A Human Strategy #540: The Addicts of Happiness

540 

In my happiest moments, when I reconstruct what was necessary for them to come about, I see how rarely the conditions can be met and how fraudulently happiness is sold throughout the world. It is however in the end something like the truth after all. The few happy people are to be something like a very small number of smokers who have hoarded all of the last cigarettes from a world made up of nicotine addicts. And they are happy because they know this. And for the many? ... as if balancing a ball on the tip of one’s nose for a few fish were happy! But even in the largesse of a more genuine sympathy, what almost disturbs the whole sensation is the recognition of how few are actually capable of both seeing the conditions and dodging a focus on any particular outcome.

The recognition of truths is the relief of pressure that constitutes valuable happiness. It is a nearly impossible task. No answer can be a goal to a question. Life without a particular goal is a life without a particular hope. The condition is just too foggy for happiness to see through. Our impulses start the very stop of what sees them, and the concept of mind only survives in its suspended contradiction. As limited in number as these impulses may be, they multiply exponentially their mental consequences, first through their many combinations and then again by the multiple dimensions and perspectives flashing onto the passive arrogance that takes credit for them, the mind. Yet all of the contradictions and errors of the past are indispensable to the pressure without which there would be no relief through the observation! We are even happier because we know this. We addicts.

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