The pursuit of happiness is the pursuit of ideals
If you think a little, it becomes quite obvious that the level of happiness of each individual depends on the level of development. It is the presence of certain internal parameters that actually determines the degree of satisfaction with life. After all, as has long been known and proven, no external achievements make a person truly happy.
Thus, it is not difficult to understand that only an ideal person is able to truly feel such emotions. Accordingly, the pursuit of an ideal is the path to happiness in the most global sense of the term. It is about the ideality of human beings that we will talk further, and the relevance of the topic for every reader will probably no longer raise any doubts.
Is it possible to achieve the ideal?
If we consider the ideal as a goal to which we should strive, then we can turn to psychology. Much here depends on the answer to the question of what a person’s ideals are, as well as on his person. If there is a desire, then the goal you set for yourself can be achieved. What is needed for this? First of all, you need to determine for yourself what exactly you need to achieve. It could be an ideal family, or an ideal job. After this, on a piece of paper, you should make a plan for yourself.
Secondly, it is important to determine for yourself the time frame within which to achieve the goal. You should not immediately plan your actions for several years in advance. This may be a short period of time during which certain results can be achieved that will bring the goal closer to realization.
It is very important to find the right motivation, or reason, for yourself. You need to support yourself with positive thoughts. Very often, obstacles arise on the way to achieving your ideal. Do not forget that without them it is impossible to achieve the goal. You need to treat them correctly. It is very important to get out of your usual comfort zone.
The ideal is different for everyone
To begin with, we should make some remarks regarding the understanding of the ideal person by each individual person. Given the enormous diversity of human beings, it is not difficult to guess that there is a different understanding of ideality for each individual. Nevertheless, for any person, ideality is determined by the embodiment of one’s best qualities in reality, fruitful self-creation, which makes it possible to constantly develop and become better than oneself.
As you know, an ideal person never compares himself with others, but only with himself. Moreover, if he surpasses his previous self, then the movement goes in the right direction. Nevertheless, in many ways, the image of an ideal person consists of certain general parameters that are understandable not only to each individual, but also to everyone else. People in reality have a lot in common, and mainly the idea of \u200b\u200bthe best and not the best, the properties of discrimination are identical for everyone, although they may vary slightly depending on the historical era and social group.
For example, for some, the ideal woman is a beautiful girl with a chiseled figure, while others value the qualities of a housewife and a wonderful mother in a beautiful field.
What is an ideal
An ideal is the best example of something or the highest goal in some activity. This is the ultimate dream of a person, what a person strives for. But the idea of the ideal is always subjective.
For example, in the opinion of one woman, the ideal figure is maximum muscle and minimum fat. And another woman is drawn to curvaceous figures. The third representative of the fair sex dreams of a flat figure. And such a divergence of ideals is observed in everything: appearance, leisure, social circle, place and working conditions, marital status, character, etc.
An ideal or system of ideals differs not only from person to person, but also changes within the individual himself. This is a dynamic structure that depends on age, developmental situation, environment, level of intelligence, and a person’s outlook. Our ideals change throughout our lives.
Is there a most ideal person?
The understanding of this term definitely depends on the preferences of the individual. For some, the most ideal person is the one who is considered the most outstanding in a certain profession or field of activity, others focus on great figures and historical characters, and others consider someone close to them to be the most ideal. Thus, it is difficult to call any person completely ideal for everyone, but it is not difficult to determine the commonality between all ideals, and this commonality is the presence of certain properties and character traits that distinguish them from among people.
What happens to a person when his values and ideals are destroyed
In our youth, we fight for our ideals and meet our first disappointments. The world is revealed to us in bright colors. We approve and accept everything that is valuable to us (represents our values). The opposite of these is what we often hate. And for good reason.
This is the very time when our ideals collapse, and how we go through this period will determine what our life will be - happy or gray.
This is the first time we are meeting so closely with lies, betrayal, hatred, and heartache. And when the pain becomes too much, we sometimes cannot stand such a collision and for the first time we stop believing. In order not to feel mental pain, and the blow to values and ideals is too painful, we decide to abandon our values and never believe in our dream again.
Such people say: “Live like everyone else”; “God has business, and I have business”; “You have to work from the fence until lunchtime.” They often try to stop the dreams of others who have not yet been disappointed by shouting: “Where do you live? Come down from the sky! or “Love does not exist, romantics invented it.”
Such people, as they become disappointed in life, change their outlook; it no longer burns with passion or love. Such people just work, just get married, live until retirement and curse the government and their illnesses.
What are the qualities of an ideal person
In general, such criteria are positive characteristics that are basically the same for all cultures and times. For example, it is unlikely that justice or generosity have ever been or will be considered shameful qualities. In fact, everyone has an internal understanding of these and other similar characteristics that seem to be inherent in people.
This fact is surprising, but if you think a little or look at your own feelings when choosing behavior in any situation, you can easily observe some indicator that is inherent in you initially, which gives accurate knowledge regarding the best decisions, thoughts and actions. Of course, if you are used to deceiving yourself or allowing negative tendencies to develop in yourself, then you will more often begin to move away from your own ideal in external manifestations, emotions and thoughts. However, the precise certainty of how to move in the right direction and what the ideal person in you is will not go away and will continue to be present in your being.
Human cultural values
A person lives in society. This or that society, if we consider it as a society, lives in accordance with its own rules and traditions, which are also called culture. A person cannot exist without a specific goal. It is culture that puts forward certain goals for the individual. This is not a scientific definition. Science identifies causes that exist in certain time periods. The goals that a person sets for himself allow him to predict the future. It is determined by the actions of the individual.
In the animal world there is no system of values from which the definition of what the ideals of culture is formed. But it exists in human society. Moreover, the goals that an individual sets for himself are largely determined by culture. The culture of a particular society is based on traditions. It develops at the genetic level. That is, it is passed on from generation to generation. Society sets a difficult task for a person - to preserve culture. Throughout the evolution of mankind, there have been a large number of different cultures. There was Chinese, Egyptian, Old Russian. Each of them cared about passing on its value system to the next generation.
Ideal in art
Thus, the qualities of an ideal person are those indicators that have been glorified for many years by magnificent works of art, the postulates of religions and great examples of human beings who have approached the ideal. We will not list each of these properties in detail, since the reader can easily understand what we are talking about and, if there is a need, determine which properties are missing or which need to be developed. It is worth mentioning separately only about the character of an ideal person, who in fact can be absolutely anything (soft, heavy, etc.), because human character is determined by a certain set of parameters and their combination. But a person with a difficult character, with whom it is difficult to communicate, but who will never deceive, and a person with a gentle disposition, who is liked by many and will never deceive for the sake of another, can be equally honest.
About moral ideals
If we analyze the concept from a philosophical point of view, we can find a division. There is an ideal, which is defined as the highest point, value, a certain system of moral concepts. In which the moral ideal is a system based on moral requirements. Their combination forms a certain image of a person’s personality. There are certain characteristics.
- From the point of view of the spiritual and moral system of values, ideals are models that are worthy of imitation. In this regard, examples can be given from fiction and spiritual literature. Many heroes have a number of characteristics that allow us to draw conclusions about their moral qualities.
- Throughout human evolution, the concept of “moral ideal” has constantly changed. Thus, in Ancient Greece, according to Aristotle, the ideal from a moral point of view was the ability of self-contemplation. A person had to renounce ordinary worldly life in order to achieve the highest point of perfection. Kant believed that the moral ideal is determined by the inner world of a person.
In order to perform actions that are worthy of an ideal personality, you need to be guided by certain rules. One way or another, every philosopher and psychologist has his own concept of what ideals are.
What are the traits of an ideal person
In many ways, such people (not completely ideal, but ideal within the limits of the capabilities given to them) are not difficult to notice. It is quite possible that you know such “perfectionists” who differ from the rest in some completeness and completeness. After all, an individual who acts in accordance with an internal ideal, in fact, does not need anything, in general, a person’s ideal needs are minimal, refined and sublime, such a person does not strive anywhere in everyday life and is not subject to various “wants”, hence inner peace and tranquility manifests itself .
Moreover, if you communicate with such a person, then you yourself begin to feel complete satisfaction with yourself and everything else. Such sensations only appear when communicating with a truly fulfilled person, one who has nothing feigned or fake, who has calmness not due to complacency. This is basically how the traits of an ideal person manifest themselves in external space and interaction with others.
