Morality, Labor, and more Death

In recent posts I've talked about how precious life is and how peculiar the human condition can be. We're a social creature whose thriving and sanity is essentially determined by the presence of other members of our species. Additionally, we're the only species that can envision a future in which we exist, and a future in which we don't (which is incredibly depressing). The overlap is the idea that we try to fill our short meaningless existence with moments that seem to justify our humanity. Now, you can chalk a lot of what I call "mysteries" to be simple biological responses. We socialize to reproduce, we don't like to die because we will have a harder time passing on our genes when we're dead, etc. Of course, having 12 credits of psychology under my belt, I'm fully qualified to say that our fears and desires are learned behaviors that come with a more advanced understanding of our biological and metaphysical limitations.

But I'm done with that garbage for now. We'll keep it philosophical but we'll at least try to stay grounded. As humans we strive for the good life. Again, call it a fear of death or call it a natural tendency to just want a ton of crap, who knows. For Aristotle, the good life was living in accordance with happy mediums and moving as far as possible away from extremes. This we call "virtue ethics" and is not what we're talking about today. I think the point of bringing up Aristotle is to show that we as humans have tried to define our existence and conceptualize it in a set of rules that we can choose to follow or not follow. This goes way beyond the Constitution, mind you. This is called morality (which I thought wasn't the point, but apparently it is). This morality tells us that it's not nice to be not nice to people, essentially. But another interesting facet of the human condition (which again, I didn't think was the point) is that we can be cruel to people who are not cruel to us in the first place. There's a trillion examples but I'm talking about greed and more specifically, consumerism (big leap, I know).

People want a ton of crap. I want a bigger tv and a big stereo system and a huge house with a parking garage with some fast cars. Why? I don't know. None of those things are going to benefit me in any substantive way other than knowing I've got some really cool crap. Why do billionaires want more money? Because they can theoretically buy more crap. I say they can't be too busy buying crap because if they were, they wouldn't be billionaires. Billionaires are just really concerned with theoretically being able to buy a ton of stuff. And really, that's what we're all concerned with. We want to know that if we need something, we can take care of it. We also really, really like to know that if we want something, we can be impulsive every now and then. But our ultimate dream, my friends, is that if we want to be flippant and irresponsible with our money, we can. We all want to know that a gold-plated pool full of strawberry jello with diamonds in it is going to be possible if we want it.

So we go to work.

Humans are a funny sort in that we don't do anything just to survive. Yeah, some of us do and that's really unfortunate (says the upper middle class white kid), but most of us are concerned with how much excess we're going to have. After the bills and the responsibilities and eating, we want to know that we're going to have a little extra to screw with. We also really like knowing that we'll have even more extra to put away for when we're old and tired and pissed off at the world and don't want to work anymore.

I use lions a lot as examples for some reason despite not knowing anything concrete about them... well, here's another.

Take a lion pack. I don't know any actual facts about lions, but just bear with me. The male and female lions hunt because they have to feed themselves. They also forgo a little extra from that sweet, sweet gazelle to give to their cubs. Within a few years, the cubs are hunting, helping to provide for the older lions as well as themselves. The responsibility slowly shifts downwards as the generations age. The circle of life involves work. Everyone has to work.

The thing about humans that's very similar to lions is that the responsibility shifts downwards. The younger ones eventually have to take care of the enfeebled older ones. The only difference is, lion parents don't have to wait until their cubs are 22 years old to be able to sustain themselves, much less their elders.

But kids have to go to school now. You used to be able to get a job with an elementary education. Granted not a great job, but a job nonetheless. If you could read, that was a plus too. Years later, a high school education was acceptable but not absolutely necessary and hey a GED was quite alright. Years later, if you went to college (undergrad) you were set. High school education was necessary but college wasn't at all. More people started to go to get an undergrad education but those with the master's degree we're the elites. Now you can't even earn a "livable" income without a bachelors. You could get a master's degree nowadays and still worry about being homeless. WHAT'S GOING ON?

