Happiness, Desire, Whiskey, and Purpose

“Is this making you happy?” – Fight Club

Why are mathematicians always happy?  They know that the root of anything negative is imaginary.

“Happiness is all that it wants, and resembling the well-fed, there shouldn’t be any hunger or thirst.” – Epictetus

Think back to the moment that were really content.  Happy.  Maybe it was after a nice steak.  Maybe it was after a draw on a good cigar.  Maybe it was in on the bench seat of a 1978 GMC® truck on a warm summer night.

Whenever it was, in moments of true contentment, true happiness, you don’t want or need anything.  The moment is complete.  It is as it is.  I feel that way after I write a post I’m especially happy with.  I feel that way most mornings after the first sip of coffee.  In those moments, in those times, I simply don’t need anything more.

W.C. Fields:  “Always carry a whiskey flask in case of a snake bite.  With that in mind, always carry a small snake.”

This is why I say that happiness is the easiest thing for most people, most of the time.  It’s simple.  Stop wanting what you don’t have.

Done.  Easy.  Unless it’s air.  I need that most of the time and get quite cross and panicky when I don’t have it.  And water, yeah, I need that on occasion.  Food?  Not an issue.  Like most people in current-day USA, I could skip a meal or a few dozen meals and still be physically fine.

So, happiness is easy.

My brothers Sin and Cos stayed out in the Sun too long.  They’re now tanned gents.

Why then, are most people unhappy?

They want what they don’t have.  In some cases, they want what they can never have.  Some mid-tier 8 who spends a night banging Brad Pitt now wants a Brad Pitt type guy to love her.  That’s simply not going to happen in this universe because Brad Pitt has all the twenty-year-old 10s he wants to have, and one of them might be a keeper.

So, our mid-tier 8 is unhappy.  If she didn’t think she deserved Brad Pitt, well, she might have a chance to be happy.  But, no, she’s made herself unhappy.  And, she’s made herself unhappy in the stupidest way possible:  she’s pining for something she will never ever be able to have.  In her case, it’s confusing being Mrs. Right Now with being Mrs. Right.

After A.I., how will programmers make money?  Selling their laptops.

This unhappiness didn’t come from outside her:  she made it up.  So, whenever I’m unhappy, it’s typically because of a really simple reason:  reality isn’t conforming itself to the way I want it to be.  You know, the post didn’t say what I wanted to say in the way I wanted to say it.

The post is outside of me.  It’s something I made.  I can choose what I can do with it.  I can abandon it.  I’ve done that about five times, I think.  I can decide, “You know what, good enough.”  I’ve done that a few times.  But most of the time, when I press the button that schedules the post, I’m happy.  Very happy.  I put in the effort on a cause that was worthy of my time.

If I’m unhappy with a post, it’s because I chose to be unhappy about it.  I write because it is something that makes me, on balance, very happy.

If it didn’t, I wouldn’t do it.

The problem, though, is happy people don’t get much done.  That’s why weed and vidya games are bad.  They give bliss without accomplishment.  It’s the easy road to happy.

But that sort of happiness, for me at least, is without meaning because it’s without accomplishment.  I’m unhappy all the time, but I’m unhappy about (mostly) things I choose to be unhappy about.  I rarely choose to be unhappy about things I can’t control.  If I can’t control it, it’s just the way the world is.

When you break up with an A.I., does it experience machine yearning?

But if I’m unhappy, and I think it’s worth the effort, even if it’s big, I’ll choose to be unhappy to try to make it happen.

That’s the definition of purpose.  It might be small, like mowing the lawn.  It might be big, like changing the world.  But I get to choose.  It should fit my talents.  And, as I’ve been prattling on about them, yeah, it should be in service of Truth, Beauty, and Goodness.

It needs to be worth it, and that defines what worth it is.  Well, at least to me.  YMMV.

I think so many people are unhappy because they simply don’t have a purpose, they don’t see a way that they can be of substance, be of consequence in a world where 8 to 10(!) billion people exist.  It’s overwhelming.

It makes one feel small, sometimes.

But me?  I keep pushing.  I’ve even distilled my purpose down to a sentence:  “To make visible that which would otherwise not have been seen.”  So, the writing is kinda core to a purpose like that, unless I want to sit in the backyard yelling at the squirrels on how they’re being inefficient with their nuts.

Do Catholics ever give up cleaning their drier filter for lint?

Purpose, then, is a double-edged sword.  It provokes me to action, and leaves me with a fire inside.  But this is one that I choose to carry.  It’s one that I wish to have.

I control (mostly) my emotions.  Being happy means not wanting.  Except when I choose what I want.  And right now?  I want elimination of Evil, a steak and a cigar.

In that order.  But I’ll work on getting rid of the Evil while I enjoy my steak and cigar.

Author: John

Nobel-Prize Winning, MacArthur Genius Grant Near Recipient writing to you regularly about Fitness, Wealth, and Wisdom - How to be happy and how to be healthy. Oh, and rich.

