Random Rant

Random post #1

On pursuing happiness:

Judging by the title, there is no way this article is not going to be personal. At the expense of sounding petty, pretentious and incredibly self indulgent, let me start off by saying that I might come across as someone with an extremely pessimistic worldview, mostly because I am.

To be honest, I'm not a very happy person.Well at least not most of the time. So it would be inappropriate and maybe a bit hypocritical of someone like me to presume that I am in a position to give anyone advice on anything,especially on how to be happy.

Having said that, It is surprising how a lot of people claim to find inspiration and more than a little bit of reassurance from quotes like "Be positive", "Think you're happy and you will be", "worrying means you suffer twice" "happiness is a choice" and reading a ton of self help books and watching motivational videos. Maybe it does make a difference to some people at times,or maybe it's a lie people tell themselves to feel better,which is something I have a hard time understanding.

 We're so used to being expected to feel a certain way, conditioned by society to continously strive to be happy and positive, bombarded by advertisements constantly presenting us with images of what an ideal family looks like, how an ideal person acts and talks and walks and treats everyone else, how an ideal woman dresses and so on and so forth that at some point we forget that there is no ideal person. 

Nothing is ideal. No one is perfect. Deep down we're all just a giant mess of emotions and ideas, acting impulsively, making spontaneous decisions that we regret in hindsight. In short,most of us are just winging it.

No one, absolutely no one has got it all figured out. Depression is something a lot of us deal with daily. You can't help the way you feel.

You're in control of your actions, not your emotions. It's true that there is no shortcut to being happy, no 3 step method, no amount of pills that can make you feel truly happy. Even anti depressants aren't happiness drugs, they re just mind numbing, mood altering substances that chemically induce endorphins and hormones in such a damaging way that every prescription comes with a ton of side effect warnings. No matter how elated people claim to be feeling when they do take them, nothing ever lasts.

We're constantly told to pursue happiness, but what does that entail,really?

Happiness isn't something you achieve in concurrence to something else. As cliche as it sounds, Money won't buy happiness and neither will your jobs or whatever materialistic possessions you own or whatever status you enjoy in society because at the end of the day, happiness is not a choice. It's a state of mind. And the first step to take if you wish to truly be happy is to give up trying. You can't force yourself to feel something at will. 

I'm aware that I'm rambling on. I guess what I'm trying to say is that: we need to try being honest about our emotions. We all have problems and the best way to solve them isn't peretending that we don't have them.

It isn't to turn away, avoiding them in the hope that they'll eventually go away, wishing that you'll wake up one morning and feel different. The best way to deal with them is to start looking for solutions instead of shortcuts.

I recently watched a TedTalk and while I don't remember all that was said, here's the gist of it:
The speaker was a person who happened to be one in a long line of a team of researchers continuing a study that spanned more than 4 generations, starting from around 1930.

The participants were observed yearly from a very young age throughout their lives. They were given questionnaires and interviewed periodically about themselves , their jobs, families, hopes and aspirations, their views and pretty much everything about their lives.

Many of them died. Some of them are still alive and continue to partake in the study.
Here's what it all came down to:

The research suggested that those of the participants who had cultivated the healthiest relationships were found to be the happiest and in turn, lived longer lives. The loneliest of them were found to be the least happy. And they had comparatively shorter life spans.

There's something about the study, as debatable as it's findings are, that just struck a chord with me.I believe I'm not the only one who found it to be eye opening.

I'm not going to end this on some obscure note that the key to happiness is maintaining healthy relationships, I'm not even sure I know what the key to happiness is, I'm even less sure if such a thing exists but I feel like there's some truth to the idea that our relationships matter. That the nature of the bonds we form with people takes precedence over the far more material aspects of this world in affecting the way we feel.

There are plenty of millionaires out there who are insanely rich living the most luxurious lives and still claim they can't find happiness even though, on the surface, it looks like they have everything they could ever possibly want.

Its commonly said that doing the things you love will make you happy. Now while that does sound like an oversimplification but maybe there's something true about that too. Maybe the reason a lot of us can't find happiness is because we re looking in all the wrong places. Maybe we haven't yet found the things we love doing.


A while ago, I watched Bo Burnham's stand-up comedy special "Make happy", and there's something that he said in the middle of a rant that stood out to me.

He was talking about the constant pressure people feel to perform. We're constantly expected to express ourselves to the world, to say how we feel only to realize that the world doesn't really care.
We're given this large platform on social media to literally perform our lives with the world as our audience. And the more we try to live up to those enormous expectations, we find that it's impossible. It's unrealistic. There are teenagers and adults alike out there Livestreaming their lives on Instagram, eventually let down by the fact their lives aren't glamorous as the next person's. And the cycle continues.

Bo's show was such a revelation, especially the part where he said something along the lines of "If you're lucky enough to get the chance to live your life without an audience, take it"

And I honestly think that should be enough.