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.
This article was originally published on markfabian.blogspot.com in 2012.
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