Yeah, this is largely why I wanted to mention weather v climate and what actually is happiness. It's not totally black and white a lot of the time, and even someone who has the emotion of happiness pretty regularly may not consider their lives at large a happy/fulfilled/contented one.
The way I see it is that happiness is both an emotion and a mentality. People tend to confuse one for the other. There's a distinction between
feeling happy and
being happy (the weather vs the climate). There is also a difference between
being happy and
choosing to be happy, and this is the mentality that I'm referring to. Emotions by their nature are fleeting but it's very difficult to see them as such. It feels almost logical to allow our emotions to control us, when in reality more often than not what that leads to is impulsion. Depressed people can feel happiness, "happy" people can feel depressed. But both of these are fleeting feelings for two different kinds of people.
That's a bit of a can of worms because I think at that point you have to take an analytical look at someone's life and how that shaped them into who they are. We're primarily the product of our life experiences and the result of generational trauma or even just susceptible genes create a guideline for how our lives can turn out without any fault of our own. There are plenty of people who have been dealt an utterly shit hand in their life, but they still find a way to remain positive and optimistic about the future. It's a balancing act between understanding that it's not necessarily your fault bad things happened to you, but sooner or later you need to be responsible for yourself lest you fall deeper into a dark place. You are your own worst enemy; you are your own best advocate.
You can make the conscious choice to take life in stride, in spite of everything that has happened or is happening to you. You can find the good in everything if you know how to look. There are many people who have perfected this mentality to the point where it is second nature for them, they make the choice to be happy despite whatever bad may be happening in their life. That doesn't mean they don't feel negative emotions, but in the face of that negativity they choose not to dwell on those thoughts, they choose not to entertain them. You can live a negative life and still choose to be happy. The beauty of the human mind is that it is so complex and flexible that it can learn to adapt to its circumstances.
At the same time, it's often easier to find the bad in everything. It's difficult to crawl out of a negative mindset because when it's all you know, you don't know how other people could be so deluded as to believe that life can be good at all. And sometimes it might be extremely difficult, seemingly impossible to realize that things can be different. I've known many severely mentally ill people in my personal life, and its truly incredible the progress that I have seen in people. We live in a society where depression, anxiety, mental illness, run rampant among the population. There are a few main reasons as to why I think this is but that's out of scope of the discussion. The beauty of the human mind is that it's complex and flexible, it can learn to adapt to its circumstances; that doesn't mean the adaptation is healthy. It's not a matter of good or bad, right or wrong. Morality is subjective and especially in the context of how our brain forms connections, how it forms habits, mindsets, the logic at play is too abstract. That doesn't necessarily mean the adaptation is permanent, or can't be healed to some degree if not outright changed. But it isn't easy to believe that such change is possible at all when you are falling down and endless pit of pain and torment.
I also think the flip side is probably true, in that someone lives a hard painful life that is fraught with sadness, but maybe they're moving in the right direction and feel some sense of deep accomplishment or anticipation of such to the point they'd say their life overall is happy.
It's a bit hard to quantify because where the human psyche is concerned it's impossible to understand every twist and turn and to account for every single variable. I believe for many people this can definitely be the case, for sure.
As someone who has lived a primarily negative life, even though I think I am going in the right direction, I'm definitely not "happy". That's not to say that I don't feel happiness, that there aren't things in my life that make me feel happy. Of course there are, that's the only reason I'm still breathing. But where climate is concerned, happiness isn't even really my goal in the immediate future. The bar is so low that my goal is to feel neutral and work up from there. I am happy that I am moving in a better direction, but that doesn't take away from the fact that I still have a lot of problems to deal with. I don't think I want to go into detail in public about how I feel this all applies to my own life. What I can say though, is that given how my life has played out, I find much more comfort in striving for neutrality/contentment as opposed to living a completely carefree, happy life. But that might be because I've lived on the complete opposite end of the spectrum for so long that the idea of going to another perceived extreme is discomforting.
I hope you make it through whatever you're working on though. I'm excited for you and I hope you get what you're hoping for out of your struggles, or at least get pointed in the right direction.
Thanks. I have a very long road ahead of me but I'll do what I can. It was the act of falling lower and lower, even when I thought I couldn't go any lower, that sort of flipped my "survival switch" in my mind. If that hadn't happened, I probably wouldn't be here yapping. I know all too well what it feels like to truly reach the bottom of the hypothetical bottomless pit, and that part of me hasn't gone anywhere. But now I'm capable of counteracting that force and that's not an opportunity I'm willing to waste.
It's quite obvious that I think about this sort of thing too much, isn't it? Lol