One of my favorite sayings is, "When everyone is special, no one is special." You know why? BECAUSE ONLY A FEW PEOPLE CAN BE SPECIAL BASED ON THE DICTIONARY DEFINITION OF SPECIAL. Don't you see? Once everyone is above the bar, we have to MOVE THE BAR. Everyone dreams of being rich but NOT EVERYONE CAN BE RICH. If you and 4 friends are looking a pile of 100 1-dollar bills, you all can share it--each getting 20 dollars. But you KNOW that one person in the group is a jerk and is going to take 90% of it. Now that means that the other 4 share 10 dollars which doesn't split evenly. So someone is going to get screwed. One genius in the group comes up with an idea: let's make more money! Everyone is super excited because they all get 100 dollars but now each individual dollar means less. Welcome to inflation.

The point is not inflation, obviously. It's that we all expect to get out of college and make a ton of money which just realistically isn't possible. A bazillion students (literally) graduate college every semester and they all expect to make all this money and it's simply not possible. It doesn't make logistical sense. Such is life. So we settle into mediocrity never making as much money as we would like doing something we hate and yet we continue to do it because we want to have a place to live and feed ourselves and have a car and them maybe, just maybe, have a little extra on the side to hopefully stop doing what we hate one day or maintain a modicum of sanity by blowing our extra money at a shooting range, putting up targets of our boss.

I talked a lot in the past about doing things for our ultimate survival--but the way we work is so paradoxical it's amazing. We work to survive, but we're killing ourselves but working so much at things that we hate. So why do we do it? Just to bite off a bigger piece of the pie so we can buy a bigger TV which will hopefully provide enough pleasure to justify the hours spent at the job you hate or the fact that your life is already insignificant enough without spending 40 hours of your 168 hour doing something that makes you unhappy.

Oh wait, that's 40 hours on top of the 30 minute commute EACH WAY. So that's 45 hours plus the 8 hours of sleep you HOPEFULLY get each night (but you don't because you've got too much crap to do) but let's say for argument's sake that you do get 8. That's 56 hours you spend sleeping so 101 hours of your life are either spent working or sleeping. Then you've got 67 hours of your week left to do taxes, cut the lawn, attend soccer games, fight with your wife, discipline your kids, and maybe, just maybe you'll have a few hours left to do something you enjoy--something that makes you forget about all of the garbage you have to deal with. But in those 40 hours you hope that you'll make enough money to put aside so that one day, you can hopefully devote an extra 40 hours to making your life slightly happier than it has been. The rub is that by the time that's even remotely possible, you're not young anymore. You've got arthritis and you're sight is leaving you and your doctor said you probably shouldn't be riding rollercoasters or skipping doses of your medication and really the only thing you can do is sit on your butt for what will hopefully be a productive 20 years of life looking back on all that could have been. You finally have the time to read Freud and Aristotle and learn the piano but at the point in your life, you physically can't.

And then one day you'll find, 10 years have got behind you--no one told you when to run, you missed the starting gun.

I think thoughts like these are originally what prompted the post on death. Maybe my primary interest is not death for death's sake, but life for death's sake. If life is the most precious thing we have, we sure don't act like it.

But what can we do? What's the alternative? With the media glorification of the rich and famous we can never just settle for good enough. It's biological to want to be the best and have the greatest display of wealth and I think we're all inherently lazy--so lazy we'll work ourselves to death in order to not have to work anymore. Of course, you could always be a drug dealer. The hours are probably flexible, the money is great, and if you can ignore the constant threat of imprisonment and death, it can provide a lovely life for you and your family.

Death

It tops the list of things you're scared of.

There's insurance against it.

We have industries devoted to fending it off.

We have industries devoted to making sure it happens.

It sucks.

Ironically enough, death is an integral part of life. What goes up must come down. What has a beginning has an end. Every reaction has a... you get it. When we're young, we're immortal. Our entire lives are ahead of us and we hope to God and Lady Luck that our time is a long, long time from now. For those of us taking the more liberal stance, we act impulsively and do whatever our fickle hearts yearn for. If you read my post on happiness, you know that these kinds of people probably surround themselves with equally impulsive people and probably claim to be mostly happy. The more conservative of us will probably do things they consider safer and because of this will probably plan farther in advance, into a life that their more conservative lifestyle will hopefully grant. As the only animals capable of planning, we sure do a lot of hoping. We hope that despite doing a ton of dumb stuff, we'll wake up the next morning to do it all over. We hope that despite not doing anything crazy, we'll wake up the next morning to hopefully do something spontaneous one day... if we can get off work and don't have a dentist appointment.

