Against (the Abuse of) Happyness — BC Community Challenge

A friend just called. He rant on how people are coming to be. Crap, he said. Everything is crap. Superficial. Vain. Non-existent.

I was reluctant to cheer him up by telling him that it’s not, because I’m running out of macchiatos and not in the mood for sweet talks. Even so I told him that I am doing something, something major and so phenomenal, even quantum physics can’t mess with this one. Said to him, I am giving away Awards now, red carpets and all. It’s called the Happyness Award. Mistyped. It’s actually from the book and movie The Pursuit of Happyness. Mistyped.

A week ago or so, I was online on my IM, and I displayed all the same status: “Happyness.” for days. That sure will tick people off. Why on earth that would tick people off? Why can’t I just display: “Here’s a gun. Go fuggin kill yourselves.”, or “You’re stoopid and ugly. Bugger off.”, or “I hate you, people. You blood-sucking leeches.”. Oh hell no, they’d thank me for that –discreetly. I’d be screaming their screams; and most people feel happy when it rains and a person tripped over a muddy ditch. It tones down their own intensity.

Everyone’s on to happiness AND de-happiness these days. Ironically, both have the same purpose: as a detachment to our own depth. Both say: See? see? see!?. In my own case, sometimes they scream too loud, too invasive and end up ruining this breakfast-on-bed ambiance of mine, hence I just gotta “shut the thing off”. Whether people say or feel happiness sincerely or not, we really don’t care, or we might’ve not paid attention, or we just looked away at first. Then, people starts to forget. The pursuit of our own happiness, has turned into the pursuit of others’ unhappiness, although we may have felt this because we assume that others pursuit our own unhappiness. It’s not because we are evil, it’s because we feel insecure and unsafe. Since when then happiness gets this superficial and boastful? It’s fine being ambitious in terms of professional, or intellectual achievements; but of happiness? Love? The truth?.

It is such an intense discourse, certainly there have been a fight on the process. But we just cannot do anything about it. We repress. Hold it tightly. There’s another extreme to that too, there are always the cynics, the passive-aggressive bullies, and the self-proclaimed evil who’s ready to break every rule on earth. Okay then. Shut up and do something. Our brain pops out the big round red button that says: EVACUATE. Get it out of our system. Divert, distract, defend.

There are of course the “stable” times that allows us to stand outside of the box. Appreciating various perspective from those surrounds us, observing the whole emotional fuzziness –ours or people’s. It’s an psyche-optical illusion. It’s all in the mind and the mind extracted what we want to perceive and/or refuse to perceive. And yet, as much as rage, grief, guilt, is inside that box, there are also passion, indulgence, love, and even the chocolate treats taste sweeter. Hence we walked in, saying: Okay, gimme your best shot.

Oops. Missed!

Missed again!

Nuh-uh. I said your BEST shot! Can you just aim a litt…

BAM! …

Silence.

We got hit. And poof.

Box? What box? I got hit, dammit! Can’t you please understand that I got hit!? What is wrong with you people? Why is it have to be me that got hit instead of you? Do you think that this is my fault? Is it really? Well, I got hit BUT HEY IT FEELS GREAT! It feels awesome! See? I am fine. Look at me, I am fine, I am fine. Nothing’s wrong with me.

We forgot. I know I do; please mind that I am writing this with a great risk of not reflecting on my own words later in life. But what the heck.

Some people might’ve asked me someday, “If you could put an argumentation on happiness, how come you got hit? You should’ve been “smart” enough to NOT get hit.”. The thing is, it doesn’t matter. Most of the times it jumps out of nowhere and smacks you right on the head. No matter how well you’ve strived in life, it won’t matter anymore. You’re this week’s Duck L’Orange dinner. Suddenly you felt like the whole galaxy –that includes Planet Nibiru– is having a freak circus and you get to be the Clown. “Rage, envy, and the desire for revenge will always interfere. Real life and its complications inevitably trickle in.”, as said by Mark Epstein for Psychology Today. Ironically, is it normal for a truly happy person to feel envy and hate others?

There were days that we got hit and hurt and bleed and bruised too many times, we finally stopped asking to ourselves, What have I done wrong? I’ve tried to be perfect, good, loyal, friendly, trustworthy, nice, intelligent, and even intentionally be imperfect according to everyone’s best interest.

Well, there’s nothing wrong, we are just being made.

