2024 Author: Harry Day | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-17 15:43
I want to try to protest the now popular concept, "you have to be happy."
"A happy mom is a happy child", "avoid those who make you unhappy", "the main thing is that the child grows into a happy person."
No, I'm not a masochist and have nothing against happiness, what a fool does not like sweets.
But I see this concept as a reaction to several centuries of cultural (with multiple roots) ban on happiness.
Earlier they lived "not for joy, but for conscience." Or so that God later praised. And now humanity taxied into another round of hedonism. Nobody wants sacrifices. You have to do what brings joy. Etc.
Something in me resists this, and here's why:
First, the understanding of "happiness" was reduced to the experience of positive emotions, to the search for a prolonged state of pleasure. From this point of view, the happiest idiots and people on certain chemicals.
"I need to be happy" cuts off:
a) experiencing all negative emotions as something to avoid.
b) the value of other things that are not "happiness" in the everyday concept.
Secondly, having implanted the imperative of happiness in this way, they made a large number of people unhappy who do not experience it.
Let's take another splash of the mother of a 2 month old baby, running around, tired, sleepy, completely exhausted physically and mentally. What do her companions teach? "And you rest more, the main thing is that you are happy, that you feel good, then the child will feel good." But everyone who had 2 month old babies and who found the experience of this period rather painful will feel even worse from these words! Because "rest and delight yourself" may be technically unattainable, which means that the happiness of a baby is unattainable? So she is now a bad mother, since she cannot be happy?
I speak as a person who never realized the great happiness of infant motherhood, but survived this period on other resources. Getting enough sleep or a nanny will not return to yourself the lost freedom, not to return the unpleasant realization that many things will never be the same as they were. It takes time, it takes, in an amicable way, a process of mourning to accept the loss and change, and grow internally. And not just another imperative to make herself happy in the fact that she does not feel happy.
Again, I’m not saying at all that you don’t have to be happy. It's great when you are glowing and all that. The amount of vitamins also affects this very much, yes. I say that happiness is not alone.
Because you can be unhappy. And to experience the deepest misfortune. And at the same time fill your life with meaning.
When my children were babies, I did not glow with happiness. For me it was a difficult and slow-moving but technically necessary period, and a sense of duty, responsibility, adulthood, and will helped me to cope with it. I could not "make children a happy mother", no matter what dances with tambourines I did not arrange. But something more important than happiness gave me attention, patience, warmth, some moments of joy and energy to move. And this is important - SENSE.
If you take off the goal of happiness, then it turns out that such experiences as duty, inevitability, self-discipline, overcoming oneself, work, humility, will bring meaning to life no less than happiness, without being them. Yes, you can hit the sophistry and say that happiness is the fullness of all experiences, but this will be a distortion of the term.
What does it mean to "fill your life with meaning"?
Do not know. Everyone has their own, I think. "Why do you need my meaning in life" is one of my favorite quotes. My main point is growth. Cognition. Search for wisdom. For some, it's a relationship. Warmly. Family. For some, it's a duty. service to the world. service to something higher.
I just want to say, life is more than a search for happiness
Because while we are looking for it, we again focus on the result, and forget about the process
And the whole point is in the process.
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