The worst part is, it's inevitable. We're born carefree into a live we didn't choose and as soon as we learn about it, we hope to go out as carefree as possible. A pessimist says you're born alone and you die alone. Fact is you're born nowadays with a fistful of doctor around you and with any luck, you'll die the same way.

In my happiness post, I mentioned that we only do the things that make us "happy" in order to fend away sadness, to momentarily forget our meaningless existences and to hopefully justify this mysterious life that's been bestowed upon us. Well ladies and gentlemen, it's time to get morbid.

Look around you. Well, don't do it right now because you're probably sitting alone at your computer, you sad, sad person you. Why aren't you out enjoying life? It's precious and short. But if you look around when there are people around, what do you see? People! There are people out there and if you just take one minute out of your busy life and close your eyes (not when you're driving or operating heavy machinery) and try to imagine and conceptualize and spatially comprehend the idea that every single person you see or meet has a life of equal or greater size than you. Think back on your life and how massive it is. You've been to several states and several school and traveled to your grandparents and eaten a ton of food and met a lot of people and there's a lot of STUFF in your life. Well the person next to you has done all that too. The person next to you had a mom and a dad and a childhood and they learned to ride a bike and had a romantic relationship and found a job and lost a job and is now doing something they probably hate with their lives and may not be where they wanted to be and... and... their life is huge. Conceptually, it's about as big as yours and realistically, takes up about the same amount of space in the space-time continuum. That is, no space at all. The world has been around a long, long time and there have been a ton of people that have come and gone, each with full lives. For millennia people have watched the sun rise and set every day of their lives and they have all died and people are born to replace them and they have died as well. Your life is small and it is tiny and odds are, it won't really matter all that much. But if you literally took a moment to try and conceptualize that you'll know that it's a lot like literally trying to imagine infinity.

Here's a fun little exercise to help you do what I'm trying to get you to do. Close your eyes. Well... I know it's hard to read and close your eyes but... have a friend do it. I don't know. Just... close your eyes. Imagine a square. Easy. Four sides with 90 degree angles... no problem. Now imagine the number 1. Just the number. I just typed it, in case you forgot what it looks like. Now picture the number 2. See, I'm helping. Now picture the number 3 and then keep adding numbers in order. (4, 5, 6... etc.) If you're a good counter, you're getting pretty high up there... 100... 500... 823... but soon you're going to lose track of all the digits. Now you're a little overwhelmed because you can logically imagine a number with 30 digits, but you can't keep track of every single digit. A number like 5643482309482350948323 is really hard to keep in your head and even harder to figure out what number comes next. Now imagine your life is that number. Now imagine the person next to you (or the next person you see) is the next number sequentially. Now keep going. Your number is seeming less and less important. Sure, it's a long, beautiful number. It's your number. You're proud of your number. But there's going to be numbers after you. There's going to be numbers with twice as many digits as yours, with more exciting numbers like... 7's or... 1's. You never know.

That was fun, wasn't it? My point of interest here is why we do what we do. Why in the face of all things, we press on. We know it's coming so why do we do what we do? Why do we endure sadness and why do we do things that we hate? Why do we put up with people we don't like and why do we do things that we do like when we know they aren't going to last?

Imagine you're a serf in a medieval township. Your day consists of waking up at the crack of dawn and tilling and sewing the land all day. You might get some bread for breakfast and maybe some more bread for lunch. You'll till and you'll sew all day and you know you do it because if you don't, you'll die. You know this will be your life for as long as you live. You know that if you get sick, you won't be able to work the land and you'll die. Your family will die. So you keep working. Then one day, you die. Why did you do it? Why press on? Why accept this?

Everything we do is predetermined. I'm not talking about the concept of free will because I have different thoughts on that, but everything we do is predetermined. We went to elementary school, then middle school, then in high school they informed us that we have to go to college, then in college they reminded us that we have to become adults and get jobs and be functional adults. It's expected. Why do we do it? Why do we do anything?