Examples of the ideal
A description of the ideal can be found in fiction, painting, and architecture. But the problem is that in different eras a certain stereotype was taken as the highest point of perfection. The moral ideal can be external or internal. In works of literature, you can find many examples of how a person who has external beauty, for example Helen in War and Peace, may be far from ideal when it comes to his spiritual content. Thus, we are unlikely to find a single point of view on what ideals are.
How to develop positive traits and qualities in yourself
As said earlier, everyone strives for happiness, and this need requires the pursuit of one’s own ideal, that is, such a way of activity, interaction and thought process that most corresponds to some internal indicator that is inherent in everyone initially. Of course, there is a truth in everyone, a model of what your ideal person looks like. Moreover, despite the seemingly significant differences, in the final sense, such an image is identical for everyone, as are the ideal qualities that each individual person may possess.
Probably the most essential activity that a person can have is movement towards the ideal, and this, in fact, ultimately determines any activity. Accordingly, it is advisable to reflect on how productively you yourself are moving towards your own ideal, because this is initially essential for yourself, since it determines the degree of happiness inherent in you. As you know, there are no limits to perfection, and in any version there is room for improvement.
Free, happy, internally harmonious personality
Movie "Megamind"
Having chosen what you love and inner harmony, think about whether you have betrayed those who need you.
Film "The Amazon Code"
People from the Pirahã tribe are happy and completely internally harmonious. Do you want to be like them in everything?
It is natural for a person to strive for inner harmony. Inner harmony is happiness, inner harmony is inner goodness, and fellow psychologists describe a harmonious personality in the most positive way.
According to O.I. Motkova, the signs of a harmonious personality are as follows: the predominance of positive emotions and a calm mood: good physical well-being in general; a generally positive image of himself, although he also sees his own disadvantages; healthy and varied lifestyle; predominant reliance on oneself in life, rather than on external circumstances; flexibility in managing your emotions and actions; a sense of proportion in one’s desires, claims and actions; acceptance of the duality of the World, the presence of both light and dark in it; the desire for fairly high, but not maximum achievements; realistic ideas and desires; moderate, unsharp expression of temperament and character traits; satisfaction with life in general, relationships with family and friends, as well as relationships at work and in the study group; openness to learning new things, creative activity; friendliness towards people; a feeling of the beauty of nature and unity with it; the prevailing orientation towards universal human values of the search for truth, goodness, beauty and harmonious life; the ability to spend your life energy economically.
The choice of internal harmony seems natural, but this choice is not the only possible one and is not undeniable. There is more than one path of development; there are many paths for personal growth and development, and the choice of internal harmony is opposed by the choice of serving something external.
This is a significantly different choice, and the choice is extremely difficult. This is the question: “For whom am I living? Who is at Alfa-Bank - he is called a genius of efficiency; his whole life is subordinated to efficiency: to serving the most difficult goals that he sets for himself. Is he happy? He's not interested. His priorities are different.
The important thing is that the path of service may not be a calvary at all, it can be a path for a person that is completely internally harmonious. A service-oriented person can also be harmonious, but for her harmoniousness is a means, not an end. A service-oriented person develops himself in a way that is necessary for the tasks facing him. He lives not only for himself, and his inner harmony is not the most important value for him. Internal harmony may or may not exist; in the format of service this is not important. A hierarchically developed personality builds itself not for its own convenience, but to achieve one or another goal.
That is why business people and especially managers are wary of the hobby of psychotherapy, where the task is to search for inner harmony. Of course, a good psychotherapist will definitely make sure that after his session the client remains in a resourceful and not a dismantled state, but I look at the results through the eyes of a manager with 30 years of experience. If, after psychotherapy, a previously intelligent employee begins to simply enjoy life instead of work and lives “here and now,” showing his feelings, then I have to relieve him from work for two days until he comes to his senses. Work has its own standards, here you need to use your head...
A harmonious personality is the choice of a person who lives for himself
A person who has achieved inner harmony feels good and happy. Most likely, it will be just as nice with him. This is usually true: if a person feels good with himself, other people feel good with him.
In fact, a happy person and a kind and decent person are two different things. The tyrant Sulla bore the nickname “Lucky” all his life, all his life he considered himself the happiest person, but it was he who invented proscriptions, lists of enemies of the people, and went down in history as one of the most cruel rulers of Ancient Rome.
