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Month: March 2002
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Today in Molecular Biology…the psych grad student, Jeff, was talking about drug addiction (stick with me, it’s not just biolology for this post). We were going on and on about craving and such things and we went off on a tangent about happiness/pleasure. Jeff, being an interesting fellow, he studies pleasure/happiness. So, he has some interesting ideas about pleasure and the motivation for it. Apparently, or at least to him, Pleasure and/or happiness aren’t the primary motivators of humanity; avoidance of bad things is.
Which means, that at least for most people, they’re not wanting/looking for happiness they just want to be not unhappy. And why, in Jeff’s infinite wisdom is this? Well…being happy takes work, you have to seek pleasure and work for it, you have to find it and go through some uncomfortable or unpleasant things to get it and keep it. Being not unhappy, or being not in pain is a lot easier – and being happy apparently takes constant maintenance and effort.
And so we come to the point of me posting all of this, aside from informing everyone of this interesting theory/idea.
I don’t like to do what everyone else does. I tend to stand up for things sometimes out of sheer stubborness. So if the average person is too lazy to seek happiness, to do anything except accept life and merely avoid as many unpleasant things as possible; then I want to be different.
I guess this means that I was wrong, as hard as that is to believe (for you and for me), I never thought that I wanted happiness. I was always aiming for satisfaction and contentment at best.
I guess this means that I’m going to have to be stronger and more stubborn than I ever thought possible, because none of this is going to be easy. I can’t just wait for happiness to explode onto my person scene. I’m going to have to be aggressive. To actively seek something out for the first time. And I’m going to have to accept a risk that I have feared all my life – rejection.
Does this mean I will do it? Does this mean that I am going to be happy?
I don’t know.
There is so much that I am going to have to do and so much work that will have to be done. And it will never end. I really think that happiness is something that must involve work, not only for you to appreciate it but for you to maintain it.
I thought I was a pessimist. But I’m not. And I’m not an optimist. What am I then? Well, I don’t think everything will turn out okay. I could very likely fail. But I might not and I think, that maybe, just maybe, I’m willing to risk failure and everything else to find happiness.
I guess, to borrow someone’s words, I’m a realist.
