Feb 7, 2012

The Pursuit of Happiness

Like everyone else on earth, I long for happiness. But the manner in which I chase after it has changed a lot in recent years. I owe this to sheer experience and the wisdom that comes from learning once again the lessons that your parents taught you as a child, which, at the time you did not truly understand. Now I do.
Happiness is satisfaction.
Unhappiness is found in longing. 
But the only kind of happiness we are promised in this world is the fluctuations of longing, and satisfaction. Of desires achieved. There is no constant satisfaction. And desire that is unachievable is torture. 
However, I have longed learned that there is a wrong way to pursue happiness. And that is chasing the thrill. 
Getting high, having sex just because the urge hits you, pursuing pleasure at every corner may seem like "the life!" but I've come to realize its not. It literally depresses you, because it wears you out mentally. It takes a certain kind of self devaluation to open yourself to all influences. And whether you realize it or not, your mind reacts to that. You feel devalued. You feel cheapened. Of course it doesn't happen immediately, which is why when it happens, we don't often realize why we feel the way we do. Emotions are thoughts. Millions of thoughts that hit you at the same time, and even though they are not individually articulated, they leave you in a very defined state of mind. And at the back of the mind of every thrill chaser is the question "What is the point of all this? that expresses itself as an emotion: sadness, unrest, depressions and weakness that often forces us to once more go back to the same thing that we thought gave us a momentary thrill. And that is how vicious cycles take over.

There was a time when I agonized over the meaning of life. I flirted with the nihilist idea that life was just a big joke played on us. That there was no particular meaning to it. So I wilded out all the time. But I was never truly happy until I learned that life is all about responsibility. For yourself, above all. But also for the ones around you, starting from family, and going all the way to the world. I have been happiest when I was doing productive things to improve my life, the lives of the ones I loved, or the society I was in. And my happiness was strengthened when I said no to things which had no direct impact on my productivity, no matter how pleasing they were. 
It takes a lot of effort to build the discipline for a different kind of pursuit of happiness. It helped that I had a very strong family that taught me lessons I didn't realize I was learning until many years on. But I noticed, that my values and morals have solidified the more that I practice discipline. And that I find it easier to reject things that I would normally be too weak to say no to. And funny, I am a much happier person today than I ever remember being. 
Who knew?

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