29 thoughts on “Happiness, Desire, Whiskey, and Purpose”

  1. Yes, right choice/action is the answer.
    Yet, many follow a covetous path, gimme.
    Half the effort for double pay/benefits.
    Printing to infinity, inflating false wills.

  2. Most of my life, I was always happiest on Thursday evenings. I knew the weekend was just around the corner and I ‘d survived another week of work, school or whatever. Thursday was also always a good tv night back before the internet and I felt like I’d accomplished something so I could really relax and savor some of those shows. Even in grad school it was usually the night we would all get together for dinner and few beers even though most of us would be working in the lab all weekend. Just something special about Thursdays….

    Now that I’ve retired, Thursday doesn’t mean as much anymore, but I still dread Sunday evenings as it was conditioned in to my brain to “wind down” and get read for work/school the next day.
    JB

    1. For years I always dreaded Labor Day and September because that was back to school time where I grew up. I’m 61 and still feel sad when we roll into September even though it’s just another month in a long string of months. Odd because I look forward to some cooler weather.

        1. Fall and winter in the pines and the Doug fir. A little cabin. No neighbors within a hundred yards. Snow clinging to the regal branches.

          A stream nearby that only stops talking on the snowiest days, with a little pellet stove by the easychair. It’s not heaven but it’ll placehold.

    2. I have a retired friend who says every evening is Friday night, and every morning is Saturday morning. He’s happy.

  3. I once had a serious conversation with a male relative who was about 50 and constantly discontent. Exasperated, I finally asked him Well what do you want?!

    He said he wanted to be happy. Happy. In THIS world, the enemy’s world. He was thinkin’ he oughta be, you know, ongoingly happy pretty much always. Like the TV and songs all said. At this point, he already had developed early stages of intestinal cancer.

    I didn’t have the heart to tell him that ‘happiness’ is for little babies, and even then not for long. It is not for grown men in the devil’s world.

    Like most men of my generation, he was conditioned to believe he could not be happy without some female, shit any female, most of the time being near him and at least preteding to care about him.

    So he married some aged-out, evil-hearted bitch and spent his last few years with her and her adult princess daughters, firmly believing that he now was happy, after all he had a wife and supportive females all around him.

    What’d they get out of it? A completely remodeled basement, his new car, a large extra income, and quite soon his death benefits. Oh yeah and she with-held the will from me so she could steal all his resources for herself. I had no money to challenge in court and she knew it well.

    She also took out a Restraining Order on me so as to prejudice the courts in case I, you know, decided to get a look at the will, or to oppose her in any way. I had no intention of going within a mile of her house, and she knew it well. But those ROs are money-in-the-bank to the grrls in America’s feminist court systems.

    Those ROs get the courts all EAGER to cage you, you dangerous bad threatening male. How DARE you make a wonderful female — a mother, no less! — feel uneasy? You creep. You’re a threat to society, clearly, and we’ve already got you on our books.

    Yeah fuck this world and its ‘happiness’. How about a stake through its black heart instead?

      1. I have had many, certainly more than I deserve. Generous Papa.

        When I see a glimmer of God’s magnificience in the peaks of the Sierras, or the songs of the warbling stars, I am as grateful as yourself for such grace.

        But I’m afraid the world is intractably evil, having been cursed from the ground up, right from the getgo. Under earth and water are some very old and unfortunate things, and over time areas get polluted past a redemption point. No, this place will have to be done away with, mebbe for its own good, but that uncreation need not fret you and your boys, it’s a well ways off yet.

        Seeing how the West has rejected the reunion of the father and the son in favor of feminism, has embraced accusation against the brethren, and made general war on masculinity, the Boss will be smacking it upside the head. (Malachi 4:5-6) God knows we couldn’t just let dads have their sons, and avoid the King’s foot. That’d take too much power away from women and the collusive State.

        I cannot overemphasize how big the whole dad-son thing is to Christ. If you want to rile Him, interfere with it, and He’ll get around to you. You think I’m obsessed about it? you ain’t seen nothing.

        I’d stay on that mountain if I were you.

  6. John, I’m shocked that you didn’t state that to be happy, you’d need to have a “porpoise” in life. And, along with eradicating evil, followed by a steak & cigar, where’s the beer or whiskey?

    I think it was Gordon Moore at Intel who commented that “only the paranoid survive” or something to that effect. So, one must be unhappy to strive and “get ahead”.

    The whole Epstein Circus (and the NFL) have confirmed that TPTB are running a Sh*t Show designed to make 99% of the American Public unhappy.

    AI’s gonna make us happy “living” on a UBI in a 15 Minute City driving a EV that has a 100 mile range???

    Sure.

    W.C. will sell you some snake oil, si vous plait. Along with some whiskey.

  8. True happiness, by definition alone, is about as obtainable as the utopia being sold by the communist/socialist crowd. IMHO, it is being content with where a person finds themselves that is key. Too many variables to expect more…and to do so is a waste of one’s time.

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