Last night I was talking to a guy who, if you had asked me about him a few weeks ago, I would have thought was a silly socially stunted fool that gets off on making people uncomfortable. Amazing how wrong I could be.
This has been a strange few weeks of my life where everything I knew to be true has turned itself inside out.
I was talking to him about the events of the past few weeks and how it freed me and how he had inadvertently helped to flip the switch on the 4th of July weekend.
Then he mentioned that he had recently learned that you had to choose to be happy and to do the things that make you happy.
This is strangely profound because it’s so bloody obvious. Choose to be happy, toss away what makes you miserable, be fucking happy.
Hmm…
What the hell makes me happy then? When he asked last night I couldn’t answer that question. I’ve thought about it all day and I still can’t. What the hell makes me happy?
I know what makes me miserable. That’s easy to figure out. Working in the IT inudstry made me suicidal. The last few years of twisted up relationship where neither of us could be open with the other and told stories to ourselves but not to each other made me fucking miserable.
How could I not really know what makes me happy? I like a lot of stuff but I don’t have a passion for it. Making videos is fun, writing is fun, cooking is fun, talking to people is fun, fucking is fun. I don’t do nearly enough of all those things. (But man do I type quickly these days.)
I’m going to have to choose to be happy soon before I go crazy or I’m too old to do anything.
Just can’t quite figure out what that anything is yet. Curious that since I thought I was trying to do it since I dropped out of college and now I think I was just jerking off all that time, content to live in that fantasy world where my self-destructive story made some sort of sense. It’s maddening really.
Anyway, it’s time to be happy. Annnnnnnnd…go!
We really just want the stories of our lives to make sense. The cognitive philosopher Daniel Dennett has gone so far as to describe consciousness itself as the “center of narrative gravity”.
As for making ourselves unhappy, Dostoyevski - “Notes from Underground” - points out that we’d much rather prove we have the power to make ourselves unhappy than actually to be happy - a “chronic perversity”. Here’s the full quote, worth reprinting: “Let’s assume, ladies and gentlemen, that man isn’t stupid. (For indeed, if we say his is stupid, whom will we be able to call intelligent?) But even if he isn’t stupid, he is still monstrously ungrateful. Phenomenally so! I would even say that the best definition of man is: ungrateful biped. But this is still not his main defect. His main defect is his chronic perversity, an affliction from which he has suffered throughout history, from the Flood through the Schleswig-Holstein crisis.”
I hadn’t seen this until after I posted the “Speaking of understanding” thing in which I echoed the Dostoyevski sentiment. I wish I had seen it a few hours ago. It might have helped mollify the demon in my head.
If you define happiness as “that about which I am passionate” you severely limit your options. But if you define happiness as “that which I enjoy” look how many things you just listed that make you happy. It’s not like you have to choose one thing and spend the rest of your time alive doing that. You can be happy part-time, just to try it out.