Happiness Is Overrated … 5 comments
I think people spend way too much time trying to be happy. People don’t realize that spending time being happy means that they are going to spend equally as much time being not happy to the same degree. That’s just physics. Pendulums swinging and all that.
You can’t know you are happy unless you have an equal degree of unhappiness to compare it too.
Besides, people are who are happy all of the time are scary. They have kind of a brainwashed aura about them.
I like being around people who are real. They are just going with the flow and feeling what they are feeling. They aren’t taking drugs to find a happiness balance. They aren’t taking the drugs to help them stuff their emotions into a box so they can walk around and pretend they are happy. They understand that the unhappiness they are feeling is temporary and that the things they think are making them unhappy are just an illusion. They recognize that the balance is whatever they are feeling in the moment.
Don’t get me wrong. Happiness is a wonderful thing. I love happiness. But I love real happiness. Not forced happiness. Not showy happiness. Not the illusion of happiness.
Nothing beats real happy.
5 Responses to 'Happiness Is Overrated …'
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(I’m practicing being pithy. I hope it’s not too annoying… :’)
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hehe :)
Happy *is* a status symbol for some people. Not all people, but some. It’s why antidepressants are given out like cookies at three o’clock snack time. But I didn’t mean that you need unhappiness in others to compare it to, I meant you can’t know your own happiness unless you’ve known your own unhappiness. It’s like light and dark. If dark didn’t exist you wouldn’t know that light was light. It would just be.
For people who are conscious it’s not a status symbol, it’s just a way of being and it comes and goes around and around.
I have been particularly cranky of late, so to have too much happiness around me makes me more so. I need to hibernate or something.
(I edited this.)
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I think it depends on how one defines “happy”. I’ve always learned that happiness is actually a peaceful mind, a mind of equanimity. I think what passes for happiness in our society is merely mental excitement, a giddiness that comes from attachment, a misplaced notion that everything is going to be GREAT. And you’re right, the other side of that attachment is anger and frustration. Someone with a truly peaceful mind isn’t going to shove it in your face by being overly perky and showy about it, because they would have the wisdom/compassion to know that that sort of behavior is just downright annoying.
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Oh, I like how you said that – that what passes for happiness in our society is merely mental excitement. I’ve never tried to define that kind of happiness, just accepted it for what it appeared to be. Thanks for that.
If you are truly happy, you don’t need to know that you are happy. Happy isn’t a status symbol. So you don’t need something to compare “happy” with.