The Happiness Myth

In line with the previous section this deals with the problems arising from the bizarre conceptual construct of “a happy life” or “a happy ending” or anything of that ilk.  The idea that the goal of your life is to be happy, to win, to triumph over what odds were set you, take or earn what you wanted and deserved or achieve whatever it was you were supposed to achieve and bask in the glow of your happy life.

We see and hear this pervasive attitude all the time but it has become so prevalent that we scarcely even notice it anymore, so accepting as we have become that happiness justifies all like some great and benevolent god made just for you and your circumstance.  Statements like “as long as you’re happy” come thick and fast from the mouths of idiots all day every day, they use it to justify, to explain, to console to understand and yet if you think about it these things are absent from the phrase.

This idea that you’re “supposed” to be happy, or that whatever bullshit religion you ascribe to “wants” you to be happy and that if you aren’t happy then there is something clinically wrong with you strikes a very bad cord with me.  For starters, with my very limited understanding of neural chemistry, I am going to make the educated guess that it is first and foremost physically impossible to be happy all of the time.  In fact I’ll extend that statement to suggest that it is enormously improbable that short of serious chemical manipulation that you could keep someone happy for even the majority of time. 

The human brain is an immensely complicated array of chemistry and electricity, culminating in some of the most complex phenomenon we can conceive, thought and emotions for example.  The idea that you can put yourself, and in so doing your brain, into such a situation where it will be happy for all or even most of the time seems ludicrous to me.  We are transient beings, reactive, unbalanced and above all else contextual and in so being incapable of self determination or governance, forever at the whims of our subconscious reaction and our conscious rationalisations.  Even if we had everything we could dream of wanting we could not remain happy in this state.  Eventually the once perfect conditions would become standard and the once extraordinary gift would become merely mediocre.

“Mans greatest advantage is the ability to act against his own advantage”

We would tire of perfection, our happiness would fade and somewhere in the haze of overwhelming indifference we would find new and miraculous joy in tearing our perfect world apart...

But this myth, to my mind, is not merely inaccurate and misleading but also debilitating and malicious.  How can happiness hurt anyone?  In its current guise as principal motivator it hurts everyone and perverts everything.  It is responsible for the stagnation of civilisation as we have spent the majority of the last hundred years refining our indulgences rather than tackling our great crisis.  It is responsible for the deaths of millions as in the interest of servicing our happiness our great nation states have perpetrated such awful atrocities against innocent populations that it turns the stomach to think of (E.g the 4.5 million people killed in the Congo between 1998 and 2003 which helped ensure the affordability of Sonys Playstation 2).

Happiness is not the answer to anything and I believe that it will not be until we stop our barbaric onslaught towards perpetually happy lives that we will find some semblance of actual peace.

Issues - 2

Loss and Gain

There should probably be a third section to this subheading which would be “stagnation”, but then this would marry up entirely too neatly with my planned assault on the topic of “Positive, negative and indifference” so for now loss and gain will suffice.

To begin with it is important to note that it can be quite easily proven that we don’t ascribe these phenomenon equal values.  As human beings we are shockingly adverse to loss, we simply cannot bear the thought of not having what we once did and this is often to our extreme detriment.  This normally manifests in the form of choices, we can have something of great value if we choose to sacrifice something which under rational observation would appear to have far less value, yet because it is ours, because it belongs to us and we are now faced with the prospect of losing it, it is almost impossible for us not to over value this possession and forsake the far more beneficial option.  This is a huge realm of discussion and I won’t get into the bowels of it here; such as comparative value and the option paralysis nightmare, but it sets the scene well enough.

Whilst it is loss that we fail to calculate correctly, my ire is most harshly raised by people’s attitudes towards gain.  People are insatiable, they are obsessed with it and it has become a universal barometer of success and happiness.  How much can you get?  And “it” can be anything, money, status, position, possessions, experience you name it and they’ll take it and gobble it down with a sickening lust strewn across their face.

When I have raised this point with true believers of the societal dream I have been met with complete confusion, that “So what?” look burned permanently into their fucking faces.  There they go with their iphone and a new car and clothes bought yesterday to replace the ones bought a week earlier and they go home and sit in the leather sofa they saved up all year for and watch sky on the 60 inch HD TV mounted on the wall while they sink their feet in a foot bath they picked up from Hawkins bizarre as a treat for themselves while they browse the internet for more shit to buy before they go and book another holiday anywhere in the world that’s hot all fucking year and where they won’t have to deal with too many locals!

