What exactly are we all chasing? Life doesn't have to be a constant run to an ideal destination. There is no ideal destination. We all arrive at different points than we originally set out on. Some want to paint but become bankers. Others want to cook but become advertisers. But what they all share in common is a winding road that brought them to a place they never saw at the start of the journey.
Sure, some of us lucky ones get to be where we want to be. But that dream life is a station passing on the tracks. For a few sparse moments, it will all align and you will spend a few days at Dreamville. Each of us go through that happy time. Some are unlucky enough to reach it in school itself while others only arrive at it a few years before the inevitable end. But I sometimes wonder, where would they have gone if given a choice?
You see, the truth is that we can't live in Dreamville all our life. Everything gets boring after a while. Even chocolate. And that's when we get back on the train and get back to another chase. We think, "Hey, I fulfilled this dream. Let me find a new one now." But why? Why do so few of us choose to stay at the closest thing to our dream life?
I think it's because society ingrains an imaginary hunger in us. It tells us to keep going. To keep chugging. To supersize life. To never be satisfied. As if being content is akin to having given up. That there's somehow something wrong with not wanting a career. Not wanting to rise up the ladder of a corporate scale is made to feel like a weakness. I myself believed that. In fact, a part of me still does. But the question mark is growing bigger and bigger.
No rule of modern life is meant for comfort. That isn't something you are allowed to reach on your own. You have to buy it at discount rates from Swedish designer stores. You have to stock it in a can in the fridge until you are ready to be comforted. They attach labels on things and convince you that comfort comes with a bill and sometimes with an added service tax. They con you into believing happiness is always just out of reach and, worry not, you'll get there eventually. IF not, you can visit for a while with this expensive ticket away from your home. They call it ambition and make motivational posters to decorate wafer-thin cubicle walls. They thrust smiling faces from stock photographs in your face as examples of people who've 'made it'. And the whole time I can't help but feel, no one makes it.
Because, if you really examine it, here's the incredible truth - happiness isn't passing you by. It's right there and you are ignoring it like a station on the way to Greater Satisfaction that may or may not arrive. Don't mistake happiness as not being sad. If your loved one dies, there is no happiness there. But, if you pull out and examine the timeline of your life, you'll realise that such sadness is momentary. The greater happiness can be taken by the hands and carried with you.
I feel we understand this fact as children. You give a child a balloon and his life is fulfilled. He isn't happy just for the moment. His life seems made. He doesn't worry that the balloon will burst. In fact, after the first one does, he probably won't care if it bursts. To a child, that balloon means his life is complete. You might argue that it's ignorance that leads to this happiness because the child doesn't understand the world yet. But that only strengthens what I said earlier, that society ingrains it in us. It tells us to be unhappy. So that you can get used to it. It disguises the fact by telling you not everyone can be happy, but the truth is not everyone can be successful by society's standards. And not everyone has to be.
Look at all the successful people in the world who are either depressed or drugging themselves to crack a smile. Because the word on the grapevine says you can never be satisfied. A little birdy comes along and shits in their ear. So much so that they forget how happy the balloon made them as a kid. Our education teaches us to measure ourselves against others, it never shows us our own value. And when a majority of the population is chewed and spat out by this system, it becomes a belief.
So we accept unhappiness as the only thing that can make us strive. We even pull a blanket over our heads and say, "You can only know what's happiness when you've first known sadness. So, I have to get through this and strive harder than the rest." I call bullshit on that. If working harder made you happier, slaves would've been smiling.
This illusion that we have to chase, that life has to be lived by the minute and on-the-move is the greatest lie we ever bought into. And now they've designed the world around it. Fast cars to spend more money on. Fast trains to get you to a dead-end job sooner. Fast internet to distract you with more, quicker. Fast lives because you know that life is passing you by. Look at all the successful people on your friend's list. Look at their magnificent lives with a million Instagram filters. Unless you have that, you won't be happy. You can't be happy. You aren't allowed to be happy.
Because happiness is supposed to be this drug reserved for the few. It lies at the top of a mythical peak which your career has to summit before you are a certain age. And then you have to fight to remain there. We run ourselves dry chasing a dream and, somewhere along the way, we forget that we can dream by simply closing our eyes. We have the power within us and they make us spend our energies in a struggle. And ever so often, they'll throw a few million more into the pit and tell them it's the only way to live. If we can crawl out in one piece, we'll be happy. If we chase long enough, we'll be satisfied.
Yet, when you reach the top, there's another battle waiting. And by the time you realise that it will never end, it's too late. The struggle is the only life we know and casting it aside is like severing a limb. There's a reason the biggest CEO's in the world are unhappy. They have traded their dreams for ultimate focus on one single goal which only 1% will achieve. The other 99 are just there to scare you into believing that anything else is utter failure.
So we chase and we struggle. We fight and we crawl, tooth and nail, to a promised place. To the Ultimate Dreamville where we'll never have to leave again. And in the chase we forget to look out the window and watch the scenery going by. We forget the balloon that made us so happy way back, when we had still had our innocence. All because it's so easy to distract us and so hard to really direct us towards a good life. Because if you think about it, there is no better life out there. All there is, is your life. You can be good where you are and change the world for one other person. Or you can be sad trying to get somewhere else and change a world that, honestly, doesn't give a flying fuck. Because the world doesn't care if you are happy. Only you can. And you have to. The only other option is to keep chasing until your legs give way under you and you suddenly realise that happiness was right behind you all along and, if only you'd slowed down, it could have caught up long ago.
