Notes

The sad obligation of being happy

The chasing of happiness is maybe the biggest "cultural cliché" that is upon us: pictures with happy smiles are all over the social media, great music hits designed to celebrate it, epic happy hollywood endings, self-help books, group of supports oriented to help you to reach this. On the internet instructions, advices and path to be happy are more and more popular. There are many examples about it -Market takes advantage of it saying that if you consume this, you will reach happiness-. But What is happiness?, does it exist?, and if so, is it something that we can reach?.

Studying the nature discourse about the nature of happiness would be a long task, controversial and even not accurate at all -maybe because this is designed to be lived and not to be shown-. The cultural anxiety of being happy is bit awful, maybe because happiness shouldn't be considered as an "obligation", as a criteria to determine the wealth of a particual existence, and in my point of view, it shouldn't even be an objective in life.

3 cases to think about.

I remember the study conducted by a psicologist of the Stanford University, that showed that looking at the happiness of other people on Fb we get depression. I quote this because i think it shows a couple of aspects that distinguish the pop life philosophy, which we can named it "be happy". Let's talk about this phenomena.

On one side we have that happiness must be shown, it's basic to save your happy moments and share them. We think that watching a person who is always smiling, for example a celebrity in an entertainment magazine, that person is not only happy but that happiness is consistent. So, watching my "friends" on Fb showing happiness I tend to think that maybe if i were in their place i wouldn't be that happy, they are happier than me, and it makes me feel depressed.


Another interesting case is the campaign #100HappyDays, that challenges people to live a happy moment daily during 100 days and share it in a social network site and the proof of why they are so happy. This campaign goes against the current rhythms of life (rush and rush all day) that dont allow you to have a time to live a happy moment, because you are not capable to be in this moment, right now, this invitation of sharing 100 happy moments to me is almost pathetic. Why do I have to accumulate "happy points" for more than three months and sharing them on my social apps to believe it for myself?. What about if one day I am not in the modd of living happy moments and I prefer for example, feel melancholic?. Do I lose my happy points?, what if I chose to keep up my happy moments in a secret garden and don't showing them off on twitter, then did I fail?

Third and last example. I'd to quote Jetpac app, which is developed to celebrate "The international happiness day" and which is able to determine which countries are happier according to the size of its user's smiles in the pictures they upload to instagram. Then the more and the bigger they smile the happier they are.


As we can see, all of those three cases that we have reviewed have the same thread, the need for showing happiness to others. This, in the best of the cases, sends me to the following case: To certificate my happy moment first it must be approved by an external community and then yes, believe it. But also it can send us to a some kind of competition to find out who is happier or a surrow because that moment is just a short moment, that's why taken a picture is mandatory.

Conclusion.


It's difficult for me to think that happiness is an external state, affordable. Besides, it seems that it's an experience that to find it out, we don't have to look for it, otherwise those are just some actions or attitudes that you take it and put together.

In my opinion I think that is better "the sober calm that we can named "internal peace" (something like look at ourselves in a mirror, silently and taste the universe's reflection. And sincerely, I can't understand the idea of i must keep and share the moments in which i feel comfortable with myself, my enviroment and their interaction.


I think that Happiness is about a ephemeral status that sometimes it goes up, and then it should go down. Actually, Doestoievsky used to say that "happiness is that we feel after we feel the deepest unhappiness (sadness), while Jung used to say, without sad moments, happiness lose its sense. but anyway, I'd like to invite you to not push yourself to be happy, to not need for a picture to keep your happy moment to consider it true, and think about the marvelous of other states, like for example, melancholy or why not, sadness.