The legend of Leander’s fatal swim across the Hellespont can teach us many lessons about the nature of happiness, although most just view it as a love story.
Oh, what passion he must have had to battle the turbulent waters of the channel to see his beloved every night. Every morning he would swim back, repeating the epic display of affection and courtship. Beautiful Hero, the object of this fiery desire, while holding up a lantern for him so he could follow the light to get to her, must have made some valuable observations watching him toil night after night. Upon the dawn of the twentieth night, she must have realised: ‘This guy is a dopamine junkie. For why has it not occurred to him to take a little boat? Why does he just not stay here with me? Why the eternal journey? And why was it my instinct to play so hard to get?’ Why, indeed.
And so it happened that one stormy winter night, the wind extinguished Hero’s lamp and Leander drowned. Hero, anguished by the loss of her devoted lover, hurled herself from her tower and joined Leander in his watery grave.
Leander’s last thoughts must have been: ‘Ag, no! My dopamine is depleted, my adrenal glands are exhausted and the beckoning flame yonder side somehow diminished to a mere flicker. Will I never find true happiness? Oh woe is m-e, gurgle-gurgle…aargh…!’
The death of both lovers is not a bad ending to this story, it is the only possible good one – one in which the mirage of lasting bliss could survive. The ancient Greek myth writers understood this better than modern morality yarn spinners who spoil everything with that ridiculous line at the end: “And they lived happily ever after.”
You have more chance of slaying a fire-spitting dragon and meeting eloquent, porridge-eating bear homeowners than that last plonker of a lie coming true. Our notion of happiness itself is a myth. The concept is real enough, but we have contorted it into a grotesque, bouncing form that is hardly recognisable from what it truly is – ephemeral, contemplative, grateful and satisfied.
Contemporary alchemists concoct psychiatric recipes to cure us of the curse of unhappiness. Dopamine, serotonin and oxytocin join the eye of newt and the toe of frog in the cauldron to correct the chemical imbalances. Not only will you be happy, you will be wildly successful! Dopamine is the buzzword of the day, the magic elixir. While it does have something to do with sensations of well-being and joy, it is not a quick fix or a cause. Dopamine is not the neurochemical of reward, joy or happiness as is often thought. It is a neurochemical of anticipation, motivation and more. It is excited by novelty and goal-setting. As a precursor to adrenaline, it keeps you moving forward. Even combined with Serotonin (satiety, the chemical of ‘enough’) and Oxytocin (the chemical released by touch and associated with bonding and love) there is no magic potion, no guarantee to reach that Nirvanic state we have labelled ‘happiness.’
It might help to reframe the equation. Robert Sapolsky, scientist, philosopher and author repositions it thus: ‘Dopamine is not about the pursuit of happiness. It is about the happiness or pursuit’. Pursuit – that is why Leander kept on swimming. It is why we keep on scrolling through social media feeds, opening that beer or signing up for Ju-Jitsu lessons; it is the gateway drug for possibility. Regulating it becomes tricky. We have a limited amount of dopamine available to us every circadian cycle. If you release too much of it at once, there might not be enough for other activities throughout the day, and without that sensation of “motivation” you might feel sad and hopeless. Your dopamine stores now need to fill up again. It is a constant gardening process.
This is why one so often hears the story of the mountain climber who, upon reaching the summit is almost immediately filled with emptiness. The moment of superb joy is replaced by a hollowness that will only be filled by the next pinnacle. In the world of the addict, this never-ending search for the next high becomes self-destructive. In the universe of the Buddhist monk, the meticulous avoidance of sensual peaks to sidestep the despair that inevitably follows becomes behaviour avoidant of life itself. They are both over-reactions. Being human is to experience a natural ebb and flow of human emotions and neurochemistry. It is up and down and up and down and it never fucking ends. This is not a problem to be solved, it is a reality to be accepted. We would be much better served by tolerating, understanding and even enjoying these waves instead of “fixing” them. We are robbing ourselves of happiness because in its quest we don’t realise it is already there.
Let us rather be prepared for happiness. It can be found where luck, preparation and awareness meet. A better lesson to teach our children is how to bask fully in the glorious glow of ecstasy while equally not being heartbroken when it fades. Cultivate a habit of saying goodbye to happiness like we say farewell to loved ones or the old year, with tender memories and good thoughts. The evaporation of happiness does not erase its existence, nor does its presence become the only validation for a full life. We would do well to understand that beginnings and journeys are always more valuable to us than endings – dopamine makes it so.
POSTSCRIPT FROM THE UNDERWORLD
In the as-yet-unpublished and unverified postscript to the legend, Leander meets with a sage in the underworld and asks what he could have done differently to experience true happiness.
Thus spake the sage: ‘Remember Leander, dopamine is the drug of anticipation. We are hard-wired to be attracted to novelty’.
‘So if I swam in a slightly different and new way each time, I would have experienced happiness?’ asked Leander. ‘If I swam breaststroke rather than butterfly I would have experienced happiness?’
‘No, poepol’, admonished the wise woman, for she spake thusly: ‘I am saying that when you first undertook to swim across the Hellespont to declare your commitment to Hero you were exultant. And she, holding her lamp, surrendering her virginity and love to you, existed in bliss. You were both already happy, but you were too busy taking selfies of your swimming technique to realise it’.
‘Oh, for fuck’s sake!’
‘Indeed’, confirmed the sage: ‘Let me put it this way. If “happiness” had to have a physical form in myth and legend, it would be better represented by Sisyphus’s rock than the Holy Grail’.
‘For the love of Christ, Aphrodite and whoever else wants to listen, you’re not making it better!’ wailed Leander.
‘It depends on how you look at it’, soothed the sage. ‘Listen, while you are down here, have you tried dipping your toe in the River Styx yet? I hear it has quite a good temperature and temperament this time of year?’
Just then, Leander thinks he spots a light at the other end of the river. Could it be? Is that her?
‘So I do not wish you a happy new year, Leander. I will only tell you this: Start swimming, Leander. Start swimming.’
[Painting by Jan van den Hoecke – Kunsthistorisches Museum, Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=5228524]
The views of the writer are not necessarily the views of the Daily Friend or the IRR.
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