But if this is not the case and someone is not happy with him, he does not really care: his task is his inner harmony, and not someone else’s harmony. A harmonious person strives for his own personal happiness, caring about the happiness of those around him just enough to avoid having unnecessary problems with them. However, if the harmony of someone or with someone pleases him, he will easily and happily take care of others. Because it's still taking care of yourself. A harmonious person strives for happiness, because in a happy state it is easier for him to live, and it is easier for him to live with him.
“What is the task of psychology? I suggest the word "cure". However, I don't want to be cured of my preference for orange or black; from my addiction to smoking, as well as from my addiction to a bottle of beer. No teacher in the world has the right to treat a child with a desire to make noise from a drum. The only thing that can be cured is unhappiness. A difficult child is an unhappy child. He is at war with himself, and therefore with the whole world. The difficult adult is in the same boat. No happy person has ever disrupted a meeting, preached war, or lynched a Negro. No happy woman has ever found fault with her husband or children. No happy man has ever killed or stolen. No happy boss has ever kept his subordinates in fear.” — Alexander Neill.
This, unfortunately, is not the case. A happy person is one thing, but a kind and decent person is another. The tyrant Sulla bore the nickname “Lucky” all his life, had an easy character and many friends, all his life he considered himself the happiest person, but it was he who invented proscriptions, lists of enemies of the people, and went down in history as one of the most cruel rulers of Ancient Rome.
This is how the Consumer lives in a version of reasonable egoism: “If others around me feel good, it will be better for me too!” Therefore, in order for me to feel good, I am ready to take care of those around me.”
A person who chooses internal harmony as a guide chooses the life of a human organism
If a service-oriented person develops what is required of him, then a harmony-oriented person develops what makes his life more comfortable, and the direction of such development is determined primarily by the needs of this person’s body.
“The good life, in my experience, is the process of moving along the path that the human body chooses when it is internally free to develop in any direction” - Carl Rogers.
What determines the needs of the body? A person's age and hormones. When a young man is 16 years old, his body wants to run, and not sit for lessons. When a man is over forty, he wants to lie on the couch, and not run around the stadium. A harmoniously living person is looking for opportunities to do what he, that is, his body, wants, without straining his relationship with life and others.
A harmonious personality will never strive for higher achievements
Higher achievements today are impossible without narrow specialization: if you are interested in everything, you will never overtake those who concentrated on one thing. A success-oriented person chooses a specialization: yes, such a person does not understand everything, but he is a pro in his field. A harmonious personality masters everything a little, so that he doesn’t go wrong anywhere and has as few weak points as possible. A harmonious personality does not need the highest achievements in any one area, but sufficient achievements wherever it will be useful.
There are physicists, there are lyricists: to become a super physicist, giving up on everything else, or to be “a little bit of everything”? A harmonious personality does not need “super”, its solution is the last: a harmonious combination of everything, a combination of mental and physical labor, familiarity with the art of Ancient Greece and the art of cooking.
How much a harmonious personality will develop itself is determined by it, and not by external norms or requirements. The usual standard for a harmonious personality is to be no worse than others. If everyone has a house and a car, and you cannot afford it, this interferes with internal harmony, especially if normal girls do not want to date such a poor person... On the other hand, if you have become self-sufficient, then further development for personal happiness, unless it doesn’t flow out of you, it becomes no longer important. For what? It's enough to be healthy.
In order to achieve not just good, but the best, highest achievements, you usually have to work not just a lot, but a lot, you have to strain, you have to sometimes forget about rest, go through pain and through “I don’t want to.” Is this necessary for a person striving for inner harmony? More often than not, no.
What will a wise girl do if she feels that she is becoming too smart for her husband? If she has no plans to strain relationships, if she strives for harmony and harmony, she will wisely orient herself towards further development in the field of cooking and, perhaps, will stop honing her intellect. For what?
Smart people who strive for happiness never overwork themselves. If you can lie under a palm tree and eat falling bananas, then why get up and earn money somewhere? To buy bananas with it? For a free-thinking person, the need to work is a limiting belief, and he frees himself from everything that society imposes on him.