Let us try to be practical about it, the best solution is to eliminate those “external” negativities from our lives. I personally won’t hung around in some toxic waste land. We cannot expect ourselves to calmly tolerate everything that is happening in the world. Yet we are faced with this ideal that suggests: if we are truly good-hearted –or prove to others that we are good-hearted, we must repress our emotions, lower ourselves to the humble standards, and act like we’re willing to endure each blow submissively. Until we snapped. For everything unspoken, undone, it will emerges to the surface and hit others.

Here’s the three figures on the chart: Love. Happiness. Success. And you gotta have it all, loosers; or you’ll end up rotting in the corner whereas everyone walking back and forth with sneering eyes, wondering: “I wonder why you fail.”.

That’s a creepy thought, I know. But we’re living in a paranoid society already. And as James Martin theorized in his book, every paranoid society needs an external enemy. If it’s internal, the society would self-destruct. The external enemy could be everything to nothing, which will be made up and fabricated in our lives, anything to reason us teaming up with others and be superior over (the idea we have on) others, hence targeting our hate some place safe and most likely to be justified. If this goes too far, it will lead to various types of psychological abuse, mostly subtle unseen ones because it’s justified in some way.

You could say, we only want the things we’d like to have. Maybe there’s unfairness to this world, groundless jealousy, and emotional dependencies. What’s with this fear-driven negativity, then?. There’s this conformed standard in the society that suggests that if people haven’t “own” item A, B, C, they’re not or they could not be happy and positive people. They’re the ones who restrain themselves, not the people around them. Being “not yet happy” in those permanent property-like terms, seems like a HUGE problem that requires step-by-step solution. Does it? Daniel Gilbert, a professor of psychology at Harvard University: “The fact that you’re not always happy is not a problem.” he said, “So don’t look for a solution when there is no problem.”. True. Why fix something that isn’t broken?.

Pablo Neruda had spoken of a straightforwardly love with no complexities or pride. If happiness is an expression of love, try asking this to people: Are you truly happy? (Most of us might come up with all the tad-bits of Friendster bulletin boards we could find to prove that we’re LOGICALLY happy.)

Ask again. So where does life have taken you so far? How does it complete you? How does it teach you to be alive? What cry your tears, laugh your laughters, smile your joy, fear your horror, tremble for your tragedy, hate your hatred, love your love?

One more question, please. Who is running after you?

Paranoia. Insecurities. Everyone’s scared of something, and it’s going back and forth endlessly in chaos, all camouflaged of course. So what does happiness needs? Does it need perfection? Ignorance? Distraction? Victims? Sex? More victims? Euphoria? Sleeping pills? APPROVAL?

Maybe it needs self-love. Try not comparing ourselves to others, try relying on our own potentials, and try not being someone we are not, because if we do, we’d most likely to feel pain that we aren’t built to face. Maybe it needs a higher purpose and values, not just feel-good pleasures. Maybe it needs comfort. Comfort built by good things, and good things only, not just the illusion of it all. Even silence, when it’s heartfelt, is comforting in its own ways. But true comfort is when you realized that the best person and the worst person in you are both in peace with each other.

Most of all it needs us working on it together. Why? Well, there could be a possibility that the world is constantly at war, poverty, and neglect, because we let it being run by several unhappy people which are seemingly happy from the exterior. But that’s another story.

I’d say, happiness isn’t about me. Or you. Happiness isn’t about us alone, it’s about others. Happiness isn’t like rolling a dice whereas it’s always 1/6 of chance. Happiness doesn’t scream in defense. Happiness isn’t something to win over; why on earth should we win something that is already ours all along, as a right to live? Nevertheless happiness is also not a permanent state, as much as sadness or anger is never a permanent state, we got hit from time to time because we need constant reminder of having such right.

Just between you and me in this room, we both know how tired you are.

(Okay, off to the dramatic over-punctuated closure of this article.)

So, here’s my Happyness award, not happiness. It is mistyped. Wrong. Mistaken. Injustified. One day late. But accepted and loved as it is meant to be, and never to be abused or become an abuse to others.

“We are becoming a nation of men and women who, in their quest for happiness, all too often fall short of achieving any kind of inner peace. We think that by always reaching higher, accomplishing more–more money, a better body, the perfect mate–that we will automatically be happy. That’s an illusion. All this reaching is making us crazy. We need to rest.”

–Melvyn Kinder

This article is published for BlogCatalog.com Community Challenge on September 27th, 2007. For more, check here.

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