You may read that and say “Well done, you worked hard for all that shit and you deserve to enjoy it anyway you choose.”  That’s a fair enough position but here’s my question, where does it end?  Seriously, where the fuck does it end? 

Here’s my point, and I hope I make it well.  You cannot own something, without it altering your perspective.  By owning the things that you wanted, you are now completely incapable of appreciating them as much as you intended to before you owned them.  Money is the easiest example to explain this crisis of comparison.  When you have no money and a friend gives you a tenner, you’re elated, you’re grateful and that money has enormous value to you.  When you make 50,000 a year and a relative you’ve never met still sends you ten pound in an envelope for Christmas it means practically nothing to you, you may slip it into your wallet anyway but that hasn’t altered your life in the slightest.

By having what we want we alter what it is that we want.  I’ve known dozens of people who spend huge portions of their lives discussing the things they would do if they had the money to do so, or the amazing things they could do with all of the things that this money would by them.  But what’s really interesting about these people is that this state of mind doesn’t change regardless of how much money is spent in these endeavours or how many expensive items are purchased.

My best example is a friend I went to Uni with.  He always talked about what he could do if he had a small studio set up but it was too expensive for him.  Along comes the uni loans and he splashes out £600 on a small set up.  Round about this time he starts talking about all of the things he could do if he had an 8 channel sound card instead of a 2 channel sound card.  Six months later, and before anything has been done using his original purchase, another £700 spent and now he has his 8 channel sound card.  Now he starts talking about all the brilliant things he could do if he had a Chaos pad...

Seriously this story goes on like that for a long time.  Two years, five thousand pounds and a couple of completed projects which could have been done with his initial spend later and it’s still going on.  “If I could get one of those HD systems....”

People want so much that they have no idea what they have.

Right now at this very moment in your very life you are enjoying the highest standard of living ever experienced by any populous mass anywhere in the world at any point in history.  That’s right, you and I mean YOU! Are the most privileged proletariat there has ever been, you’ve got food, education, entertainment, choice and stuff, loads and loads of stuff...

Are you happy?

Honestly are you happy?

Aside from that brief moment of satisfaction as you swipe your card and that new thing becomes yours do you enjoy your life?  We’ve always been led to believe that our preferences and our desires were what defined us and that our freedom to choose was our highest privilege, but once you realise that the depths are bottomless and the ends eternal, doesn’t it start to look more like bondage than freedom.

“Does it not strike you as odd that in an age of such rampant indulgence, happiness should be so scarce?”

Gain has become our civilizations latest addiction, something to keep you occupied and justify your existence.  No one’s ever going to call you a looser if you spend every day of your life trying to get something, but spend a day in contentment without one thought to what you might one day have and suddenly you’re a waste of space, ambitionless and degenerate.

This raises all kinds of questions.  Why don’t we learn that we’ll only ever want more?  Why do we believe so strongly that acquisition is productive in nature?  Why do we turn so harshly against those who would abstain from this colossal contest?

I don’t have the answers.  The only conclusion that I have come to is that the universe has its own justice and that this is bore out in the fact that you cannot gain anything without yourself being reduced in some respect.  Be it money or success or some luxury item, by having it we adapt to it; by adapting to it we no longer value it and then we only want more than it.

And now...

Blogging...?

Issues – An introduction

Sounds like such an American word in the mouth of my modern mind and as such it feels trivial, gaudy and self important.  It’s soft and in its current setting carries connotations of teenage drama and that vague generalised inconsolability which accompanies it.  Nevertheless, I can’t help the ongoing bastardisation of language and am compelled to persist in the use of even the most put upon and subjugated words; to my mind  since the advertising revolution we have been losing, year on year, any true grasp of the basis for our communications, but that is a chapter in of itself.

Much as I have tried to carve my adult self out of sterner stuff I find myself unavoidably drawn to taking issue with just about everything.  As if rationality and emotional immaturity had teamed up to both find fault with and take personal offence at each and every tiny fibre of the world.  The following is the ill conceived and poorly researched fruits of the epic amount of mental resources I devote to topics which most people find, if not tiresome, then genuinely inconvenient to their thought process.

I’ll start with...