To whom is a person who has chosen inner harmony loyal? - To myself
A harmoniously developed personality is the development ideal for a humanistic, client-centered approach, for adherents of Gestalt therapy and supporters of free education - in particular because the choice of a harmoniously developed personality is authenticity, loyalty, first of all, to oneself.
“...What concerns the values of Gestalt therapy, first of all (and this is the difference from some training systems), is the achievement of authenticity. That is, one of the goals of the work is precisely to increase the authenticity, the correspondence of a person to himself. So that in those cases when there is no point, you don’t need to fight with yourself, but somehow live in peace with yourself and correspond to yourself. The fact is that our system of civilization is mainly built, of course, on retroflection and on the most complex retroflexive complex - narcissism. And narcissism, in short, is defined by the following thought - (this is from A. Lowen’s book “Narcissism”) denial of the true self. That is, in reality, I am a person who reacts quite quickly, promptly, and emotionally to many things. For example, at some point I find out that this is not very profitable for the reason that it is inconvenient for others, for the reason that it does not correspond to the standard model of, say, male behavior in society, and I find out that it is more profitable for me to pretend to be for example, a phlegmatic person. And then, accordingly, I begin to behave in this way. And instead of the true self, I have such a pseudo-construction that does not correspond to my reality, but nevertheless.” — D.N. Khlomov, “Paradoxes of Gestalt Therapy”
If a person lives not only for himself, the question arises - how much not only for himself? Mothers know: every child costs her one tooth, but then the question is: how many teeth is a particular woman willing to sacrifice for the sake of her children? Men know: they need to protect their home, their family and their homeland. But in order to do this effectively, a man must raise himself as a man and as a warrior, and this means cultivating his will, once enduring stress and pain, being able to replace his “want” with “need”, limiting himself, fighting bad habits and cultivate good habits, put aside your inner harmony for the sake of external achievements.
At least work to provide for your family and yourself. And if he loves his family and he has a large family, then he works a lot: as much as the family and children need.
And if necessary, let us remind you that a man must calmly give his life for his family and Motherland. This is not close to his body, his body wants to live, but if a man is raised as a man, he does not what he wants, but what he should. Perhaps complete indifference to internal harmony makes the life of such a person completely internally harmonious?
The criterion of the meaning of your life is practice
However, it is difficult to seriously understand what motivates a person: the desire for internal harmony or the values of Service; people easily know how to deceive not only those around them, but also themselves. Perhaps the safest way to rely is not on words, but on actions: who (or what) are you serving in practice? To yourself, to your inner harmony - or to something in life that is dear to you? What will life gain from your personal life? What do you leave to people as you go through your life? Can you give people more? What is your Maximum Life?
Weight control
To develop positive qualities in yourself, you can choose any direction you like, but it is better to “select” those that make you less happy, because it is in these areas that you are less consistent with the ideal. Let's take such a banal example as excessive body weight, which creates a huge number of complexes. If this worries you, you should simply start working in this direction.
However, one should take into account the absence of such a parameter as a precisely defined ideal weight of a person, which is mandatory for everyone. This characteristic is individual for everyone and is sometimes determined by natural parameters.
Thus, it is not difficult to understand how important a reasonable attitude towards your own aspirations is, since what will make you ideal is not the imitation of any external generally accepted templates, but the following of the true and immanently inherent in each individual image of an ideal person, that is, your far-fetched image, which embodies happiness .
LIFE IDEALS
Let us now turn to ways of describing alienated moral consciousness. It is not difficult to discover how little its ideological forms in our society are similar to the products of a theoretical worldview, scientifically organized knowledge of social reality. They are deprived - and this is in the order of things - of clearly thought-out foundations, but the lack of originality of the parts that make up these forms and the instability of the concepts used make themselves felt at the very first acquaintance with them. Perhaps someone who tries to undertake a research operation to study these forms will find in them some kind of central core, an integrated structure that merges beliefs with stereotypes of worldviews, social beliefs with the “logic of feelings.” In the meantime, we have to confine ourselves to assumptions, trusting in a disciplined imagination, and therefore it is difficult to offer the reader facts obtained on the basis of strictly verified methods; the secret of worldviews, alas, has still not been solved.