I guess it's more of a theoretical question for nihilism or something. Why do we get up in the morning? Okay so maybe I'm advocating mass suicide... maybe I'm not. Just kidding... I'm not. But that's the most interesting thing about this: why don't we just do it? I posted a status the other day talking about happiness. I wrapped it up by saying if we had known this is what being an adult would be like, we would have offed ourselves a while ago. And part of me thinks that's true. If someone had sat us down when we were kids and earnestly got us to understand that we're going to be living on our own, doing things we don't like doing, and not having fun all the time... we might have seriously chosen the the red pill (Matrix reference--google it).

But I think that speaks heavily to the mystery of the human psyche... above all adversity, we strive for life. Despite knowing that life isn't going to be very fun and despite a ton of uncertainty about being able to attain this magical happiness we all hope for... we don't kill ourselves. In fact, we look down on suicide. In fact, if we commit suicide, there's something WRONG with us. While suicide seems like the next logical step to accepting our mortality, we consider those who do it the victim. Now maybe this attitude towards suicide is another survival instinct but maybe it's also a result of society telling us what's good for us. Either way, we're still alive but we're still suffering and we're still not willing to do anything about it. Go figure.

We even use death as punishment. Those who kill get the death penalty. We know that killing someone who killed someone else isn't going to bring the victim back, but for whatever reason it makes us feel better. The death penalty is supposed to be a deterrent. It's based on the idea that the worst thing that you can do to someone who breaks the law is kill them. That the worst wrong someone can endure is death. I don't understand this because it seems like the worst thing you can endure is life. Life is full of suffering and pain and death isn't full of anything. I would rather have an empty bucket then one full of rotten eggs.

Epicurus (who is the first incarnation of Ayn Rand, I think) says that life is the greatest good. He was what we call a hedonist but he would have probably just said he enjoys life to the fullest. And to be fair, life is something to enjoy. If we're going to be here, we might as well make the best of it (despite the pointless endeavor that may or may not be). Anyway, Epicurus says death isn't that big of a deal because if you can imagine a time when you didn't exist and be okay with it, you can imagine a time after you and also be okay with it. If a psychopath is an Epicurean (which would be HILARIOUS), I don't think the death penalty is going to be much of a deterrent. (Philosophy jokes are the best.) Thomas Nagel (when he isn't being a JERK and talking about philosophy of mind) takes Epicurus' view one step farther about 3000 years later and says, yes, death IS the greatest harm because imagining a time when you don't exist is freakin' awful. It's all about missing out on the future. I don't even think that really occurs to people--why death is such a harm--until they're staring it dead (see what I did there?) in the face. No one is concerned about the shortness of life until the end and I think that's part of the source of regret. But maybe that's also the reason people don't go around constant concerned about death. Maybe we shouldn't think about it. But it's such a huge deal, why shouldn't we?

Humans are the only things on this earth that can plan. I've talked about this before: we can plan, imagine a future, and it's even a unique ability to imagine a future without us. Animals don't fear death because they can imagine a future without them, a gazelle runs away because it knows death is inherently bad. It doesn't know why, it just knows. We would run away from a lion because we know that our loved ones would miss us and we wouldn't be able to learn to play piano or write a book or fall in love or crap like that. Also we don't want to be known as the idiot who got eaten by a lion. WE ARE HIGHER UP ON THE FOOD CHAIN. Not the point. We have the ability to know why we don't want to die which might be why we don't just kill ourselves. Again, I don't think that is sufficient evidence for why we don't. All we know is that being alive is better than the alternative.

This post is as much about life as it is about death. I've tread the thin line of optimism a couple times and hopefully it wasn't too obvious that I am a big fan of life. I mean I suppose if given the choice I would have still chosen life. I think of the people I've met and the things I've done and I can't help but think that none of it's permanent... but yeah I guess it's better than the alternative. Is is better to have loved and lost then to have never loved at all? Is having the heartbreak better than never knowing the love that heartbreak has to follow? I don't know. That's a logic problem I can't reason out. Things we humans do to ensure we continue to live is amazing. We will keep someone who is persistently unconscious with no hope of regaining functionality on a breathing machine even if means only prolonging what we think life should be. We will argue for centuries about what it means to be alive and what being alive even means. We are so concerned with mortality that when it comes to death, we fear nothing more. Yet as I have hopefully proven, doesn't the inevitability of death hopefully render all of that pointless?

