It took me a very long time to fully appreciate this, but happiness is overrated. Long-term, unchallenged and unchanging happiness becomes merely contentedness and white noise. It's unsatisfying. True happiness requires contrast, balance, and change across a wide spectrum of experiences and emotions.
The happiest people I know are those who have succeeded in overcoming the greatest hardships to create the lives that they wanted, and only if those lives don't involve stagnation in getting "too comfortable" or stuck in too much routine.
There is plenty of testimony from pleasure seekers that there is never ever enough, and the longer you keep overloading yourself with whatever pleasures you can find, the bigger the void grows. It eventually consumes people if they can't find meaningful and challenging goals to divert themselves towards.
I think this is the biggest problem with consumer culture, or even worse the "emo" thing that everyone likes to make fun of. You hear about how these kids are always priveleged upper-middle class youth who whine when they have absolutely nothing to whine about. Everybody just off-handedly puts that whole movement down as immature, spoiled, etc, which is true in a sense. I think they're just bored, unsatisfied, and desperate because they're handed all this creature comfort and easy life for free and have nothing to balance against it other than the drama they that they have to intentionally create for themselves. It's extremely unpopular to say this, but I actually do feel sorry for them.
I really envy the life my dad and uncle had as kids. His family was poor but not too poor. They lived in a small house on the bank of the Mississippi River in Wisconsin. They were about the same age and grew up as friendly rivals in everything. They fought and got hurt all the time. They endured harsh winters. There wasn't as much paranoia about raising children back in their day, especially in rural areas, so they had tons of freedom. When they didn't have to help work in the fields or go to school, they would get a couple canoes stocked with supplies together with some friends and just disappear for a week. They went on adventures. They weathered a tornado while camping in tents. They survived a cold weather front where they got so desparate to get warm and dry that they broke into someone's back porch and smashed wood out from the floor to burn and stayed the night, because the owners were apparently away. They were miserable and scared for a little while, but now when they get together they sing songs about the experience. Now they're both well established upper-middle class, stuck to a routine, and "comfortable" with all the consumer pleasures they care to have.... and they say they didn't know how good they had it.
The fondest memories I have of my past aren't the times I was "happy" in the normal sense, but things like coming home sore as hell from sports practices, digits going numb while playing in the snow, accomplishing things that took tons of effort, or discovering new things that changed the way I looked at the world.
I admit, I'm way different from the majority of people... but I think hedonism is very misguided. I think it's a philosophy that was adopted by a few and has been forced on the rest over time through consumerism constantly implying to us every time we open our eyes or ears that if we just have X we'll be happy.
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Topic: Assessing Our Outlooks (Read 9150 times)