Is the right way to prioritize happiness? To always be “chill” and content with what’s going on around us? Does success in our relationships look like us not burdening the people in our lives? Why is it that we define professional success as a stable income, medium-sized home with a nice lawn, and not too much adversity?
If we choose this kind of life, what unique insights will we gain? What value can we add if we follow the current, choosing expedience and mundanity over discomfort and novelty? We will see nothing unique, and thereby have nothing unique to contribute. We will only be able to relate to those around us through sameness, through identity, and not by mutual exchange for what the other has. This plays a central role in the “meaning crisis” that so many middle-class young people experience today. Our needs are met, but there’s not a good story! We survive, our bellies are full, there isn’t too much conflict in our lives, things must be ok. But then one lies down to goes to sleep, and the emptiness is there. It haunts our culture.
It’s an axiomatic belief of our people that happiness is good. It’s good to be chill, it’s good to not cause problems, to be low-maintenance. Steve Jobs puts it well in this interview:
The thing I would say is, when you grow up, you tend to get told that the world is the way it is, and your life is just to live your life inside the world. Try not to bash into the walls too much. Try to have a nice family life, have fun, save a little money. But life, that's a very limited life. Life can be much broader once you discover one simple fact, and that is: Everything around you that you call life was made up by people that were no smarter than you. And you can change it. You can influence it. You can build your own things that other people can use. And the minute that you understand that you can poke life, and actually something will, you know, if you push in, something will pop out the other side, that you can change it. You can mold it. That's maybe the most important thing is to shake off this erroneous notion that life is there and you're just going to live in it, versus embrace it. Change it. Improve it. Make your mark upon it. I think that's very important.
It seems to me that many of us define happiness as not bashing into the walls. So I have given up on the notion of living a “happy” life, because to me when people say this it sounds too much like a medicated, numb state of mind where I have no agency to make my situation super awesome.
If you accept that life is going to be a little bit painful, you open up to a much broader variety of experience. If you seek pain out, you will get to feel joys that you have never imagined! The joy of creation, the joy of health, the joy of having a connection with another human being that transcends the superficial. To experience these joys, though, we must be sensitive, which means that we must risk feeling pain with the same sensitivity.
Our unique pains are the source of our personality, the source of value with which we can choose to make a living. Our mutual pains are the source of connection, our understanding of one another, of community. With no pain we choose to live a lukewarm life, one where we feel neither lonely nor connect, neither successful nor a failure. While it may be comfortable, it doesn’t make for a good story. It’s neither meaningful nor interesting. Let us not pursue happiness, but color.
The joy for creation! The joy for fully living!!!!
The more colorful the better! Bring it on and bring it all!!!!! Full and complete embracement.
“Pursue color, not happiness”. Wow.
Such a profound statement.
We have started taking life for granted. Accepting everything that comes out way and living it with a predetermined notion. But life can be much more exciting if you try to shape it and allow it to mold you back. Life’s colorful and wonderful, with its good and bad parts. We will have lived a fuller life if we can fully embrace its entire spectrum (pun unintended)