Happiness. Seems to be a struggle for a friend of mine lately. She seemed frustrated and unhappy, and told me she almost wished she could never second guessed herself, and that she could be ignorant and just be happy with what she had. An example she used was people of faith, who just believed what their faith said without question. She told me they seemed happy.

So it got me thinking. What is happiness? It’s an emotion, right? So I guess I shouldn’t even be trying to define it, and in a way, I’m not really going to. It seems people are always looking for it. But is happiness a constant state, or something that happens in passing. I say the latter. I don’t think anyone is really, truly constantly happy. It’s like anything in your life that becomes familiar, you stop noticing it. It’s like having a great friend, and only noticing how much you appreciate them when they’re gone. So I guess happiness can only happen when you change emotional states. Let me explain. Imagine I have a stream of numbers: 3, 2, 2, 5, 5, 5, 5, 5, …, 5. Say my starting state is 0. Now, imagine you meet a girl you like at bar. You change to state 3. That’s a difference of +3. So that change makes you pretty fucking happy, because it’s positive and relatively large. But let’s say the next day you wonder if she really liked you, or was just drunk. You drop to state 2. That’s a change of -1. Now, since these things just happened, the feeling lingers. So it feels like you’re actually in a happy state, but it’s in fact just an impulse that has an exponential decay rate. Now, say two days later, you and the new girl go out, and you kiss at the end of the date. You jump to state 5, a change of +3 again. Since you still had the initial lingering happiness, PLUS the new happiness, you’re fucking elated. However, you’re in state 5 for a long time, and since the happiness decays over time, you eventually become used to it. And you’re daily rate of change is probably 0, or at most +1 or -1. Eventually it’s just 0. And you become bitter. And you break up, bring you down more. And then you face the inverse of the cycle you experienced on the way up.

I explained that really badly. But my point is, you happiness is an impulse. It’s not something you can be constantly “in.” But that’s not so bad, because life shouldn’t be about always being happy. Sure, that’s what you might thing, but then I think you’re equating happiness with the “good life.” And the good life isn’t a state of constant bliss. The good life is whatever you’d like it to be. So if your idea of the good life is to be happy all the time, then you’re asking for something that isn’t attainable. You have to look at what you DO want from life, and think really hard about was you’re asking for. Think about if it’s something you want, or something that just sounds like what you want.

Fuck, I didn’t sound at all as lucid and clear as I wanted to. Oh well. My mind is swimming with thoughts of a certain member of the fairer sex.