My Old Blog

The title just popped into my head while sitting here drinking alone in my apartment. Usually when I just write about something with no direction it turns out shitty.

But this is worth thinking about….not that I can solve or even make any real progress on such a question in the next 30 or 45 minutes. Actually, maybe it isn’t even worth thinking about? Oh well, I’ve already started.

Let me ask this: If you achieved what you wanted, would you be happy? Is happy even a realistic goal?

Happiness, however you wish to define it, is a feeling. Is it realistic to make the goal of your life to be forever chasing a fleeting emotional state??? It sounds like a recipe for disappointment.

And happiness is relative anyway. Success will certainly not guarantee any sort of happiness, especially if you have a history of success. In that case, it would simply be normal and expected. Failure would be bad, success (defined as achievement of what you wanted) would be uneventful.

So you would have to trump your last success for it to make you happy. After that you would have to trump it again. One can easily see how this kind of one-upmanship will quickly lead to unrealistic expectations.

I wrote this probably 4 or 5 years ago in one of my personal journals: “And then you take the last great step: Failure becomes the only viable option, because if you succeed it means you didn’t risk enough, and set your goals too low. Failure is your only consolation, the only time you can be sure the stakes were high enough. You race so hard life becomes too short for anything.”

I used to place a great deal of emphasis on whether or not I was happy. Now I largely ignore it. I’m not that kind of person. I’m not negative, nor am I a pessimist….I am just chronically underwhelmed…always a little dissatified no matter what I achieve. Nothing will ever be enough. I know that…..unless maybe I have a kid and my outlook changes.

Hmm….success and happiness do not appear to be all that related, at least for me. While constant failure is sure to make you unhappy, I don’t think success will make you the opposite.

I believe in goals anyway. They make life more interesting, provide a focus, but achieving them is a temporary high at best. That is nothing to brag about. I can spend a few bucks on some drugs and get a temporary high.

There is a vast amount of information on the study of happiness on the Internet. I have much of it saved on my computer. If anyone is interested maybe I’ll put up some links, but here are a few things I have learned:

• Being married makes you happier. So do kids (though they don’t help your marriage). So do pets.
• Money makes you happier up to about 15,000 bucks a year (the point at which you are no longer starving and cold), after that there is very little correlation.
• Religion makes you happier.
• Old people are generally happier than the young. This is especially true in industrial countries.
• Being disabled does not make you unhappier in the long run.
• Inequality makes you unhappy. It seems to be true that if everyone is poor, you aren’t really poor. Alternatively, no matter how much you have, you will always be dissatisfied if there are others with more.
• Self-reported happiness in the US is decreasing and has been for 50 years. This is also true in most industrialized, Western countries….except for the Scandinavian states, where people are getting happier. Iceland is consider the happiest, most content nation on the planet.

I studied microbiology in college and, while I remember little specifics, the general knowledge that we are all little food-seeking procreators sticks with me.

This leads me back a bit to what the hell we’re all doing on this planet in the first place. To survive and reproduce is pretty much all we owe nature. This is our immediate purpose.

And I never could find any need for her to grant us a clear notion of success, nor any inner contentment. The urge to procreate is strong and unspoken. It is obvious.

Contentment can actually be counterproductive. The content are lazy. The conflicted are driven, creative and anxious. The latter sounds much more likely to survive……so they can produce more anxious, neurotic, driven offspring.

Nature hasn’t hardwired us to be happy, or content. I believe we can trick ourselves into both of those states with a lof of hard work, but the particulars of life remain the same: We are born. We live a little, and then we die. Pour as much sugar as you like on that statement; it will remain equally true.

All is not so dreary though. If I wrote the statement above about failure 5 years ago, I’ve had a while to think of how to get out of the neat intellectual loop I’d created.

That, however, is not the topic of this post. I don’t believe much in preaching. Opinions are overrated and cheap. Advice is nothing more than a form of self-flattery.

I was thinking about all this tonight because I saw a bunch of people at church this morning and at the Mother’s Day lunch this afternoon.

They kept asking me whether or not I liked my job, whether I was happy in Atlanta. I said some shit because they are nice people, but the more I thought about it, the more I wondered: You know, I am exactly where I said I wanted to be, but so what?? Aren’t I always? What does achieving my goals have to do with being happy?

What is success to you?

This entry was posted on Sunday, May 9th, 2004 at 11:21 pm and is filed under Inside My Head. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.