Have you ever looked around you and wondered why everyone is so happy? Constantly everywhere I turn, I see people who seem to have better lives than myself. People are laughing with big groups of people, couples are intertwined in embrace, individuals happy with themselves. This overwhelming flood of positive emotion caused me to think and reflect, because more and more lately, I begin to question what happiness is and how do people find it, because I definitely have't gotten there yet.
The search for happiness is a motive that is ingrained in us almost as deep as the need to satisfy hunger and thirst. Happiness is the object of our conduct, the way our lives move is to seek pleasure and individual satisfaction. Why then, is the highest cause of death among people our age suicide? 80% of households have at least one person there that is not content with their lives, that they are suffering from some sort of emotional distress. The postmodern warped world that our generation live in has led us to become unhappy as our lives are marked by consumerism.
However, if we plough deeper into our individual lives, we will come to realise that wealth, fame, power, beauty, these actually do not make one happy or unhappy - these are external factors. Happiness comes from within, it is a by-product of our inner human condition where our soul is content. One who lives just to search for happiness will probably never find it, as the search is what brings one the most grief.
As individuals stuck in the clockwork of dull postmodernism, we have no time and place. As a generation defined by democratic systems and capitalistic economics, we are the middle children of history. "We have no Great War, We have no Great Depression. Our Great War is a spiritual War, Our Great Depression is our lives." The spiritual war that we fight is this search for happiness. No one can be truly happy. Every person that looks around will always see someone that is happier than them, more set than them, more in tune with their future and environment. This is a phenomenon called comparative emotional response. As we move further and further on with our lives, we realise that the current state that we are in is nothing but a wait. Life is just one long wait. For what though? It is the wait for true happiness to come. Our actions are the search, our goal is to reach the end.
One's happiness is hindered by the importance that is placed on material possessions. We continue to lament over technology lost, we complain about our lack of funding to provide us with the best on the market. What we need to do is escape from the shackles that bind us to our mundane lives, and move towards spiritual freedom, liberalism, socialism. Independence. If we don't let ourselves goal, our possessions end up owning us, and evolution is limited by our containment of raw emotion in the conservative environment of the 21st Century. Freud believed that human nature contains two fundamental instincts - life and death, characterised by sexual and aggressive tendencies. Embrace these core tendencies and interact with other people. Ditch the mobile phone, ditch the internet. Balance sexual and aggressive instincts so that you present yourself well through "aggression" and maintain connection through the "sexualism". That may seem confusing, but what I mean is that as people we have almost forgotten how to communicate with others. True happiness stems from forming connections with others, and although social media may seem to be a bridge, it really is a catalyst to the time bomb waiting to explode under us when this intricate, fragile web of technology breaks down individualism.
Although all this seems to be a montage of different socialist ideas, it all comes down to one point. Before anyone can achieve happiness, they must accept that one day, we will die. Without pain, and without sacrifice, the world would be empty. We have to give up on holding on to the last fragment of the facade that we could possibly live forever as technology improves. As humans, first we have to know, not fear that some day, we are going to die. It's only after that you've lost everything, and hit rock bottom, do most people come to this realisation. It's only when we have nothing left, that we are free to be ourselves. If everyone remains chained by their silhouette of happiness, on a long enough timeline, the survival rate of everyone drops to zero.
At the end of the day, we just want to be happy. We long to feel content, we long to feel loved, we long to have someone always there for us. But we can only achieve that if we learn to respect ourselves. We need to understand that life is a short and valuable thing, and it is too fragile for us to waste time searching for it. Rather, we should free ourselves from the shackles of materialism that chain us to postmodernism, and let the winding adventure of life lead us to the true happiness that we seek.
Trevz.
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