Been thinking a lot today, as the song goes. A paradox: most of my unhappiness comes from the unbridled and selfish pursuit of pure happiness. Or the pursuit of bliss/pleasure/adulation/gratification. Most of the times that I feel self loathing, I feel that way because I am gonna get embarrassed from saying or doing something vaguely (or maybe not so vaguely) smarmy and shady.
Seeking bliss alone makes you a target. If you, as a reptile, just look for the next opportunity to catch a beery buzz or socially climb by insinuating that such-and-such did this and that…it might give you a fleeting satisfaction. And it might manifest itself in a million different ways, but at the end of the day, it’s only a moment. “He sought the most pleasure for himself,” is not a legacy that is we want on our tombstones. Seeking bliss means that we become addicted to it, and then we spend time chasing bliss, the next high, the next big thing, the next bit of praise from the cool kids.
The chase for approbation also withers our souls. When we become adulation addicted, and when we become dependent on what other people think of us as a measure of worth, then the bliss we seek is subject to approval. We’re looking over our shoulders to make sure that others approve of our grotesque pursuit of happiness. We try to reconcile the paradox of being pure bliss seekers with needing to have praise for others, not knowing that they are impossible to balance. We wind up lying to cover the pursuit of our bliss. When we lie, we wind up lying to hide the lies and our lives become caught in a paradox.
I’m seeing my generation now–my peer–crash shoals of seeking bliss. Judging acquaintances on “how happy the other person makes me,” and activities through the “what am I gonna get” prism means everything situational: if it’s expedient to break a promise (or a vow) to achieve bliss, that’s simply what we do.
The thing is, the longer I live, the more I realize that seeking instant gratification isn’t going to do it for me. It’s not going to make me happy–not going to make me have more utils of pleasure. We think we’re victims and entitled to more when someone has the appearance of more pleasure. We don’t get that we’ve screwed up, we don’t get the idea that we’ve all messed each other over, and we all deserve a worse fate than we’re getting. We some how spend a lifetime seeking our pleasure and when we don’t catch that phantom, we feel like we’re victims. The siren still calls us all the time: there’s more more more more just over here.
The thing is–when we serve for the right reasons (not, say, to seek approval, but to honestly be of service), when we get past ourselves and do something because we care we feel something that we can’t get when we chase it. When we chase “charity” because we’re hoping it makes us happy, it never does. But when we chase it because it’s the right thing to do, and because we’re over ourselves, then something wonderful and inspiring can happen. When we empty ourselves of the worldly desires of seeking the pleasure du jour…we can then see what’s truly possible to achieve.
How do you think we do that?
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