The Twelfth Commandment
In recent years there has been an enormous interest in "happiness". Scientists think they have worked out what "makes us happy" - the chemical interactions in the brain that create the subjective feeling of "happiness". Though they seem to confuse it with "pleasure", which is not the same thing. Confusing "pleasure" with "happiness" is like confusing an energy drink with a balanced meal. The energy drink gives you a short-term sugar rush which soon wears off and may be followed by a hypoglycaemic crash which makes you feel even worse, whereas the balanced meal doesn't cause a "high" but gives you energy for a whole day. Similarly, we may get pleasure in the short-term from activities that in the longer term make us unhappy - recreational drug use leading to addiction, for example. Or we may use pleasure-giving activities to numb the the pain of broken relationships, unemployment, financial distress and general ...