Why do the Americans
insist on harping this word - happiness? All day and all night they talk about
it. They ask each other - are you happy? They exclaim, as though it were the
most elegant and insightful thing anyone ever said - I just want to be happy. They've
even written it into their constitution, as though it were the ultimate value.
Their principal approach to ethics - utilitarianism - is founded on the
principle of greatest happiness for the greatest number.
But it's not happiness you want, you clowns. Think about it, what is happiness? It's a kind of ecstatic feeling, like when you find out someone you like likes you back, or you got that job you were keen on, or you just nailed a sick pipe down at the beach. You can't make a life of that, because it's meaningless. Happiness is the pay-off for doing something meaningful. It is the product of something, not a thing in itself, and in order to get at the good feelings we must also deal with the bad - with the failures, with the attempts that didn't come off, with the uphill battle to success.
We
need to chase meaning, and the substance of life, not its syptom. The dream of
unbroken happiness is akin to a lifelong Soma trip. Why don't you just take
ecstacy every four hours, you'll get the same effect.
instead
of idolising 'happiness', why not just be more honest? Why can't we simply
acknowledge that life is tough and sometimes you won't be happy, but that, in
actual fact, it is the existence of difficulty, hardship, suffering, adversity
and struggle that makes happiness possible? The elation that comes with winning
the tour the France is enormous because it was so fucking hard to get there. Of
course, when things are difficult, sometimes you fail. Sometimes that girl
doesn't sleep with you, sometimes you lose the third set tie-break 7-6. Other
times though, things work out differently. And then they're magnificent.
Things
are always more satisfying when you earn them. Suffering and happiness both,
are the substance of life, it is something other than happiness we are looking
for. We are looking for, as Joseph Campbell said: the experience of
being alive (ed - this concept is widely misunderstood, article
forthcoming).
Remember
the last time you had a really good night out or a thoroughly satisfying
holiday, would you say that you felt happy, or that you felt alive? The most
powerful and important memories, those that define who were are in the present,
are not just those in which we were happy, but also those in which we were
profoundly sad, miserable and anguished. Happiness and Anguish are two sides of
the same coin. Appreciate the beautiful gift that is life, this thing full of
feeling.
The
'good life' is not one in which you were perpetually tranquilized. It's one in
which things happened to you. In which you achieved things. In short, its a
life in which you lived, not slept. "The pursuit of happiness" is the
pursuit of comfort and leisure, but surely we want more than that from life.
Soma trips are for pussies. Life, that's the good shit.
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