So I guess through all the rambling... what you should take away from this discussion of death is not that persevering through the dark times is unnecessary, but that like a great party, life is short and is eventually going to end. If you can walk away from it with the best story, you win. And while the end is something you don't want to deal with, all you need to do is fill the time you have with the things you enjoy. Yeah, we rely on people for our happiness--people who can be mean, stupid, awful and selfish. And yeah, going to school so we can work til we die sucks a lot... but if life is so short and if the only thing that allows us to forget are the little moments of happiness, fill your life with those little moments. Proportionally, even the shortest moments of bliss are the biggest things anyone can do.

Happiness

Admittedly, I'm in the middle of one of the existential crises I speak so highly of. A good friend once told me that a crisis is inherently bad and in most cases, I would have to agree. But to me, a crisis also means that there is something wrong and whatever is wrong has come to a head and this crisis gives us the unique opportunity to experience the issue from the eye of the storm. Thus, today/this week's/this month's crisis gives us an opportunity to look at many interesting things that for whatever reason are coming to a head.

Happiness is one of the most interesting concepts imaginable. I'm utilitarian in that I believe that pleasure is the highest good man can achieve. It follows then that pain is the worst thing imaginable. Ayn Rand says that life is the greatest value for man, and that anything contrary to the realization of life is bad.

Pleasure takes many forms. Physical, emotional, metaphysical... pleasure is such a broad concept that it can take so many forms. Pleasure is also a funny thing in that, fundamentally, what gives us pleasure hasn't ever really changed. We always find new ways to experience pleasure, but fundamentally, it's always the same. But what will be discussed henceforth is the concept of happiness. To me, happiness is defined as the emotional manifestation of pleasure. Now the reason I say this is because using words like "pleasure" and "happiness" interchangeably can get messy. So regardless of whether you agree with my definition, that's what I mean when I say the word "happiness."

The main interest I have in happiness is the question of its source. Now, think about what makes you happy. For me, it's going out with my friends, performing, laughing, playing an exciting video game, or the perfect song coming up on my iTunes shuffle. Obviously, that's not a complete list--but it's something to work with.

I said going out with my friends makes me happy. Why? indulging in camaraderie and having a shared experience? You and your friends go to the movies and see a comedy. A great joke has been told and the entire theater erupts in laughter. You take a brief moment to look to your left and right. You see your closest friends laughing as well and you sigh deeply and sink a little farther into your chair, content. You walk out of the theater, quote the joke, and relive the experience of having heard a good joke. A few months later the movie will come out on DVD and you'll invite your friends over to watch it. Unfortunately, your friends can't come. They're busy with work or whatever. Not a big deal, you watch it by yourself. The scene with the joke is about to come on and you prepare yourself for the riotous laughter that's sure to ensue. The joke comes and goes. And you? It might have elicited a mild chuckle at best, but suddenly the emotion that follows is melancholy.

A wonderful blog I just stumbled upon is called the Thought Catalog which I highly recommend for those bored at work. Anyways, one of the articles I read defined melancholy as such: ‘Melancholy’ is separate from ‘sadness.' The concept of ‘sadness’ implies grief and a certain hopelessness, while ‘melancholy’ implies a sorrow with purpose, an emotion with which one can be swathed as if it were a shroud. Swathed – no, more like ‘swaddled’, and in that regard melancholy is comfortable, a lozenge to be masticated for a reason, a sadness that has pensive pleasure melted into it, something it’s comfortable to suckle and to be wrapped in... to be swallowed in melancholy is to be immersed in conscious, intentional unhappiness, the sort that, perversely, makes one happier."

