Happiness is the most tiring pursuit anyone can go after
Happiness is the most tiring pursuit anyone can go after. It is not and can never be attainable through purposeful pursuit. Happiness is the saddest positive emotion — I know, it’s ironic, but think of the number of times that you felt sad for not being happy enough. I do not blame you for wanting a happily ever after. This unrealistic belief has been brought about by the endless fakeness of media expectations for us, because the media understands the human psyche and why we constantly chase the happily ever after and think of it as the ultimatum for the human journey. The human journey, however, is not final when happiness is attained.
Most people don’t want happiness. They just want to know where they can find it. So that when they are ready, or when they think they are ready, they can go there. And when they do go there, they are truly happy, at first. They find comfort, ease, and love. But at some point that all becomes too overwhelming. Comfort in happiness becomes uncomfortable. Ease becomes overwhelming because they want, or need to work hard for at least one thing, but they find that everything they want is easy. Happiness seems like a stage where everything else just becomes obsolete, and people would rather have newness and change in their lives. So people drawback, and jump into sadness, depression, and misery. They like it there, although they still long for happiness, they feel more comfortable with depression than with happiness because depression is a low, and you know you can’t get lower if you are at your lowest. Most people don’t think “I’m going to do so and so to stay happy,” but they say “I’m going to do one, two and three to become happy,” and that is, where I believe, the message about happiness gets distorted.
Someone once asked me where they can find the answers to their troubles, and where they can find happiness. I said: “Well, I have a theory that if I tell you, you will never go looking for it. Not you personally, but everyone in general does not go seeking for the solution when they know exactly where to find it. Asking where something is will lead you exactly to the place where a thing is, and so with that, you’re just comfortable knowing where it is rather than possessing it.”
The Happiness Chair
Imagine a red chair–we’ll call it “The Happiness Chair.” For your entire adult life, you have searched for happiness, but to no avail. Until one day, you stumble upon a man and ask him “where can I find happiness?” He points you out to a chair and says “you see that chair over there? That’s The Happiness Chair. As long as you sit on it, you’re going to be happy.” So you think to yourself Finally, I have found happiness, but you don’t sit on that chair just yet, because you found happiness on that chair and you can come back to it whenever you want, whenever you feel like miserable or exhausted. Time will go by, months, years, and you won’t give the chair much thought. Then one day, while you’re down and out, you remember that you know where you can feel happy. You will go back to that chair, and you will be truly happy. You will do all that you ever wanted with happiness. You will go to people and boast about your happiness. But at some point, you will get overwhelmed with happiness. You will start finding everything too easy. You will take it all for granted. You will not appreciate it, because you know exactly where to find it. So then you leave that chair. And because you left that chair, you start thinking that there must something wrong with you. How could you leave the chair that gives happiness? How could you not be comfortable with happiness? How could happiness not be enough?
You see, we have become so convinced that happiness is the ultimate goal, we take any feeling of sadness, depression, and emotional exhaustion as being weak and giving up. But those are perfectly normal feelings for anyone. Not one of us has not experienced long periods of sadness and depression. We have all gone down that hellish road, and it freaks us out that it’s that way, to the point that we think that’s it, this is my whole life now, and we’re so convinced by it because society has never taught us that such feelings are completely okay. We are constantly taught that you need to be happy and have positive energy all the time, and so when we don’t have that so-called “positive energy,” we start feeling as if there is something particularly wrong with us.
I have previously written on this topic and how I no longer strive to be happy, which you can find here:
