HAPPINESS
by David Eide .

I always pin my unhappiness on one fact: I have distrusted a great deal; other people, family, "America", the world. An aspect of myself has at any rate. I never trusted the American experience, the "climb to the top" which for a writer is an absurd proposition. Competition is one thing but all the time, all the way? I certainly didn't trust the judgements of others, though I listened to them enough, every word, every pronouncement, every gesture seemed metaphysical in my youth. And it revealed a great desire for death, for escape, the fear of loneliness, scorn of the crowds that one was forced to be part of. None of that produced happiness.

I always saw wealth and the pursuit of it as the big bugaboo since it distorts sense, judgment, distorts everything imaginable and yet creates in its stead a kind of gargoyle. A kind of leering, sardonic aspect- religious in a way- but not devoted to any end except this exhaustion of itself. It can be rationalized away quite easily and yet it remains, stronger than ever. All this wealth and yet all this distress. A definite barrier to happiness.

I can rationalize the productive power of the society and defend it with the best of them. Anyone with an historical imagination can see that affluence creates the kind of security necessary for a bold, innovative society only if its members are willing to contradict the damn thing and set out for the future. That is a paradox that does not produce happiness. When wealth secures itself, it wants to secure itself even more firmly and reaches out to as wide a circle as possible and turns back the very need for the creative society. Therefore, at the bottom of it, in this relation with society, you have to be unyielding. Not necessarily cynical, but unyielding without distorting the good that appears from time to time. No happiness here.

Now I can pull back a moment and see that my first perception of the organized society was one of great temptation and dread. It appeared almost thoroughly homogenized. Huge of course, without rhyme or reason. Frantic and full of useless energy, demanding to be treated in its particulars as a kind of ruse not to find the secret of the whole. Organized media, for instance, appears as an attempt to bring some order out of that perception. And at the bottom of that perception are irrational fears, obsessions, superstitions, ideologies, the "dark desires"- even in the most pristine product. Waste is the great problem. Waste compounded by the fact that people are free to waste their energies and shouldn't be denied that freedom. Waste in organized society can be as easily rationalized by a company, government as a neurotic can rationalize his peculiarities. Perhaps it is many things but it is not happiness.

Electronic media turns reality into a continuous event. All objects, events, personalities, then, become One and the only force in human nature able to relate to the One is the unconscious force that finally becomes organized through the categories of class, race, sex but not happiness.

Free people can't afford to get locked into a funnel where all they fear and hate is the opposite of their own desires and aspirations. Do that and they get into the grip of some manipulative force that will tease them away from themselves and their potentials. They become the opposite and get into even worse trouble. That most certainly does not produce happiness.

I don't think the future is dark and murky. It appears that way if you don't have faith in anything. If you have faith in the sources that make that future dark and murky then obviously you have faith in the opposite of these things, the source out of which they spring.

The future is there like a mountain or the ocean we are tempted to explore. It produces adrenaline but rarely happiness.

Those of us who don't experience happiness have a maxim: The more knowledge is transformed into wisdom the less hostile and alienable it becomes. And wisdom is knowing whose experience and judgement to trust.

The experience of distrust is not enough to throw everything over. Experience itself, after all, is far more profound than the abstractions that come out of the ganglion of relations and attitudes. And that the overwhelming way that the society communicates with itself is through the relation of abstractions.

One learns how to eclipse the sense of a dark and murky future dominated by cityscapes, nuclear weapons and their insidious delivery systems, along with climate change. No happiness appears in any of them. The best advice is to have unbounded curiosity and find the way to integrate the finding of that curiosity. Meditate on those findings. Cast a baleful eye toward the mind or spirit who convinces you that they know, understand and are communicating the whole of it. They are communicating their own prejudice and not their happiness.

2008


Back to Essay Page

Back to davideide.com


© 2016 David Eide. All rights reserved.