On The Nature Of Happiness
I remember reading once, and I don’t remember where, something someone said about the nature of terror movies. “Terror movies” it went, “they don’t explicitly show you something scary, they imply it. They give you an empty box, and they tell you that there’s something awful, terrible, dreadful inside that box. That box, it holds the most awful things in the world they say, and THEN, your mind does the rest of the work. It’s your mind that fills the box with something you absolutely despise and dread, something that makes you miserable, something born from the deepest pits of your subconscious”. It’s pretty clever, they use the power of your own mind against you, they let you come up with your on dreadful creation in the most masochistic way for you to torture yourself
Now, why did I open with that in a blog entry titled “on the nature of happiness”? it’s really hard to define something as abstract as happines, but it’s easy to tell what it’s not. A life of terror, dread, a sense of hopelessness that something bad will happen is not happiness, it’s the opposite of that. Maybe if we know what happiness is absolutely not, we can define it, at least in part, as the opposite of that. When something bad happens, it’s natural to feel unhappy. However, for us to remain unhappy for long, that can’t happen without our own help. For that to happen, we need to fill the boxes of our life with our own dark expectations, we come to expect misery, terror, dread, rejection, and just like in a terror movie, we suffer in our own minds, torturing ourselves with ideas born from our own psyche, which more than likely, a big amount of times do not end up reflecting the real world, but they do become our world nonetheless, for the suffering they make us feel is very real
I’m going to talk now about the one time the vast majority of people remember as happy days, that is, the early days of their childhood. We don’t need to be rich, famous or live in a mansion to be happy as kids for the most part, what marks the difference, at least as far as I believe, is our expectations. Every new experience sounds awesome, the prospect of knowing someone new or going to a new place has your mind overflowing with exciting ideas about the things we might encounter, and so we fill the boxes of the unknown with happy thoughts, expectations, and we experience happiness in our minds. The place we end up visiting could have turned out to be boring, but we were experienced happiness instead of suffering prior to getting to the place (I know that personal experiences can vary wildly, but I expect most people to have experienced this, at least)
This is probably the natural state of any child, to fill the empty boxes of their lives (the idea of experiences that are yet to be lived) with good things that make them experience happiness, rather than bad ones that make them experience dread and despair in their minds (and we are attached to our minds every minute of every day, so that matters a lot). However, as we grow up, bad things happen sometime, it’s natural, and sometimes, a bunch of them happen in a row over relatively not that short periods of time. Then, during those dark times, we start filling the empty mental boxes with bad things, things that make us suffer before we actual experience things, and like that, we turn our lives into a horror movie, something that can grow into a habbit, one that might keep living on even long after it stops reflecting our physical reality, however it remains our mental reality, and that might be the same as just outright saying that it stays being our reality, for we experience everything through our minds. Our reality then remains a terror movie, even long after the dark times have passed
At least to an extent (a significant one I’d say), wether we are happy or unhappy depends on the sort of things we fill the mysterious empty boxes of our lives, those that represent experiences yet to live, our future, both the big things and the small ones, and our entire future is comprised of them. Every new day is an empty box, so is every new person you meet, every place you go to, every conversation you have, every choice you make. It’s not easy sometimes to fill those boxes with good expectatives and thoughts, and maybe it’s not good for our own sake, since even though being as happy as a child sounds good, it also exposes you to danger when you have to take care of your own safety. Maybe growing up is all about finding the balance of the sort of things you fill the empty boxes of your life with, don’t make it a seen-through-rose-tinted-glasses cartoonish movie (although doing this sometimes can’t hurt, I’d say), but also don’t make it a terror movie by telling yourself that the boxes will be filled with dark, dreadful things. Bad things will happen sometimes, but also good things, and if you suffer before the bad ones happen due to expecting them, you will also suffer when they do happen, so you will have suffered twice, whereas if they doesn’t even actually happen, you will have suffered for free, when you could have instead spent that time being happy
Nothing we experience has an absolute value detached from ourselves, it still has to go through the lens of our mind, and it ends up looking in one or other way in the process, depending on our mindset. When we do this not to things that actually happen, but to the future, the unknown, an empty box that represents which has yet to happen, the effect is even stronger. Always be mindful of the things with which you fill the empty boxes that are put in front of you by life, I believe that therein lies, at least to a significant extent, part of what comprises the nature of happiness











