The False Promise of Happiness.

I think the most productive thing to do during times of change is to be your best self, not the best version of someone else. ~Seth Godin

I noticed a young girl looking at me in traffic.
I could sense the story she might be telling herself: “Lucky her! She gets to drive herself around in those nice shoes and sunnies.”
Okay, maybe she didn’t phrase it quite like that, but the look on her face suggested something along those lines.

Of course, there’s no guarantee those were her thoughts. We only assume, imagining ourselves in their shoes and projecting what we might think.

She was holding a unicorn inspired furry headband, or at least I think she was.
She tried hard to look at it fondly, but she couldn’t get herself to love it anymore, the way she expected to when she first bought it.

The classic industrial trap.

Mostly because her attention had shifted to something else that seemed more appealing. In reality, I knew it didn’t do much for my sake. But there will always be truths we want to share with others, truths they don’t want to hear and that we don’t have the right to tell.

We often associate relentless happiness with the things we want but can’t easily have. And when we finally get them, we cling tightly, until one day, they become a source of despair.

You had to choose what would make you happiest for the longest time. At that moment, it was a pair of Nike Jordans.

But when the Jordans stopped bringing joy, they became a symbol of what you gave up to have them. Choosing the Jordans meant trading away everything else you could have had instead.

Now the hype, the bargain, the thrill…they aren’t worth it anymore.

And so, the wish list begins again.

The person next to you might seem to be in a better place than you are right now. Sure, they don’t have unstoppable tears streaming down their face, but who’s to say your places won’t switch tomorrow?

We keep taking turns in this endless cycle until we realise the truth: we’re tethering our happiness to things whose nature isn’t to make us happy.

It’s not the object itself, it’s the story, the string of words we attach to it, that suddenly gives it the power to do so.

Take travel, for instance.
When we’re in the thick of our lives, travel feels like an escape. For a few days, we’re away from the obvious problems. Everything that reminds us of our issues is far away, so we associate this new place with happiness.

But spend enough time in that new place, and you’ll create a new whirl of problems there too.

The truth is, you carried those problems with you. They just got stuck at baggage claim for a while.

The baggage you didn’t know you carried along and so you never claimed it.

You know how sometimes you experience so much joy in a day that you think you’ll never run out of it? Until it fizzles and you just can’t figure what happened, what went south?!

The point of all this daily banter, ranting, and circling around the same message is this: a full-size, real-life escape doesn’t exist.

All we can do is find a better way to move through life. making the turns a little less steep and the downfalls less overwhelming. To build the strength to pull ourselves back up and bounce back, mostly on our own.

You go become the person you can rely on most because everyone else is busy falling and finding their own way back up. And put an honest effort in trying to understand yourself when no one else can… especially then.

A merry life to you!