The relation between human happiness and self delusion
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Answer:
First of all, it's a pretty deep question. And I hope I'm able to do justice to such a beautiful question with my answer.
Okay, I think I should first explain what "self-delusion" basically means. It is an act of trying to deceive your own self. For instance, you might be trying to tell yourself, "I'm not doing anything wrong, afterall everyone does this" while deep down inside, you know you're wrong, but you're trying to give yourself excuses to do that wrong thing, then this is self-delusion.
Coming to my point of discussion, human happiness and self-delusion are so strongly related that we often fail to even distinguish between the two. I am not saying that happiness can only be obtained by self-delusion, but I'm saying that we people have tried to obtain our happiness from deceiving our own selves so many times, that now we find it difficult to realise that the source of our happiness has become deception.
You might want an example: Suppose you are appearing for boards this year, and you haven't prepared much. And, your father has a close friend who can easily provide you with the board paper, obviously, i.e, if you pay him handsomely. Let's also just suppose you come from a rich family, and you can afford to pay him, so you do. Then, you get your happiness, you get your desired marks. But, you know what? you have deceived yourself in the process. This sort of cheating would not help you in the long run, it would not teach you life-lessons as you could have learned by working hard for the exam. But, it gives you short-term happiness. And, you would believe you have got all you wanted. But after a few years, when you go to college, away from your parents, you would not have this privilege of getting the question paper ahead of the others, what would you do then if you didn't work hard? you'd fail.
But, it is hard for us to realise all this beforehand, because this self-delusion is giving us the happiness we need at that given time.
Thus, human happiness is very closely related to self-delusion, but we must try our best to learn how to derive happiness from good-deeds, instead of deception.