The Philosophy Discussion Forum

The Anna Karenina Principle
“All happy families are alike; each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.”

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anna_Karenina_principle

Necessity and not choice causes one to break the family legacy of unhappiness.

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Self-cherishing is the ultimate cause of every problem. Unhappiness is considered to be a problem. When self-cherishing is not the ever-present, primary reaction to a problem, the problem becomes an objective situation and the resulting rational reaction to an objective situation, rather than an emotional reaction to a problem, has a better chance of denying one the later regrets caused by an irrevocable, irrational action (decision). Happiness ensues.

Doubting, happiness can be found epistemologically because it is mental or a state of mind. Epicureans even said sensations were 'irrational', but then that is basing conclusions on logic and evidence. This is self-evidently true if you are always happy how can you know what happiness is. if you are sad, you want to make other people happy because you are not happy. Life is a choice, then a condition is propositional to arrive at q an empirical proposition. A material implication 'If Oswald did not shoot Kennedy, then someone else did'. Or, 'If Oswald had not shot Kennedy, then someone else would have'. Truth conditionals of the antecedent and consequent is the 'truth-value'.

It can be both. Certain stimuli or situations create happiness in the majority of those exposed to them. OTOH, certain individuals can choose to find happiness in situations that most would not derive happiness from.

Very much a choice, I think. I'm sure that nature plays a part, of course, and for whatever reason, some people are more predisposed to be happy, or sad, than others, but in all but the most extreme cases, I have no doubt that we have the power to override this with our attitude to life, and in how we live it.

QueenKerluke wrote: ↑Tue Mar 18, 2025 4:07 am Is happiness a choice or a condition?

Both.

Pyrrho endorsed that happiness is a futile search for knowledge.

Academic Scepticism: A claim is made by a wise man, or it lacks any justification, and is mere opinion. Knowledge is self-evident. Never to re-asses a cognition. The non-dogmatic of what philosophy is.

it depends on how you define happiness

what makes some people happy? intoxicants?

-Imp

QueenKerluke wrote: ↑Tue Mar 18, 2025 4:07 am Is happiness really just a choice, or is it the result of external conditions that we cannot control?

Well, if you knew even basic logic, these words are not correlative. So the question is simply gibberish.

Binary recursion can only produce a binary result. You need to simply state, Hollywood Mysticism by bad writers.