Consumer culture proclaims that happiness is having things and doing things. The advertising industry has from the dawn of its existence parked its considerable haunches on this belief. But having things and doing things is the opposite of happiness. True happiness has no reason.
Natural behaviour is spontaneous behaviour, which is free, easy and graced, also unplanned, uncaused and having no obvious relation to external stimuli. Our structures cannot tolerate spontaneity. Observe how a government briefing unfolds.
The world is temporal, meaning time-bound and finite. It came from nothing and is now in the process of returning to nothing. To paraphrase the timeless Stephen Hawking, ‘Why bother?’ Spare a thought for cosmologists! Still looking for a cause. Still not finding one.
The feeling of well-being, sometimes called the joy of being, is autonomous; it does not depend on our life situation being one way or another. Sometimes it arises to illumine a circumstance that is, by every measure of the mind, a terrible constraint or a grievous loss.
Well-being is uncaused. This shimmering convexity is innate, inhabiting every individual to the fullest possible extent.
Men's Work 