Is happiness a choice? I and our friends were having a debate over this, and I mean a British Parliamentary format debate, two of my friends take the stand that it’s a realization rather than a choice. What do you think? Thankyou!
Did you limit the scope of choice? Otherwise, anything other than a choice (such as a realization) is arrived at by choice, and this becomes a semantic argument reductio ad infinitum.
It sounds like what you guys were really debating was whether one’s emotional state is ultimately controlled by the conscious or the unconscious mind, where the emotional state is happiness, the conscious mind is represented by choice, and the unconscious mind is represented by realization.
Regardless of the framing, I do believe that happiness is a choice to the extent that we have neurophysiological free will, and a realization is just as legitimate a manifestation of that choice as any other mechanism of the mind.