You Really Do Not Want To Be Happy
Happiness is very rarely what you want for yourself. Maybe for the people around you, but for yourself? Very, very, very… rarely.
One of the most import revelations I made lately was the understanding of the difference between pride and happiness. Consequently, I’ve gone forward to try and understand why people conflate (a word I learnt from some guy talking about Facebook, obviously) the two. If you ever tell yourself, “I’m not happy.” chances are the feeling your looking for is pride.
Happiness is not a fleeting feeling
The preceding heading contains no errors
Just before writing this, I felt really bad for whatever reason. I have felt like this entire day has been as disturbing as they get.
Because I felt bad, I decided to watch a scene from Transformers 3. I’ll leave it in your face but don’t bother watching it, it’s not important for the article.
I felt happy in the moment of watching the video, in fact I smiled throughout the whole thing (You can clearly tell what kind of movies I like by now, right?). However, right now, as of writing this, I don’t feel any of that happiness.
This is why people often talk about happiness as a fleeting emotion, in this case, a fleeting pleasure. However, happiness, as pleasure in this situation, is not just fleeting, it’s actually inverting… Inverting in the sense that it doesn’t just go away after some time, instead it goes as far as to produce an opposite feeling.
Thinking back to when I watched the video, I feel no happiness whatsoever, in fact, I think I feel some resentment for myself. I hate myself a little more than I did before.
Now this was with respect to watching some YouTube, but if someone told me that they never feel like this after doing something else, I wouldn’t believe them. If I could meet the costs, I’d install cameras to watch their entire lives, till I caught them doing something I knew they were not proud of.
Pride is not a fleeting feeling
In 2017, when I was about 16 years old, I signed a contract with an online client to start working on their game.
Much of what you see in that video was coded by me, at 16 years of age. When I think back to that time, there was a lot of happiness associated with how I felt starting to work on a AAA quality game at 16.
Some excitement here and there about how good the game looked? Yeah. It felt really good to hear him praise my work like I was a pro? Yes. I had a lot of fun sitting at the computer and writing code instead of reading my books? For sure.
However, despite all those good things there’s one thing in particular that separates this from the preceding case. Have you guessed it?
Working on this game MADE ME FEEL GOOD ABOUT MYSELF more than it produced pleasure.
This is the difference between pride and happiness, and pride is a form of happiness.
What did you say was the difference again?
I have taken sometime to think about how I can make some meaningful literature using the theory I just explained, and honestly — I can’t seem to come up with anything.
Happiness is a comprehensive description for the feeling which things that make you feel good(pleasure) produce. But it’s a very-very big illusion. Because it narrates the story of satisfaction, of a never ending state (of happiness), this is something human being do not have the ability to experience.
Satisfaction, is not possible (not in human beings anyway) because we have the ability to recall past events and judge ourselves in their light again.
Happiness = (Pleasure)
Pride = Pleasure + Greater feeling of self-worth
Self Resentment = Happiness (Pleasure) — Pride
Self Resentment = — Pride
When looking for things to make us happier we need to make sure that we do not do things that do not offer any pride because those things make us feel worse in the long run, if this was the only note you took from this entire article, I would be proud…
Thank you.
