Happiness and meaningfulness/fulfillment

LeighSabio

How important is an individual's subjective perception of happiness vs. the subjective or objective meaningfulness of their life to that individual being fulfilled? If an individual leads a meaningful life, or even a life great importance to the world, and still feels miserable, are they fulfilled?

For instance, what about someone like the prophet Jonah? He was a great prophet who saved an entire city and was remembered to this day for doing so. And yet he was forced into this life, and miserable for most of it. If he had been able to resist God and flee, his life would have been less meaningful and important in the broad scheme of things, but he would likely have enjoyed his life more. Would you consider Jonah to have lived a fulfilling life? Would you say his life would have been more or less fulfilling if God had allowed him to run? Is someone whose life was dedicated to an important cause, who understood the world deeply, and who brought about great things always considered fulfilled, even if they are miserable doing so?

Obā-san

Well, fulfillment centers around contentment with one's actions and achievements, and as such is entirely self defined. Most people can attain a fair level of fulfillment, and seem predisposed to a sort of median state, for when things seem useless they can remember their achievements and their intentions, and while things are going great they can remember their misdoings and lost opportunities along the way. 

Some people are capable of feeling completely fulfilled regardless of the circumstances, but the utter lack of self-awareness and/or absolute unyielding certainty leaves this state open pretty much only to the utterly insane and the most completely fanatic believers in a cause, which are can overlap of course.

On the other hand for some people only failure and missteps seem real and progress seems entirely insubstantial. (*shout out 2 all my fellow peeps struggling w/ depression here*)

as for jonah, he seemed to fall into a fairly more benign case of the former group of persons, being very assured of himself and his actions, to the point of going against the direct word of the god he worships (*which is p stupid/crazy*) so maybe he feels fulfilled? idk

unless you are like using some different definition of fulfilled in which case all my rambling here was pointless

Obā-san

and of course happiness and fulfillment are two very different things