Happiness is a lie

Sabratha wrote:BTW - a lot of people here mentioned that life can be meaningless. What does that exaclty mean? What is the difference between a meaningfull and meaningless life?
People often speak about life having a "purpose" or some "higer sense" in it, but they almost never explain what they mean by that "purpose". For me this is all bogus.

GnarledCynic wrote:
http://www.kabbalah.info
Truly recommended.

Alex Foster wrote:Finding meaning or purpose in life means to look forward to something--to have something to devote one's time to that makes life seem less like a use of time and more like a reason to get out of bed in the morning.

ijc wrote:My husks of impurity are functioning fine.

Seriously, it's nonsense.

Alex Foster wrote:From my blog, but I thought we could discuss it here:

Happiness is a crock.

Unless I'm missing something, which is entirely possible.

I think the chief problem is that I was raised in the U.S., where the pervading notion is that you should be happy. Take pills if you have to--tell your kids they're a special snowflak--whatever. You're supposed to be happy, dammit! It's even in one of those frightfully important documents that all men were created equal and were put in this grand nation to pursue happiness.

Pursue, yes. Attain, no.

So, this is it--five days a week you work at a job that is a combination of stress at worst and boredom at best for eight hours a day with an hour break in the middle. Nine hours of your sixteen waking hours are spent doing stressfully boring things. That's all your energy right there. The rest of the day is spent waiting for the next nine hours of stressful boredom. That's forty-five hours a week--if you don't work overtime--and forty hours of sleep--if you get the proper amount of sleep. For this drudgery, you get forty-eight hours off. One third of which will be spent asleep. Then you do it again, for a few decades.

[Unless you're one of those #####& who enjoys their work. This isn't directed at you, because I can't contemplate enjoying doing anything I could be paid enough to live on.]

I'm guessing most people aren't the happy workers, though, because statistically, it doesn't make sense. There are more people working pointless, soul-killing jobs and you can't enjoy that so more people must be dead inside than I've been led to believe. In the U.S. we're led to believe everyone else is having a better time than we are, but I don't think that's true. I think, by and large, most people are miserable. Or deluded. They're striving for the chimera of happiness they've been sold. And they continue on that fruitless path until they die. Oh, the life-cycle of humanity, brings a tear to my eye. No, really, I'm weeping, here.

Yes, yes, I'm not the first person to wonder about happiness and why we try to pursue something that doesn't really exist, my question is this: Why don't more people kill themselves? I'm not being a wise-ass; I really would like to know. It seems to me that at the moment every person with more than three brain cells realises he or she will spend the vast majority of their life and energy doing something that is stressful, boring and, ultimately, pointless, he or she should dive beneath the nearest bus.

The only theory I have is that it's a schizoid thing. I'm incapable of being truly, unadulteratedly happy and for this reason I just don't 'get' the things that make getting out of bed worth it for the other humans. I am, however, quite capable of seeing the ultimate pointlessness of everything and being completely at a loss for why anyone should do boring things that mean nothing.

Some of you will say, 'Find something that means something to you and do that!' That's just keen of the peachy variety, if you have things that mean something to you. Some of us don't. I have an apartment and books and those things mean something to me. So, basically, I go to work so I can keep my apartment and my books. Life, to me, is something to get through. It's a prison sentence. I mark one day off. One more hour is done. I read because it's the cheapest way to mark time and it takes me out of whatever shape of boredom my life is currently taking.

You may think I'm depressed, but I'm not. This is neutral for me. Being schizoid means things just don't mean to me what they do to you.

So I guess that's my answer. Schizoids will just never get happiness. And for that reason we cannot pursue it.

Looks like I answered my own question. Go me.

GnarledCynic wrote:[

Come on… You were cynical from the moment you opened the link. You saw the word kabbalah, thought about Madonna and\ or religion and read everything while being closed minded.
(Sorry if my assumption is wrong)
This has nothing to do with the Kabbalah you probably heard of on television (aka mysticism and similar money-making #######4) nor is it about religion.
It has a lot more to do with science, actually, than mysticism\ religion\ philosophy.

Sabratha wrote:

Alex Foster wrote:Finding meaning or purpose in life means to look forward to something--to have something to devote one's time to that makes life seem less like a use of time and more like a reason to get out of bed in the morning.

Well, that's not really much for me. I constantly plan for the future, the near future at least. For example tomorrow I'm gonna go to the bookstore and buy a certain book. On wednesday I'm gonna write my final exam on ethics. e.t.c

Still, is looking forward to some future point in life makes it any more meaningfull? I don't really get this. I'm trying to say that I know what you want to say, but I do not "get it".
Its as if I hear the words, but don't hear the tune.