Knowledge and intelligence

The topic has vexed me for as long as I have comfortably been able to both distinguish and understand the subtle links between the two.  Each one a separate entity, each one basically unquantifiable and neither requiring the other in order to thrive, yet still they are inexorably bound together, related and involved.  Quantification is an issue straight away because we rely on tests to tell us our standing in this abstract score chart, the most obvious of these being the I.Q test.  This test claims to measure intelligence but how on earth can it measure someone’s intelligence independent of that person’s knowledge, a person’s brain might be capable of handling complex and difficult equations but they might lack the pre requisite knowledge to approach the task; Or on the other hand a person might have no spatial awareness whatsoever but through the application of their knowledge about spaces might get to the right answer when dealing with spatial problems.  This is why I have no time for test scores of any kind, because ultimately the only thing you can ever test is the person’s ability to complete that particular test.  (For the record I score very poorly on I.Q tests)

So in reality we all just make assumptions based on comparisons.  “This person can’t understand the things that I understand, hence he is stupid.” Or “This person talks far better than I do, so he must be very intelligent.”  For as long as I can remember people have assumed that I was intelligent simply because my manner of speech was verbose and pedantic, it exceeded their standards and was therefore taken as evidence of superior brain power.  The fact that this particular peculiarity is the product a mental disorder and has no bearing on my intelligence is of no significance to people as they make their assessments, they like simple causal relationships like “Big words = Smart.” 

When dealing with knowledge we do exactly the same thing.  If someone doesn’t know something that we know then we instantly take this as a sign that the person is in some respect deficient, whereas if a person demonstrates knowledge in some exotic or esoteric category then we automatically assume that this person is our mental superior regardless of how shallow this knowledge is (How would we know?).  It’s a ridiculous cycle of thought if you let it become it so I’ll quickly boil it down to understanding.

Understanding is the key in my opinion to judging a person’s mental faculties.  If we assume that most things (ignoring currently unexplained phenomenon) can be understood given sufficient access to knowledge and processing time then we can also say that the speed at which understanding is reached is as good a barometer for deciphering a person’s intelligence as any.

Now that’s out of the way with let’s get on with the real issue. It is difficult to say and not sound like an arrogant pillock, but I am bound to such a description simply for committing any of this to writing so I may as well continue.  I am a man of at least average if not marginally above average intelligence.  I am also a man who has spent a far above average amount of time researching and accumulating knowledge on all matter of topics from behavioural psychology to ancient history or atomic theory.  Yet in spite of these two facts I am almost completely useless.  Every day is a surprising struggle to accomplish, moments are awkward, tasks are ambiguous, morals are uncertain, facts misleading, events unclear and intentions questionable.  Everything is a challenge for me, every action a potential misstep and every inaction a missed opportunity.  I need every drop of my intelligence, knowledge and understanding, every day, just to get by.

And this leaves the question, how the fuck do people less intelligent and knowledgeable than me survive?  Encountering the same basic environmental challenges and presumably being subject to the same simple laws of conduct they manage to perform as well as and in most cases far better than I myself would.  My explanation for this has always been that minus the intellect to question ones surroundings extensively the operations of life become a far less complex challenge.  But this explanation is missing something and raises more questions than it answers.  For example if that were the case then how in the hell do the scores of people far more intelligent and knowledgeable than me cope, if I am just scrapping by weighed down by my mediocre mental capacities then how on earth is it that people manage to do such astounding things which their natural abilities.

So am I to assume that things are easier at either end of the spectrum?  Doesn’t sound right to me, I find the prospect of genius maddening and the threat of ignorance abhorrent.  Not that one has a choice in such matters anyway, there is nothing I can do to make myself more than I am save learning and learning as I will discuss is the great double edged sword of all existence and my only options for decreasing my abilities are substance abuse or serious injury.

I thought that learning would be the “silver bullet”, as exponents of education would say.  That to be in a constant state of education would eventually assure me of safe grounding regardless of the situation.  What I have discovered is that there is no such thing as safe knowledge.  What I mean by that is that there is no way to predict what the effect of knowing something will be and as I consider all knowledge to be inherently indifferent then its effect is entirely in the hands of the recipient.  In other words, knowing something could be a good thing, it could be crucial to your existence, it could save your life or open your eyes or lead you to a brilliant epiphany; or it could completely crush you, it could break your spirit and permanently jade your perspective.  There is no way of knowing what knowledge will do to you and absolutely no way for you to undo whatever damage it may have done.

In fact this very conclusion is a perfect demonstration of the point it seeks to make.  I would not have come to this conclusion were it not for my search for knowledge but ultimately the knowledge I sought led me to conclude that the knowledge was and is a hindrance to my existence, rendering huge portions of my life meaningless and counterproductive.

These sort of cyclic, self defeating prophecies are what my life is mostly made up of...

This brings us to....