Naturally, interpretation is subjective, but essentially, melancholy is not just the state of being debilitatingly sad, it's a comfortable sadness that one occasionally finds oneself in when one is purposively hopeless. Actually, reading that back, it doesn't clarify it all. An example would help... maybe... it's when you try to relive an experience in your head, but the happiness of the memory is so fleeting and seemingly far off that only then do you recognize that it's gone. I think that's why we enjoy reminiscing so much. We sit around with our friends sharing those "remember that time when..." stories because we want to be able to transport ourselves back in to the moment when we were happier than we are now. Sadness is what you feel when you lose a family member or... well I can't think of another example. But you get it. Melancholy is this state of experiencing the absence of happiness from the eye of the storm. It's not a debilitating hopelessness, but it's not a joyous feeling either. Like the quote, it's something to wrap yourself in or a lozenge you chew for a reason.But you also must notice that I can't talk about happiness (or at least haven't thus far) without talking about people. Like cold being the absence of heat or darkness the absence of light, sadness is the absence of happiness. So if you're not doing the things that make you happy, are you sad? Or maybe that's melancholy.

Anyway, so much of what makes us happy seem to come back to our good friend Maslow, a psychologist who I readily subscribe to. Good ol' Abraham Maslow put together this handy little pyramid called the hierarchy of needs which orders our fundamental needs from the physical to the abstract. Of course at the bottom are our physiological needs like food, water, shelter, garbage like that. Next, is our need for safety. Safety contributes mostly to psychological need to know that we don't always have to be at a constant state of stimulation. Safety is 100% key to happiness and having a good time. Give a stranger a gun and your address and tell me how easy it is to relax. Anyway, the next level gets more abstract and even more interesting: friendship, family, and intimacy. We start to realize how tiny our lives are compared to everyone else's (not that our lives are smaller, just about the same relatively small size) (I'll also address death in a later post), and we start to need to associate and cement our existence. I don't know why the need to belong tends to override security. Maybe if you knew the stranger with the gun would bring cookies and your favorite movie, you would even try to make a new friend (see Stockholm syndrome). If this need for belonging is unmet or deficient in some way, it can lead to depression, social anxiety (another thing I'll address), and a general loneliness. But it's funny how occasionally being deficient in belonging can lead to these bouts of melancholy. We clearly rely heavily on the simple presence of others that happiness seems impossible without it, or at the very least unimaginable. I'll come back to this.

Continuing up the hierarchy, we have esteem. Esteem is another funny one because it's one thing to have people around, it's another thing to be accepted and respected by them. Honestly, if I was to critique Maslow, I would lump these elements of people-needing in with the previous level. But what deserves it's own level for sure is the notion that we need to achieve. This is HUGE. Nietzsche among others have written incredibly interesting works on the human need to achieve. Why do we do it? Maslow says that it's for two reasons. For us and for others. I say it's totally for us. On the surface, we care what people think. Performing makes me happy. Making people laugh makes me happy. But deep down, I just want to know I'm good at something. I want to know that my life has a purpose that transcends my frail body. I want to know that my capacity for reason and judgement enables me to do something worthwhile, that will stick out. Many existentialists talk about achievement as a way to secure immortality in a universe where ethereal immortality doesn't exist. Whether or not it does is a different discussion, but the need for money, fame, notoriety, and fans could easily be said to be a facade that says, "Hey world, look at me! I'm important!" But I think that it's also equally true that it's just as much of a way of saying, "Hey self, look at me! I'm important... I'm important... I'm good at something... I'm important."

So these things that make us happy, performing, being well-known in our field, having a ton of friends... is it just a way of dealing with our own mortality? It's possible that it's just a way to stave of the constant looming of that feeling of crippling despair that comes with being insignificant. This leads directly into the last level of the hierarchy... self-actualization. Knowing that you can live up to your greatest potential. Though I think I diverge from Maslow with this one because I think that most of the criteria he has for self-actualization are arbitrary things measured by society like morality, efficacy, rationality... You know, I actually only subscribe to Maslow in theory. I acknowledge the line between each level but I don't think I agree with the conceptual format. Maybe it's more like a square with 4 sections and each bears on the other a little. I don't know. I'll have to work that one out later.

