Dear Zoe,
Today, I’d like to talk about one of my favorite subject: happiness.
If you think about it, happiness is like your favorite children game: the tumbling monkey. The game goes like this: players take turns rolling a die and removing a stick of the color shown, without letting the monkeys fall. If any monkeys fall during a player’s turn, they must keep them. The game ends when all the monkeys have fallen, and the player with the fewest monkeys wins.
Zoe, attaining ‘happiness’ feels like pulling a branch full of monkeys.
Yes, you got the branch out, but you also dropped some monkeys. Or in our context, you got your happiness, but you lost the thing that has given your life meaning before you attain happiness.
Humans are really odd creatures if you think about it. We felt that attaining happiness means finally being ‘there’- a place where we won’t need anything, safe from pain, and enjoy an everlasting bliss; however, this was not often the case.
However, ‘there’ is an illusion; we will never reach ‘there.’
Zoe, our brain is geared for survival and evolution. Hence, when something bad or good happens, we have this psychological ‘immune system’ that will normalize our sadness and happiness. This is the reason why tsunami victims can laugh at each other a few months after the deadly waves ransacked their homes. This is the reason why a writer who became a bestselling author felt empty after their success and considered suicide.
The only way to be happier, our mammalian brain said, is to improve, achieve more things, and pursue whatever it is that you think will make you even happier. To stop pursuing happiness means contentment, and to our brain, contentment means to stop growing, and to stop growing means death, at least psychologically.
How then are we supposed to be happy when our brain conspired not to make us happy? When happiness is the enemy of human nature’s main goal: to evolve?
The answer: by realizing that happiness is an illusion, that you don’t need to achieve X, have Y, or be with Z to be happy. That happiness is like that old grandma who is trying to find her glasses only to realize that she’s been wearing them all along. That happiness is not the light at the end of a tunnel, but a light you carried all along.
Happiness is found in those small, joyful activities that make you smile. To me, that is writing these future letters for you (whether you read them or not), reading books that half the modern world forgets, enjoying two cups of coffee with your mother, and painting a picture of a cat with a Hitler-like moustache with my favorite daughter.
Happiness is not an end goal; it is the end in itself, like love.
I hope, Zoe, that you will find your brand of happiness.