.
When we are unhappy, we are faced with a great choice: Do we recognize that life is inherently complex and filled with obstacles to happiness? Or do we blame others for our unhappiness? Of course, in some truly terrible instances — losing a loved one to a drunken driver, for example — it is quite valid to blame others for one’s unhappiness. But when most people blame others, they do so because that is easier than to acknowledge life’s complexity or to search within for the sources of their unhappiness.
Moreover, even when others do play a misery-inducing role in our lives, we still retain some control over our happiness. No matter how much outside forces may dominate our lives, there is one thing that we can virtually always control — how we react to them.
One book that deeply influenced me was Man’s Search for Meaning, the memoir and observations of the psychoanalyst Viktor Frankl, who survived a Nazi concentration camp. One of his most important insights was that while the Nazis controlled everything in the inmates’ lives, including whether they would live, starve, be tortured, or die, there was one thing the Nazis could not control — how the inmate reacted to all this.
That is the major reason I have found little relationship between the circumstances of people’s lives and their level of happiness. If external circumstances determined people’s happiness, happiness would be a simple rather than a complex subject. We would know whether people were happy simply by knowing their external circumstances, and we would never have to work on our happiness because we would never have any control over it. We could predict happiness according to two simple equations: Good Circumstances = Happy People; Bad Circumstances = Unhappy People.
The fact that such equations do not exist should convince anyone that blaming others or outside forces for our unhappiness is usually a mistake. Others can certainly contribute to our happiness or unhappiness, but it is we who make the final determination about how much we will allow others to affect our lives.
Dennis Prager
Chapter 17, “Seeing Yourself as a Victim”
Happiness is a Serious Problem
