The Trivial Pursuit of Happiness

We like to be in the pursuit of happiness or eternal satisfaction, we even appear to earnestly try our best to attain bliss but really, we know happiness isn’t good for us. That’s at least what we’ve been taught right from the cradle.
“Second place son? No problem, next time you can work harder and get the first place”
“You only scored 82% in your finals? How will you get into a good college with these scores?”

We’re taught to win and given tools to enable us to win. We’re taught that we’re special by people who were taught that they were special. It seems to be a vicious cycle of premature ego inflation at a time when our highest achievements are to be potty trained.
When i now look around, i feel thankful for the fact that i had a childhood, unimpaired by academic pressures (for a while anyway). I got to experience scrapped knees; battling in the playground and using imagination to transform ordinary sticks into one shot kill guns and samurai katanas.
But let’s move on shall we?

As adults we carry onward the same pressure to perform and succeed everywhere we go. When we eventually are introduced into general society and out of our closed groups, we figure out that we aren’t so special after all, there are always people better. That’s when the materialism begins. We begin supplementing our own selves with objects in order to add value to our total package, as if the objects now were an extension and part of us. This is the phase of expensive watches, over obsession for vehicles, instruments, shoe closets, branded bags, fifteen thousand items of clothing and accessories to match them all. Our identity has now been diluted to being unidentifiable to the objects we want to associate ourselves with, some of us become “gadget freaks”, some become “car/bike nuts”, some even attempting at becoming a library of movies and television shows.

Now if you’ve made it this far, you know where I’m going with this. You’ll never achieve perfect and pure happiness or even lasting peace if you belong to the above category (i fit there too).
You cannot be happy if your identity is tied to objects, or if you want to be a winner.
You cannot be happy if you have the competitive spirit, or are a compulsive shopper.
you will never achieve happiness with your current friends, to achieve happiness, you must become someone you have never been before and be consistent with it. You current friends will then become ancient reminiscent of the person you used to be.

You cannot achieve happiness if you aren’t in love. Although this sounds counterproductive, every relationship must have its ups and downs (a phrase created by people in relationships). These downs are periods of non happiness. You’re only chance at happiness is to find someone who isn’t everything I’ve described above or is someone who at least aspires to be that person.

Welcome to the world. Where we’re given a stick and made to participate in a gun fight. All of us run forward and earnestly try stabbing life with a stick.
Winning is accepting you have a stick, throwing it away and enjoying the 5 seconds you have until the bullet is in your brain.