But, moving towards declassifying this secret, we dare to assert that the main content of people’s practical worldview results in their life ideals (other denoting expressions are also possible). Such ideals are formed on the basis of people’s generalization not of some isolated, fragmented aspects of their life, but of their entire individual and group experience. These are “echoes” of all social practice, “casts” from people’s everyday relationships. With some approximation they express their fundamental needs and interests. As befits ideals, they prescribe only the “image of a person”, but not the “way of his actions”; they indicate not how this person should act in certain specific situations, but what he should be like in a given era. Life ideals contain the core orientation of all value orientations of the individual, general goals, and more broadly, they provide the rationale for the strategic program of life activity (strategem), the model of the sublime and the base, the due and the forbidden. These ideals provide guidelines for the moral quest of the individual and allow one to cope with such extreme (terminal) characteristics of human existence as the meaning of life, vocation, death and immortality, suffering, redemption, etc.
A more specific acquaintance with the life ideals of alienated consciousness obliges us to add another adjective to their definition - “traditional”. If the American sociologist A. Tofler imagined “shock from a collision with the future” (futuroshock from entering a post-industrial civilization), then we are struck by “shock from a collision with the past” (perfectoshock). It can be argued that on a broad basis, types of worldviews and worldviews are being reproduced that were formed and polished not so much in the relatively short history of capitalist development for our country, but in the long history of “traditional societies.” Their phenomenological faces are represented by a motley spectrum of ideals long known in the history of culture - hedonism, quietism, stoicism, anarchism, asceticism, etc. Of course, in no case can we talk about a literal coincidence of ancient and modern ideals; the sins of modernization are unforgivable. However, in the content of many modern ideological forms there are by no means random and superficial analogies, but internal unity, a continuous relationship with types of personal ideals that have been well known since ancient times. The kinship is not in the denoting words, but in the very essence of the restored tradition.
Such restoration occurs partly spontaneously. The extended existence of ancient ideals is explained primarily by a certain commonality in the content of people’s life activity at different stages of the existence of society, by the basic and superstructural fragments of the past, and not only by the inertial force of ideals as such. But at the same time, the reproduction of ideals cannot be completely explained by spontaneous factors. The forces that turned out to be interested in repeated alienation were ready to resort to the use of traditional ideals. Publicly, these spiritual traditions can be castigated as “relics”, on which, on occasion, it is even convenient to place a significant part of the burden of responsibility for the imperfections of the ideologically glorified system of power. But the moods and behavior stimulated by these ideals turn out to be suspiciously well adjusted to the modern orders established by this system. They can penetrate officially professed ideals.
so much so that they participate in their subtle transformation in the desired direction. They are attractive due to their simplicity, self-sufficiency, and the ability to offer with their help more or less acceptable answers to any of the most intricate questions from the consumer of ideals. Of course, the main focus is not on them, but their seductive potential is not neglected. By awakening the old order in the historical memory of people, they serve as an additional factor in confirming the legitimacy of the new order, an indicator of their stability as opposed to mobility and conflict, existentialism and the problematic nature of modern ideals. Despite their venerable age, they attract with an aura of provenance, with the illusion that the life principles they proclaim, having extinguished all the failures of trial and error, have already become immune to the flow of time and the spirit of change. It seems that they, disconnected from the graph of the historical process and the inevitable change of worldviews, flow almost from the “nature” of man, are naturally connected with his highest needs, capture in repeatedly filmed form the optimal ways for an individual to enter civilized society, and provide examples of relationships with him. Moreover, these ideals are, in fact, not strictly tied to historically changing circumstances, are not directly derived from existing forms of social relations, and can migrate relatively easily from era to era.
In order to find a guiding thread when analyzing the diverse manifestations of moral alienation and in traditional ideals, it is necessary to choose some kind of ordering principle. Let’s imagine a certain centerline of a person’s relationship to the objective world of things, to forms of consumer activity that affect various social values, cover a wide range of communication, and not just things. Positions placed above this conditional center line will be designated as an expression of deviations from the ideals, values and norms of socialist morality towards consumerism, and positions located below this line will also be conventionally called anti-consumer. You can apply another notation system, close to the proposed one, say, calling the first group the conformist ideals of “contented consciousness”, and the second group – the anti-conformist ideals of “unhappy consciousness”.
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