Life is like a river, and we humans, like any other animal species, are carriers of a life principle that is our essence and our absolute priority. We live as if this priority did not exist and give priority to less important, sometimes minor or even trivial issues.
Last weekend, a friend told me she had “given up”. If she gave up when I know she would have preferred to hold on, it means that the unconscious driver of her body, whom I call THE DRIVER, forced her hand. It means that he felt she was lacking in gratification, fulfilling joys or pleasure, and that this lack could prove toxic. By encouraging her to give up, the Driver was able to recruit a dose of gratification that protected my friend from this threat.
I am not writing this to say that my friend should give up trying to lose weight, quite the contrary, but to make it clear that her Driver has not found other sources of gratification in her environment and that she needs to look for other outlets than food.
I have written extensively about the components, drivers, and generators of happiness, which are the 10 pillars of happiness, encompassing the 10 ways to satisfy our basic human needs, the first of which is food.
The pleasure of food is the primary source of vital satisfaction because without it, life stops. The second is love, a combination of sexuality, affection, family, and self-sacrifice for one’s loved ones. There are eight others, but I do not have the space here to review them. I have been working on this theme for 40 years and stopped writing about it when my first child was born, as I felt that this child gave me the opportunity to put this theory into practice. This research into the Ten Pillars of Happiness has enabled me to live better, to give my life more direction and to stay focused on the essentials, from which we are constantly straying. I realised that my social and professional role also brought me a great deal, and that this need to position oneself in the social hierarchy while feeling valued and giving meaning to one’s life was the third of these 10 pillars. I ended up counting them, and in twenty years, I haven’t found any others. These ten are universal, both in space and time. A Japanese, American or African person is human today and has been since our species came into existence because they are subject to the same needs and derive their happiness from their satisfaction, everywhere in the world and since the beginning of time. Being overweight is a marker of an insufficient harvest of this gratification, without which happiness withers away and whose withering becomes threatening.
