that makes other people unhappy. Since I’m a nice person, even if the other people are making my client unhappy; I’m not sooo happy that I make other people unhappy.

Does anyone else think that one’s person’s happiness makes other people unhappy/ Is it global yin and yang or something?? Economists would say it has something to do with scarce resources.

Love the piece!

The thing I would most want to put in my shopping cart would be time…but it always seems to seep right through.

There is a certain sense of accomplishment in fighting for that parking spot at the mall, besting the throngs of shoppers and coming out with the purchase! But I am always happiest working on a personal project - creating, building, experimenting. As a culture, we are beginning to forget how to do that - that “hands on” work. Were we happier as a society when we could say “I built that … with my own hands!” Or do I just sound outdated, in this society of instantaneous materialization of all you could ever want, right there on the shelves at Target? Most of that stuff breaks anyway, since we as a society have forgotten how to build stuff with our hands, or at least build it to last more than a month.

Is the local craftsman dead? Or can we still hope?

I’m starting to think that happiness is contingent so much on what we want which is often “written” on us by our culture and tangled in our bodies. It is biological, cultural, and collective. When we ask “How are you doing?” We’re in some way asking “How am I doing?” because how we’re doing is interwoven so deeply between each other and our environment.

My kid is waking up to a first realization that much of life is working on other (perhaps boring) things so you can spend ten minutes doing what you really want to do. This is not appealing to anyone but a reality. Our unpopular adult opinion was that if you only did what you really wanted to do (ok it was video games) all the time, you would quickly get bored. Everyone needs a goal to work towards to feel as if waking up each day is necessary. Some goals might be mercenary, like a degree so you get paid more. Getting a better paying job may be the means to accomplish something else like paying your kids’ college tuition. As soon as a goal is reached don’t you make a new goal?

I would like to think that only those who aggressively pursue financial success as a means of happiness are the ones who are deluded in their “pursuit of happiness” and who have lost (or never had) perspective on life. But truly, the idea that obtaining one certain something like a PhD or getting married or the perfect job will make everything come together for a person is so false. Getting so focussed on one objective seems like it will inevitably lead to disappointment once you attain your goal and realize you are the same person you were before, unless of course having objectives is what makes you happy.

This is such a lovely way of addressing slippery philosophical questions in an meaningful and accessible way.

Thank you for putting this out there!

I’m feeling like there is some sort of happiness imbalance in the global economy, for sure. I tried for a week to live entirely “harm free”, because I feel like it’s very difficult to consume (exsist) in this country without hurting something or someone; the environment, other countries, etc… It failed.

– My heat and electricity is provided by a price-gauging monstrosity of a company; a lack of bike lanes and a poor mass transit system meant my commute sans car lasted 2 hours each way, instead of 15 minutes.

– The presence of corporations that outsource labor to other countries and undercut people there seems ubiquitous;

– American Apparel is a convenient place to buy -new- clothes from a company that doesn’t scam it’s employees, but they advertise with images that come insultingly close to pornography (usually of the child variety). They ain’t getting a dime of this feminist’s meager income.

– large companies like Trader Joes are forcing out of business smaller privately-owned organic markets that are still too expensive to be a viable option for me.

Do I have to move to a lonely mountain-top, wear banana leaves, and raise goats for food (and inevitably companionship) in order to alleviate my harmful impact on the world?

Excuse the rant, and the typos.

The overall message of the film was inspiring and reminded me why I want to teach art. I got some advice in high school, “Find something that you like doing so much that you’d feel guilty getting paid for it. Then find out how to get paid for it.” It reminds me of the feeling in the movie.

The suitcase I think is a metaphor for the trip he took through the movie to understand happiness. Embellished shoes don’t need a reason to exist. I believe that euphoria is extreme and temporary. Otherwise it would be a less intense word. I loved the graph about long-term happiness and pleasure coming from something “meaningful”. I wish that that graph was enough to convince my brother to give up temporary happy-inducers like drinking and smoking.

I've actually seen this film a few times, and each time something different stands out as paramount in that particular moment. In my most recent viewing, I could not stop thinking about the way that the brain changes and develops in conjunction with learning and environment. This notion is one that is so interesting and encouraging, I can only dream of the possibilities this idea encourages. It makes perfect sense: the gradual physio-muscular changes the body undergoes when training/practicing for any sport, the brain reacts similarly to repeated stimuli, eventually re-routing/activating your brain to be able to think/understand in ways you weren't able to before. In this way, "Euphoria" embodies hope and possibility as much as it embodies bliss.

Euphoria really resonated with me, as someone who believes in the power of community and a positive outlook. The quote that keeps coming to my mind as I think about my experience watching Euphoria is from the baseball movie Field of Dreams: “If you build it, they will come.” I was incredibly moved by the magnetic attraction the project had on the community, the fact that when people found out what was happening, they wanted to join in on the experience. I keep coming back to the image of everyone walking onto the barge to view The Metaphor: the construction workers, elderly couple, community members, and gospel choir, all filled with the anticipation of watching the culmination of their efforts. I really love the idea that once you find the thing worth searching for, the people around you can sense it, as though you are a neon sign, and want to be involved – what a beautiful concept that is! I also connected to the idea that, in making our survival easier, our technological advances have also robbed us of the intrinsic meaning that our lives used to contain. Finding something worthy to pursue is one way of bringing back that meaning.