Happiness is in the Moral Aspects of Life

If you attach your happiness with material things like a house, food, travel or wealth…etc, or with something semi-material like the number of friends, then be sure that boredom will chase you. However, people who are more attentive to the spiritual and psychological life don’t feel bored even if their material situation is less than others. We see the mystic or worshiper stays many years in the temple and doesn't feel bored.

They who live life focusing on moral aspects like thinking, analyzing, innovating, feelings and emotions are less bored than those who live on the visual and material aspects only, because matter offers nothing by itself. If you cleaned a room and arranged it well what will take place in it that worth all the effort? The human is the most important and his/her spirit is more important than his/her body.

For example, the Western material civilization is plagued by boredom, addictions and even suicide, which you won’t find in underdeveloped countries in the same high rate. The reason is that they are soaked with material things. They have money, and some have servants, and freedoms which they thought that its absence was the cause of their unhappiness. So, all relations and connections have been broken in the name of freedom, and a person can do whatever s/he wants, sleeps with whoever s/he wants and expresses whatever s/he wants, and yet boredom keeps following them.

Generally speaking, boredom is bliss, because it urges man to seek and do the best. The normal materialist social situation once looked attractive because of its ambiguity, but after they reached it and unraveled its mystery they found nothing real and true in it. However, who deals with the constant, i.e. God, will never reach a dead end, because man can’t encircle God, thus will never be bored because s/he lives the permanent sweetness and pleasure of faith.

The first step to cure boredom is to stop seeking material objects and turn to mental and emotional realms, thus breaking the boundaries between you and yourself, by attempting to speak, think and concern yourself with these new interests until the old interests grow weaker. Gradually, one will arrive to a level in which she can be in one place for a long time and yet doesn’t feel bored. It’s true that the place is one, but the ideas are constantly renewed.

We see that people who are uninterested in the moral and spiritual aspects in an ongoing search for new things, changing clothes, fashions and places, because they are concerned mainly with matter.

On the contrary, if there were a group of philosophers, you’ll find them going around the whole world without changing their place. Meanwhile, you see people going to tourists attractions but see nothing important unless it’s especially noticeable, and you’ll find them getting bored of it and won't not come again. But who can taste mental and intellectual pleasures might stop at one landmark reflecting upon it and studying it for years, as one philosopher said that he's willing to spend the rest of his life in the back of his garden. Because he thinks and meditates and observes the roses and insects, while one glance from a shallow person to this garden will make him feel bored and won’t look at it again.

Change is a spiritual motive, but the mind translates this emotional need falsely, connecting the feeling of boredom with a material object and then goes looking for that thing and tires himself for it, and might not be able to reach it. "Those whose efforts have been wasted in this life while they thought that they were doing things correctly!" (the Quran).
Man’s soul is looking for tranquility, and that’s what the believer in God feels even if they don’t do many things. The believer can control their acts unlike the materialist person who feels pushed to do things and work. The believer doesn’t do a thing unless they feel it’s suitable, because they are basically passive, due to their tranquility and satisfaction with what God has destined, and they only do what they can. The tranquil self is the opposite of the anxious self which is always looking for something, whenever it goes somewhere it feels bored and wants to go somewhere else. While the self that has reached faith has found calmness and homeostasis.

Physical pains can be forgotten, unlike psychological pains. Even moments of joy are forgotten because joy is man’s default state. When people talk about calamities they address them in a material perspective as in lack of food or electricity, but if you look carefully into the real cause that tires them you’ll find it to be a psychological one. If they were filled with love and confidence many things will feel a lot easier and they’ll be more capable of being patient.


People insist that matter is everything, so when they meet you they ask about the house, job, and money as if your happiness only lies in material things. That is a false test of happiness. Because there can be people living in the midst of comfort and wealth but they feel miserable because of boredom, losing someone they love, or feeling psychologically restrained. We see people who belong to the wealthiest class in the world but matter added nothing to them, and people who are materially less fortunate and yet they live more happily.

Every person is actually two persons, the first aspires to reach the second, and the more you get close to the second the more happy you are, the more you move away from it the more lost you become, because it owns the first. The first is terrestrial and the other is celestial.

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