I don’t want to change human history. I don’t care much to be remembered after I die, even if it is just in the minds of my “loved ones.” I don’t care about contributing to society. I just want what everybody wants: periodic bursts of happiness (I guess, seratonin) that are regular enough to keep me from being depressed and bored but scarce enough so that I don’t grow accustomed to them. I can achieve that shit by sitting here watching terrible TV shows that I’ve torrented and playing video games while eating terribly unhealthy food that takes advantage of our evolutionarily-developed sense of taste to be enjoyable. I think everyone could probably go about being happy in much simpler ways than they are.
We’ve burned through a quarter of our candle and all we’ve done is fallen into line behind everyone else, jumping through the hoops we are expected to jump through by people who have already jumped through theirs and need to feel validated by it.
Enjoy your fucking worthless day everyone.
I don’t think that’s the right way to look at it.
Beyond 60 you can’t really do much so it’s more like a third of your life really.
Whatever. In 40 years we’ll be able to technologically augment our bodies, and live as a race of super-beings. Right?
I don’t want to put crazy ideas in your head, Will, but a lot of people seem to find happiness in ways above and beyond TV and junk food, if that’s conceivable…
You’ll always be the king of anger
Cai: you mean they strive harder to achieve something? There’s no difference in the feeling of achievement I get from winning a tough Pokémon battle and that feeling I got from getting three A-grades at A level. The difference is that one is supposed to be “meaningful” and the other isn’t. But working on an ad-hoc, instant gratification, by ear kind of level appeals much more to my pathetic attention span and my lazy, gluttonous, vile inner self that’s crushed on all sides by others’ expectations of long-term goals and commitments.
If you think it needs extraordinary effort to make a person happy, or maybe you expect extraordinary happiness from extraordinary effort, well, I’ve got news: everybody is miserable, all the time, because they are constantly looking for something that is out of reach that they don’t even want. Everyone is unhappy with their life and don’t ever listen to anyone lying and pretending that they aren’t.
Have you considered talking to your local Humanist Chaplain?
That’s not a joke btw, I mean it. That is what they are there for.
And they somehow are more qualified to talk about how to be happy than anyone else is? I call bullshit. They’ll say the same thing as everyone else. They’ve probably worked really hard to become a Humanisty chaplain — they’d probably consider it a pretty worthwhile achievement. Maybe they have a family or aspire to have one. Maybe they get satisfaction from “helping” others.
The point is, all their hard work so far is not going to give them an objective view on how easy it is to be happy. They and everyone else will say “you’ve got to have goals and work towards them” because that’s what everybody’s already doing. They would never admit that anyone could possibly be just as happy doing fuck all but seeking gratification bit by bit as they would working hard for years and years to reach some far-off and vague goal.
How appropriate… this is exactly the kind of shit I am talking about… no matter how much you think you achieve or how hard you try, you are going to feel the same as if you hadn’t done any of it and just sat doing less “worthwhile” stuff instead.
I love this post. You are making some pretty damn solid arguments there.
“There’s no difference in the feeling of achievement I get from winning a tough Pokémon battle and that feeling I got from getting three A-grades at A level. The difference is that one is supposed to be “meaningful” and the other isn’t.”
I agree, word by word. Whoever tells you about how much he/she enjoys committing his/her life to long-term and somehow meaningful goals, simply because of some sort of philosophical sense of fulfillment they pretend to experience when they finally succeed… almost certain bullshit.
In my experience, people are often motivated by public acceptance: collective praise is a reward that is worth some sacrifice (I guess this is pretty easy to understand from an evolutionary viewpoint).
Myself? My constant drive is some constant instinct to compete, this subconscious feeling that if someone can do better than me today, I must be able to do twice as well the next day.
Yes, I do *actually* love my studies: but would I work as hard as I do, if it wasn’t for this “must beat everyone” nonsense? No way.
“Everybody is miserable, all the time, because they are constantly looking for something that is out of reach that they don’t even want.”
I am sorry but I can’t agree here. What do they not want? Ethical fulfillment? Then you are probably right. Anything at all? Nah, be sure they all have reasons.
I don’t understand the following implication that you seem to be making: people lie about their true motivations -> they are fundamentally unhappy.
Lies are well accepted in our world, especially those that are most evidently so: why would I then need to feel unhappy about telling others the same old story?
I love you writing stuff like this, TC. It’s inspiring, in the literal sense.
Dunno if it’s just me on this one, but do you remember the feel of elation after handing in a particularly large chunk of coursework, getting it all over and done with, and you felt awesome because you were free? But, after the elation fell you realised that you had nothing left to do, so you’d fill it with crap. You weren’t really happy (although amused) because you knew you were only doing it to pass the time. I think that’s ultimately why I’ll have to disagree with you on this one. Yes, you can be just as happy playing Risk as you can planning world domination, probably more so in fact (the paperwork for the latter is a nightmare, as I’m sure you know), but ultimately the long distance goal is what makes us as humans tick. The thing just out of reach is what keeps us striving for life so that we have that little bit more time to complete it. It’s almost our survival instinct; if there’s no reason to live, why fight death? Ultimately, the strive is as fun as the fun itself, so it compounds to be more fun than meaningless instant gratification. In gaming turns, what’s more satisfying – twenty minutes of Bioshock, or twenty minutes of Smooth Moves? Okay, that’s probably bollocks, but you know what I’m trying to get at. Without direction, life seems almost pointless, and thus instant gratification is required to fill the gaping void left by lack of direction in a very square-peg-round-hole way. Let’s face it, if games were wholly satisfying, the gaming industry would have ran dry decades ago. Fun isn’t everything.
And don’t be too selective in your quotations, either http://xkcd.com/572/
I really don’t mean to sound condescending when I say this, but have you considered that you might not be the highest authority on your own mind? Psychologists and therapists train for years and years, and it’s not obvious stuff that they learn.
For example, “major depressive disorder” is treatable with drugs and counselling, and it’s often the patient who is the last to diagnose it.
Ah, that other comic serves to prove my point as well (even though it was clearly meant as a set-up to a joke, whereas the one I linked to is more serious). There were loads of things on that list and he needed to get them all, but each one was as valuable as the other. So wasting x years with that woman to find “happiness” was as worthwhile as procuring a shark’s tooth.
Even if that’s not the case, it implies that there’s some higher level of achievement, meta-accomplishment, as it were, that can be fulfilled by other means than traditionally-viewed paths to “happiness.”
I’d feel like a cheat to even consider the prospect of having depression. It’d be insulting to people who are really depressed. I can’t pretend this is anything more than feeling pissed off at the world for things that slightly aren’t going my way, and a slightly different way of looking at things that everyone else seems to agree otherwise on. I am a revolutionary, not a major depressive!