We are not… Happy
This is not to insult your intelligence; we know the name conveys it well, but we’re not talking just about ourselves. Perhaps it’s better phrased like that: Mankind can’t be absolutely happy.?
The very fact that we have “ups and downs”, times of joy and times of despair, labor/effort for reward (and I’m not talking specifically about industrial labor. Just pure effort in exchange for pure joy/reward) means that we’re constantly in an exchange of a long-sought state of mind and the lack-thereof. Thus we can’t constantly be in that one state: happiness. It’s not news, no.
We don’t need that many words to describe a fact that we all acknowledge, but we may need to look at it that way to realize that our pursuit is open-ended. That no matter what, we’re doomed to suffer, and –sometimes– be rewarded for our suffering. Till our demise.
I won’t talk about death. Not here at least. But I’ll talk about what we referred to (just contextually) as “reward”. After all, this is a delightful article about happiness! It’s only natural for us to seek joy and refrain from pain, but we are so complex to the extent that we often confuse these two. We often create our own easy rewards for a shortcut to our happiness. We often capture others’ reasons of happiness and burn them into our minds as a reasonable source of reward, ripping them off all context.
Our genius and complexities create these false positives that can be manifested in an almost unquantifiable way. And we can live off it a whole life not knowing we’re living in a very boxy world of limitation and dissatisfaction. Suffering the most, rewarded the least. It doesn’t stop there. Our minds can abstract away the reward from the equation and encourage us to seek pain just for pleasure! We can and do forget the reason of our effort.
Though I’ve been mentioning the mind as the main culprit, but I’m only talking about one key station. As the mind rarely works on its own; It tends to be very attentive to everything that happens, and happened around. I’m not the Medicine Man. I’ve no “elixir”. Suffice to say I need one myself. I’m merely observing, and reporting. Such as millions of people did and will continue to do.
“Such there is Night, not Night as ours–Unhappy Folk” – J.R.R. Tolkien
Co-founder & CPO at ElCoach
3 年I enjoyed the read, Hashim. Eloquent and poetic in a sense. Keep it up :)
Applied Scientist II at Microsoft
3 年I enjoyed reading this, keep going ????