The point is, we need to feel happy. We need it and most of us can't explain why we just feel this overwhelming desire to be happy. We know what makes us happy but I don't think any of us know why. And it's funny how fleeting the things that make us happy truly are, especially when viewed from the lens of when we aren't doing those things. A good friend once tried to tell me that wisdom is being able to point out the moments that are bad and getting through them until the next time when it's not so bad. But it's funny that we're just constantly running away from the bad moments in life and chasing after the good. Why does the good in life have to always be something that we chase? Why can't the good just be something that is?

I posted a status earlier today that might have been a little depressing and if it set off suicide alarms, I apologize. I'm fine, really. The point of the status was just that I don't know anyone who is truly happy all the time, whose life is the way they dreamed, and whose life just constantly delivers happiness at all times. Yeah of course you know happiness by knowing sadness... but again, why does happiness have to be something elusive? Is the state of nature completely devoid of happiness? And what if you were the last person on earth? You wake up tomorrow and no one is around. What does happiness mean when there's no one around to experience it with you? Can you truly be happy and self-actualize if there's no one to have standards by which to measure your achievements?

Listening to my music makes me happy. When my headphones are in, it's just me and the music. [It's funny because when I play my music for others, I always get the itching feeling that no one likes it as much as I do...] But why does that make me happy? Let's look at it in the context that we just explored. How can liking music relate to others....? Well I know other people like music and I know that if certain music is pleasing to me, it must be pleasing to others, right? Not always the case... but it's plausible. Maybe I just appreciate my own capacity to appreciate music, and that makes me think that I would be a good judge of music in a social situation in which that's called for? Who knows.

Think about what makes you happy. Always do that. Never, ever, ever stop doing what makes you happy. If happiness is something we have to chase, lock it in a cage and never let it go, keeping it by you at all times. If happiness lies in something as fleeting as the presence of certain people, keep them around you. If happiness goes away when certain people are around, keep them away from you. If happiness is just a thin tissue cast over what would otherwise be a pit of boiling despair, we might as well enjoy it when it's around. Melancholy will happen when some of that despair leaks onto the tissue, but maybe it's something we should embrace so we can know the true nature of our psyche.

And I'll try to make good on my promises to talk about death and social anxiety. But don't let me do it in the same post, that's not a great idea.

UPDATE 1 6/13: Stupid me... I didn't follow this whole conversation out to the next logical step after the conclusion. What I was really itching to say, and what probably sparked this entire post is that happiness seems to live and die with other people. How do you go from happy to sad? When your friends go home for the night? When you have to go home because you have work in the morning? Obviously everyone else's role in this little void isn't born of malice, but it seems that happiness declines exponentially with consciousness after a good time. Expressed mathematically is something like residual happiness = event happiness - consciousness^x where "residual happiness" is how happy you are after something fun like a sweet party. That's kind of a digression though and really isn't that important.

It is definitely interesting to think of memories as bricks--specific and defined pieces of an overall structure. Memories make up you who you are. They mold our retrospective perspectives on the past. They are the only proof of yesterday and the reason we induce that tomorrow will happen. But they have specific beginnings and endings. Sure, they can be linked together by other less well-defined memories, but the strongest memories have well defined edges and sizes and brightness and construct the largest parts of our overall memory structure. I guess the only difference between memories and actual bricks is that bricks don't really fade away or are as much subject to psychological influence as memories.

Yet another digression... Well, I've already kind of talked about how people can have an active influence on happiness. If they don't love you or express disappointment in you, your happiness is negatively influenced. If someone isn't who you thought they were or you don't have the relationship that you thought you did or could have, there's a significant and profound influence on how you feel. The need for acceptance can cause you to change your entire life, do things you don't like, and engage in poisonous relationships. It's quite interesting. Maybe I'm repeating myself... I just wanted to make sure these observations were on the record and quite clear.

UPDATE 2: Sadness is a full body and mind oppression. You feel it smother you from head to toe and it leaves you helpless and immobile--all you can think about is the pain. Melancholy is a splinter. It will sit under the surface and fester until it starts to hurt. But it doesn't hurt too bad. In fact, you're still able to carry about your day but the pain is still going to be a bother. You can remove it, but it's going to hurt to deal with. It's a tiny pain, but it's pain. It's a quick spasm of pain. But it's pain.

EDIT: Just for clarification, my interest in death and depression is purely academic in my pursuit to understand the human condition. Jeez...