The Pursuit of Happiness.. inevitable?

I found this old essay i wrote on my flash drive yeaterday.. i've posted it because i want to know what you think..

One of our core freedoms is the pursuit of happiness.

When you really think about it, everything we do is in the name of this pursuit. Money, power, sex all make us happy in some manner.

We think we need them even if in the long run maybe happiness isn’t what they give us. Or maybe we sacrifice short term for what we believe will be long-term happiness. Regardless, our goal in the end is happiness.

We aggressively pursue this happiness. We will do anything to attain it. It is our true currency, our societal trump card. We are capitalists to the bone but it isn’t money that really drives us it is happiness. People say that nobody ever has enough money. No matter how much you have you always want more. It is what drives our economy. The never-ending desire for more. Perhaps an even more intriguing and troubling truth is that we are just as greedy about happiness.

No matter how happy a person is or how many goals they have achieved they always find some way in which they could be happier. They always find something that can be improved. Something new to fix.

We can always be happier. We always want to be happier. How can anyone ever truly be happy when they are trying so hard to be happier? Maybe this is where we’ve gone wrong. Maybe our idea of happiness is just too capitalistic. Maybe we should be open to just being rather than being happy.In general we define most things by their negatives. You can’t have freedom without someone being captive or at least not free.

We define conformity and even our entire culture by what we consider to be deviant. Without these opposites there is no comprehension of meaning. We do not exist without someone else to show us who we are not. We even talk about how a perfect society with perfectly happy people would not be perfect because they don’t know what they have. Without sadness there would be no happiness. Wouldn’t it make sense that a person who knows sadness the best would also be able to know happiness the best?

So many people do their best to avoid the bad. It would seem that these people would be shortchanging themselves when it came to experiencing the good. Or even worse, what if avoiding the bad is the same as avoiding the good. That inner conflict between the good and the bad within yourself, the happy and the sad, could be necessary to feeling. At any given moment maybe that sadness you find is what makes you happy. Maybe that is the real reason we spend so much time finding something to improve is because without something wrong we don’t feel right.At the same time my greatest moments of happiness that I can remember are all moments of feeling content. Nothing sexy there. Just content.

Or apathetic. Maybe both. Content to the point of apathy? Absolutely. Where there are no desires left but to remain in the moment. It passes as all moments must. But at that moment there doesn’t appear to be sadness. Perhaps it is those moments in which I truly embrace the sadness though. The sadness that the moment must end, the sad beauty of desiring nothing, the wish that the world was so simple.

To want nothing, even more happiness, may be what it is to be truly happy. Except how do you want to want nothing? How do you find a place that you never want to leave? Except who would want to stay forever? I have no answers. Juat the feeling that there is something out there .. something in the dark.. something i want to grab hold of and never let go.. what that thing is.. i dont know.