How can I be happy?
In the first part of this two part series I cautioned against making happiness the goal of life. Happiness is a byproduct of living well and living true.
The focus needs to be on living your own life while creating as little suffering as possible along the way. Keep your heart open as you do so, surrounding yourself with only those who will let you be without leaving you alone.
This takes courage. It’s the work of emancipation ( taking one’s life into one’s own hands: mains in Fr.). Happiness is a side-product of mustering the courage.
Live Your Own Life
Living your own life isn’t easy. There are forces aligned against this simple proposition. Some of these forces are outside us. Some are within. Forces that want your life in their hands. But even the forces “within” were set up by early failures of relationship that made us feel as though being oneself meant being shunned, punished, neglected and rejected. We internalize the bad feelings, and solve the problem of being unloveable by living their life. It increases our chances of surviving the ordeal of lovelessness.
When we ask “how can I be happy” we should recognize that are forces in society as well that do not want us to live our own lives. Remember that scene in The Matrix when Cypher, who had exited the matrix to join the resistance, decides he wants to go back into the simulation? He wants his red wine and steak and to pretend that everything is peachy keen. The promise of an easy life, even a utopia, that alone can save us, is how powers keep us entranced by the life they want us to lead. It keeps us from joining the resistance. What the resistance resists is living somebody else’s life. But it can be exhausting. And sometimes it’s dangerous. And so we conform ourselves out of existence, sometimes consciously, like Cypher, but mostly unconsciously.
Happiness Born of Oblivion Is Not Happiness
He chose the kind of happiness that requires head-in-the-sand oblivion. The Wachowsky brothers/sisters, who wrote and directed The Matrix, were making a point that most humans most of the time, especially in the more affluent nations, are in a simulation game. The simulation is being programmed by elites (as we’ll see using mainstream media) who are writing the script for the rest of us. If we’re lucky we get a red pill moment, like Neo. But if you take the damned thing, you’re going to have to fight for your life.
This requires what Scottish psychiatrist, R.D. Laing called “demystification”. He worked with individuals who were diagnosed with schizophrenia. But when he interviewed the families of these patients, he entered into a fog of obfuscation, double-binds, and chaos. He asked himself, who’s insane here, the patient or the family?
Brave New World
Huxley’s 1931 book, Brave New World, is a dystopian take on the the elite’s end game, which is control through technologies like “the feelies” and a pill called “soma” which keeps people in a state of “happiness” while being enslaved. He saw the dangers of state and corporate overreach, along with the use of “science” as a tool of the state. The devil’s bargain is to offer happiness in exchange for your freedom and sovereignty. Bad deal.
How can I be happy? Come at it obliquely. Focus on being yourself and fighting for the freedom to live your own life.
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