Paradise Sucks
Loveawake blog today wrote a post on the pursuit of happiness and if it’s worth it, it was a good read, one that inspired the writing of this article. In fact I got very intrigued because the current novel I’ve been writing wanting to write for the past 4 or 5 years deals with this very topic, it is titled Paradise Sucks… and essentially deals with the issues that Roosh brought up in his blog post. I almost didn’t want to write this for fear that it would mean the novel would become redundant and I wouldn’t need to write it after showing my own conclusions here in one tiny post – then I realized these two things aren’t the same, and that this post won’t necessarily arrive at the same place or say the same thing as this post will – or at least it will happen without such a direct message as this will. Novels are different, it isn’t just the message it’s how it’s delivered.
The pursuit of happiness is not the issue, Roosh points out the valid attributes of what happens when we reach the goal of what we think will make us happy, you get a burst of happiness and then as we are conditioned as humans, we become bored, bored of the very thing that made us happy. He is completely right. This is why paradise sucks. Think about how boring paradise would be or is – everything that makes you happy and that you want is there, forever – all at the same time, all the time. One of the things that makes us happy is new things… as humans we always need some new horizon to go towards, some new frontier to conquer, some new challenges to over come… it is in our dna, this cannot be changed. Paradise is not something we can survive pyschologically, we will purpsofully or subconciously destroy paradise, just like the parable in the bible with Adam and Eve – we are not as some would wish and aspire to be, perfect beings that would be happy when challenges and shiny new objects to play with aren’t there.
I’ve heard the pursuit of happiness and I have lived it, the upcoming novel by yours truly is on this topic as well, it’s called The Refugee, and this is the precurser to my novel Paradise Sucks… some of us purposely cast out our lives in pursuit of something more exciting, and more challenging, and even just different… but as the plot of Paradise Sucks will show, even this desire and action in the pursuit of happiness provides the same eventual numbness to it as does any other pursuit of happiness. Roosh is correct in his post, at some point what we seek out to make us happy will bore us. So what do we do?
The problem stems from our culture, and our inability to understand ourselves as a part of this culture, no matter how rebellious to our culture we are – a wise man once wrote, you are, no matter what, a product of the culture you are born in – you cannot leave it, escape it, disown it, be anything but what culture you grew up in. You hate the western world? You move? You’re still a western male, and cannot escape this culture, it is seeped into you in ways you have no perception of. Thus the tragedy of the man who hates his own culture, try as he might, he is always cursed to be a part of it and a living ebodiment of some or many elements of this which he despises.
Our culture promotes the pursuit of happiness as the be all and end all of everything we should be pursuing in life. Make more money, be famous, live on a beach, bang ton of women, do drugs, make a lot of friends, be successful, get cars, have kids, be more successful than others, have enough money to do what ever you want that makes you happy. In itself, there’s nothing wrong with that, but there’s something even more prevalent in our culture… something insidious, something that is now showing on the surface of many of its citizens and more each year. Overindulgence. We should be seeking balance – see balance allows you to seek out happiness in small increments, while seeking out hard work in similar increments, family life, personal interests, social interests, all in small increments, none being indulged in selfishly and too intensely as the other – but our culture this does not happen – this culture we want it all, fast, now, fully experienced – we want to suck the entire energy and experience for ourselves until it becomes a lifeless corpse and something we can move on from and seek the new thing to experience. What happens in this overindulgent lifestyle is that one fix begets another, and it has to be better, bigger, more… and so on and so on, or we get bored. The problem is that we as a culture become so focused on one thing that makes us happy, that we exhaust this thing and when we attain it, we destroy it and become bored. Any and every spoiled being will become bored by everything that comes easy, and we have in abundance… the more you have in abundance the more you will be bored of it. Should you gather everything up in the world, then what? Off yourself to save off boredom?
Life is about balance. When we act out of balance, that’s when boredom seeps in, that’s when living in highs and lows begins, that’s when the circle of pain and suffering and joy and excitement keep spinning forever. Do anything, no matter what it is, too much will cause us boredom and a crisis of faith. There is a lot to enjoy in the world, and there is a lot of time to enjoy it, there are different things to enjoy in different times of our lives, we should be mindful of our changing desires and interests, we should realize when we pass into another chapter in our life, that there are chapters, that the most robust life is not limiting oneself to a simple set of desires, but to experience everything we can, even passive contemplation, even the mundane – if your life is balanced, you are happy with out being content, you are not bored, the constant balancing act is the horizon that you can never reach – it is the challenge that is never completed – everything in life must be constantly handled in order to maintain this balance. This is the happiness you naturally pursue that our culture does not promote or respect. It is only about over indulging on everything.
Paradise Sucks… don’t seek it.
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