The Unhappy Condition
An Introduction to Happiness and Option
Happiness matters.
Zoraya ter Beek was euthanized in May 2024 after being granted permission to die by the Dutch government, following a three-and-a-half-year approval process. She was 29 years old.
Photograph by Ilvy Njiokiktjien for The Free Press, from The Guardian
If you search for information about Zoraya, every news story is beaded with details about her condition. This is reasonable; people don’t seek death without cause.
Any judgement about whether or not Zoraya’s desire to die was justified is on you. But here are her conditions, as reported.
In the years leading up to her suicide, Zoraya had been:
Physically healthy
Living with a romantic partner
Diagnosed with autism, depression, anxiety, and a personality disorder
Long seeking treatments for her disorders; treatments included talk therapies, pharmaceutical medication, and 33 rounds of electroconvulsive therapy
The treatments did not meaningfully improve her condition. Her psychiatrist told her “There's nothing more we can do for you. It's never going to get any better."
She was approved to die because of her “unbearable suffering with no prospect of improvement,” which is the required condition for euthanasia under Dutch law.
Zoraya died because she was unhappy. As I’ll explore later, “unhappy” here is a catch-all term for every manner of human suffering. It’s characterized by an arduous, often life-long search for happy-making conditions and an ongoing rejection of unhappy conditions.
Suicidality isn’t necessarily an unhappy disposition. As human euthanasia becomes increasingly legal across the world, more and more people choose to “die with dignity” rather than living in conditions they consider to be so undesirable, they’d rather not live at all. This is why so many articles covering Zoraya's death mention her physical, environmental, and history of therapeutic conditions. Because none of these are obviously misery-inducing—indeed, we might expect some of them to be misery-relieving—the implication is that Zoraya was defected or broken in some more mysterious way.1
The problem, which Zoraya eventually believed was insurmountable, was in her mind. For a decade, she attempted the standard therapeutic interventions, trying to adjust her mental condition into a bearable one.
But Zoraya could achieve no set of conditions that would permit escape from her suffering. And so she chose to remove every life condition, all at once.
Happiness and unhappiness are paramount.
Wanting to be happy has never, never, changed. Even wanting to be alive comes and goes. […] But what beyond that has still been unchanging? The wanting to be happy. Obviously the most insistent, persistent imprint of nature on you.
— Bruce Di Marsico: The Option Method: The Myth of Unhappiness , Vol. 1
Our world revolves around the duality of happiness-unhappiness. I wager that for the vast majority of humans on Earth, all motivation bottoms-out here.
If we cause difficulty for ourselves or others, it’s probably because at some level, we believe it’ll make us happy. If we devote our lives to selfless altruism, maybe even becoming quite unhappy ourselves2 in an effort to achieve the best environmental conditions for the largest number of people, it’s because we value human happiness and want to maximize it.
We believe those conditions which altruistic actions create have a causal relationship with happiness. There’s no escaping this—happiness and unhappiness are paramount in human decision-making. Even stating this seems to border on idiocy, or relating to people the way some sentient fungus from another galaxy might when interacting with humans for the first time.
Isn’t it obvious that people want to be happy, want others to be happy, and orient their actions toward making this possible?
But there is a fundamental flaw in this mode of relating to ourselves and our world. An error in view that perpetually generates the happiness-unhappiness duality. A way of looking at the world which necessitates endless striving toward achieving happy-making circumstances.
Happiness and unhappiness are not states of mind resulting from achieving preferable or unpreferable conditions.
Happiness is unconditional.
Happiness is not a product of conditions.
Happiness is the foundational satisfaction that is present beneath, within, and prior to every set of conditions. And unhappiness is the condition we find ourselves in when we relate to happiness as though it’s conditional.
This is a non-ordinary definition of happiness.3 It’s non-ordinary in the sense that it refers to an unbreakable satisfaction, unlike conventional definitions of happiness. It’s also the only happiness that ever actually exists—the happiness of the here-and-now.
Do those last few sentences sound like word salad? Or maybe they’re clear but sound bizarre or illogical because everything we experience is predicated on causes and conditions. Nothing just exists without verifiable support from something else!
Right?
Happiness and Option
This post has been an introduction to my series Happiness and Option. In this series, I’m exploring a confluence between the results of my ongoing experimentation with Dzogchen, Vajrayana Buddhism, and the works of a late-Twentieth Century American psychologist named Bruce Di Marsico.
In my next post, I’ll introduce Bruce Di Marsico’s Option Method, talk about what we really mean by happiness and unhappiness, and explore common unhelpful misunderstandings people hold around these topics.
I hope you’ll join me.
Or the implication is that, because it was all in her head, she didn’t deserve to die. Or she’s a victim of government malfeasance. Depends on the ideological bent of the publication and/or its audience.
Or maybe it’s because we did something altruistic in the past that made us feel good. Ultimately, we are all doing as well as we can.
It also excludes reference to the Physiological Needs tier of Maslow’s Hierarchy. I’m writing mostly to inhabitants of WEIRD societies, where unhappiness epidemics seem particularly incongruous. That said, all of us will die to injury or illness. I’m very interested in how we relate to our impending deaths, especially the fear and pain we experience in the process of dying, and how to discover happiness there too. I intend to write more about that in the future.
Yes! I shall happily join 🍃
This is a very good article! Helping people understand that happiness is unconditional (i.e unhappiness does not exist) is the most important mission in the world.