[An Amateur]

Wow, I thought this topic was just gonna sink and I'd never see it again.

Originally Posted by StarStarMoon

I do believe this touches on the basis of Buddhism

I hadn't thought of it from that perspective however I suppose my conclusion that happiness is our goal does touch on that.

Originally Posted by death song

Victor Frankl (a concentration camp survivor and philosopher) claims that the only need that we have to satisfy in order to be happy is to find meaning in our lives. Abraham Maslow has a whole pyramid of needs that he thinks we need to fulfill in order to be happy.

The problem with Victor Frankl's idea is that its too broad. Just like I am saying that everyone has the goal of attaining happiness. It means achieving different things to different people. I am interested in analysing this idea further to break it down and identify the things that make people happy, exploring the other things that generally make people happy. I imagine (without yet looking at his work) that Abraham Maslow has tried to do a similar thing.

I think I read somewhere that Tibetan Buddhist monks are the happiest people on earth. The Dalai Lama wrote a book on happiness but I haven't read it yet.

I've actually heard that too and I have only read "Transforming the Mind" by the Dalai Lamma but was unable to find some of his other books. It's certainly worth looking into.

Since I originally made the post i've had some new thoughts on this.

Happiness is the thing everyone without exception wants in life. This is achieved by meeting the basic needs, food, water, shelter, etc and complexity in ones life.

In modern times basic needs might come under earning £40,000 a year because we need money to buy housing, pay the bills and buy food etc. This means most of us need an income usually in the form of a job.

In western society at least there appears to be an emphasis on material things and we measure our success through how much we earn etc. We our increasingly defined by our work. Many people get up, travel to work, spend 8 hours or so working, go home, watch T.V, eat, sleep, repeat. This is simplicity in life and most of these people probably aren't the most happy people (I can say this from experience). What people need is complexity in there lives, they need social interaction and activities that break them out of simple routines and define them outside of the work place.

There was an interesting article about this on LifeHacker that I found quite insightful and I think shows the important difference between what Frankl and Maslow appear to have looked into.