Resilience matters.

‘This part of my life….this part right here…

This is called Happiness’

The pursuit of Happyness

What if we’re wrong? What if the point of all of this wasn’t to aspire for ease and comfort but to grow in strength and fortitude?

We as a society have become fixated on making life easier and simpler –We avoid conflict and challenge and seek out the path well-travelled – it is the focal point of our current existence and it is hurting us immeasurably.

We are chasing the cheap thrill of gratification because of the chemical rush and I get it… the body has an apparent love for utter apathy. It is at its most ‘comfortable’ when it is not stressed. So much do we strive for this intellectual and physical sedentary that we will go out of our way to protect it and we pass it onto our kids with the view that we want to ‘protect’ them and we don’t want them to hurt so we try and shield them from all of the hurt… but that good intent is causing more harm than good.

Exertion hurts. Being challenged hurts. Confronting your own demons and traversing your own peaks and valleys? That hurts. You cannot get stronger without lifting heavier. You cannot build immunity without exposure to illness.

The further we run away from conflict – the softer and pudgier we become. We outsource responsibility for our resilience and make it ‘societies problem’ as we try and legislate into apathy. Over time we are devolving and becoming more pathetic in the face of adversity. We hold in admiration the strength and resilience of generations past and seem all too happy to let them die as nostalgia. You only have to look at how we as a society have responded through the current adversity to know that generationally our resilience is waning.

We are getting weaker, lazier and emotionally fat and conflating happiness with comfort as we seek to avoid anything that holds a mirror to ourselves. We see life as something to ‘get through’ instead of something to ‘achieve’ and slowly we erode the value of success as we become nameless, faceless drones content to be as quiet and compliant in our ‘everyone gets a trophy’ approach to life.

At our most primal level we are built for resilience. The speed at which we are creating this exponential rise in comfort seeking dressed as ‘happiness’ is manifesting itself in a soaring rate of depression, anxiety and mental illness because for all of our efforts, we haven’t worked out how to stop bad shit happening… and when it does (and it will) – we are becoming less and less capable of dealing with it.

If you want to find happiness – learn how to lose… and how to grow through the adversity. If you want to find happiness – feel the satisfaction of learning from mistakes. If you want your children to be happy – teach them that they are going to get knocked down but that they are going to be equipped with the fortitude to stand back up. If you desire happiness – become ok with accepting responsibility for your choices and apologising for your mistakes. Happiness comes from standing up for honour, integrity, and justice – and being vocal against corruption.

Happiness comes with love – and love is equal measures pain as it is pleasure.

Happiness comes with purpose and that purpose is not to get through life with as little scarring as possible – but to learn and grow and to build resilience and integrity in successive generations.

As someone who is eternally flawed, scarred and broken I can say I don’t know anyone who has made more mistakes than me – but I am truly happy every day. Not because my life is perfect… but because it is not.