Happiness: The Final Frontier

Day 5, Thursday 22nd March 2018

I want to write about the things that I feel you want to hear, which is the reason for this daily writing exercise, to break that trend and create pieces that I don’t think you want to hear, or at least write words that I don’t cognitively assume that you want. I just need to get the words down on the page, like a babble of different length textual structures which might not even make a lot of sense, just the thoughts in my head, rather than the construct of yet another Medium ‘motivational bollocks’ or ‘maximise your work efficiency’ piece, because frankly Medium if full to the rafters with that sub genre of dialogue which is boring, tired and repetitive.

Happiness is a big topic that I ruminate about on a very regular basis. I feel that I don’t talk about it enough, in both an abstract sense “what is happiness” and in a direct, experience based sense “why am I not happy in this moment”. A book which I read about happiness was incredibly depressing, in that special way that only an academic could turn the subject of pure human joy and spin it, so that it’s acutely subjective for the reader that there’s no guarantee it would bring any of it’s titular assertion. The key fact of this tome which drove a sense of malaise around happiness was that empirically, based upon many studies, one of the most fundamental factors which determines how happy someone is, is how likely to be happy they are.