The Pursuit of Happiness and How We Are Doing It Wrong
"None are more hopelessly enslaved than those who falsely believe they are free."
-Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
I've been dying to write a poem on the topic I am writing about here but I was at a loss to find the right words to deliver my message in a beautiful, elegant and grandiloquent manner. So, here we are, at this little mini-essay on the world we live in where fantasy has irrevocably spilled over into reality and the two are no longer separable.
Human beings have the innate desire to be happy and are in the constant pursuit of happiness (Yes, The Pursuit of Happyness was a nice movie) . We take measures to ensure we are happy and part of this is to ensure that we are free for all eternity from the dread feeling of sadness and despair. When we feel sad, the human mind employs the usage of a complex system of checks and balances to ensure that the sudden rush of sadness can be compensated by a sudden rush of happiness of equal magnitude. We desperately rush to stifle and asphyxiate the sadness and bury it under heaps upon heaps of (artificial and unauthentic) happiness until we it is but a fading memory, a ghost of a terrible feelings long gone. It is like taking a considerable dose of painkillers; quick, efficient, effective. We believe that we are free of anguish; that we have ended our plight.
But like painkillers, this abrupt feeling of ecstasy will eventually wear off and we will realize that the painkillers have not taken away the pain but simply numbed it. We are haunted by the ghost of this sadness and now the only way to deal with this is to painstakingly dig it up through layer upon layer of false happiness and it is not only tedious, but also excruciating. The world we have lived upon so far is one which is built upon foundations of happiness and now when we undermine those foundations, we soon come to look at ourselves destroy our own worlds brick by boring brick and soon realize how when we buried our sorrows, we partly buried ourselves.
And indeed this no way to pursue happiness because, as said many times in the previous two paragraphs, the happiness we receive as a reward of our efforts is but a counterfeit, a replica which is nothing compared to the original thing. We indulge and enjoy the taste of these candied lies so much, we are so preoccupied with it that we forget about pursuing real happiness. And by the time we realized what pointless lives we've lead so far, it will be too late.
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