happiness (serious)
Dec. 27th, 2001 10:23 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
chrisvenusSomething that I have thought about a lot in the last few years is "what is happiness" and what causes it.
We all go through ups and downs. Its the way of life. On the great happiness scale you go up and you go down. How do you measure that happiness though except as relative to yourself. What about your default level of happiness, should that be neither happy nor sad or should it always be happy?
I'm about to spew out a load of waffle, most of it detailing what I think makes up some of why I am happy and sad. Some of it missing out large chunks of information that I don't think other people want to know or maybe that I don't want other people to know...
I would appreciate comments on any of what I say below. None of it is sensitive to me really so I am happy for people to say what they will and would appreciate people's honest opinions. And I won't take offence if you say that I am talking a grand self-pitying pile of shit. :) So, on with the plot...
I didn't have a great childhood. I spent a fair bit of it being bullied at school and thoroughly hating my childhood. It was my surname that did it. "Venus the Penis" was a most unoriginal refrain that haunted me from the age of about 5. It seemed to me at that age that everybody that I wasn't actually friends with would taunt me and be rude and as I entered a new school I found even people I didn't know doing this to me. Quite probably this is why I am the shy person I am who always assumes that strangers will dislike me and resent my presence, the evidence in my youth seemed to suggest it.
The fact is though that after a while I started getting resilient to the names. As the old phrase went "sticks and stones will break my bones but words will never hurt me". A ludicrous assertion as I think most people probably realise. Looking back I think I just built big walls around the core of me. I stopped those words that hurt me but I stopped a lot more at the same time and withdrew into myself a lot.
I wasn't as miserable as I was but I don't know if I could say I was really happy.
I went to a boys only primary school and then from there moved onto a school that was boys only except for the sixth form. I made a couple of new friends but not many. In all the time that I was at school there are about 6 people that I would say I became good friends with. The rest were people I would hang around with and wouldn't feel uncomfortable with by default.
I was happyish. I went out with people. I smiled and laughed and joked with them but it never lasted longer than the moment. I'd never really thought about it until just then but I think even in the old days there was a touch of the depressive about me. I definitely remember going out for a walk one time near home. Never enjoyed walking but it was time to be alone, just listening to music on my walkman. This one time I just started crying for no reason. Not big uncontrollable sobs but just a huge dark cloud hanging over me and a couple of tears escaping from somewhere inside of me to the outside world and the outside me.
Is till recall the thought I had at the time. I'd read a star trek book recently dealing with the old days of the Vulcans. I don't recall it clearly but it was basically saying that they weren't emotionless entirely, just that they were very mentally disciplined to keep their emotions under control. But every now and then the emotions would leak out (or something) and that just reminded me of how I felt. Just once I clearly perceived the barriers in my mind and a glimpse of the poor little me inside.
OK. I feel that I have slipped into melodrama slightly at this point. At the time the moment was just a minor moment of worry, a slight confusion of why I was feeling like I did before getting on with my life. As with all memories though it is now being re-evaluated in light of more recent experiences.
And I get a horrible feeling that the majority of the comments I get on this will be to do with corrections on my understanding of Vulcans. :)
Anyway, on with the self-psychiatry. Analysing myself to try to understand the world and other people better and to give you some idea of me and my life.
I was probably about 15 when I first really got to know any girls. Shocking to some people I'm sure. You hear of some people who have had kids by that age but here was me with no social experience with girls since I was 4. (though as an aside I still remember my next door neighbour, a girl called Annette who I kissed when I was 4 and it still sticks in my memory. Just a kiss on the cheek but a strong memory none-the-less.)
Anyway, I remember this time clearly. We'd just started parties and drinking and stuff when we got to know girls. :) The Matt Keen Parties really did go down in legend to the local area - well known to the extent that when in a pub somebody said they recognised me and quoted the Keen parties as where they thought we'd met.
Anyway, I met girls and found that they were nice people. They seemed to be nice to me which was good unlike random blokes who as discussed earlier were nasty to me. Maybe this is why I tend to prefer spending time with girls than with boys. It could of course be because they are more attractive though, who knows. :)
I went out with two girls for a grand total of a fortnight each. Both of them failing for the same reason: When going out with a girl I had a bad tendency to not know what to do and to avoid the situation and hope it will go away. :) Strangely enough this got me dumped fairly quickly. :)
Friends of mine tended to have more success with women. Relationships lasting longer than a month (an impressive achievement in those days and the friend who hit three months was a champion). :)
I'm not sure where this is going really. Seems to be detouring but I suppose it gets to this point of being able to try to explain why I am at my state of happiness or unhappiness. I inherently believe that people are nice. I always believe this. I also believe that people will be nasty to me. So I guess since they are nice people they probably have good reason to be nasty to me. Then you get the other side of I really wanted to be with a girl but I had proved that it wasn't to be. Because of who I was they didn't want to be with me. All those fantasies I had (no, not that sort) of getting a girlfriend who would encourage me and get me over these hang-ups and so on never materialised and just left me looking around at people who had what I wanted while I had nothing.
When I was alone I didn't see the good things in life except from the point of view that other people had them and I didn't. Again I emphasize that this wasn't the way it was at the time. I never really thought about it much. Oh yes, I often thought how nice it would be to have a girlfriend and had crushes on many people who I hoped would like me one day and never did or turned me down. I have good memories of that time but also those memories come attached to memories of all the things I missed out on at the time.
University arrived. I ran away from people again. I spent so long telling myself and actually believing that I didn't care what other people thought but if that was so then why was I so afraid to go and talk to people and find out what they thought of me and whether they could be my friend. I slowly built up friends though through those on my course that I was forced into interaction with. That and the people I bumped into down in the computer room night after night as I explored the excitement of the internet.
It was the beginning of my second year when I was at a party where I knew virtually nobody. I chatted lots with a girl called Emma since she was one of the few people I knew and didn't seem inclined to rush off anywhere. When I came to head home at about 4AM (ah, those good old student days) she walked with me to get away from the party. I remember getting to college and some vague awkwardness as I asked her in. I was absolutely knackered but I was being polite. She came in and we chatted and stuff. I can't remember the order of events but I do recall her telling me that she had been waiting all night for me to kiss her (there was a funny line there but my crap memory has consigned it to oblivion) followed by us kissing, me falling asleep on my bed through exhaustion, her doing some washing up and tidying my room...
We went out for a while and in the end I had a dilemma of really liking another girl. This was quickly followed up by insecurity of her spending a lot of time with another friend. This problem was adequately solved by me hiding for a few weeks after which she started going out with my friend Stuart. No hard feelings really, especially since last I heard they were still together several years later. :)
A period in my life as a pined after another girl and in my own feeble way attempted to woo her. It worked to the extent that she was considering jumping on somebody else to try to fend me off. Eventually I persuaded her to go out with me and we went out and it was almost like I had imagined, somebody who was willing to take the sweet innocent me and tell me how I should do things.
It was some of the happiest moments of my life. In between a whole lot of insecurity of course but I was happy there. And then in a vicious twist of irony she had a dilemma of liking another guy so she dumped me to go out with him.
Never really looked at it like that and I can't help but find it mildly amusing. Back was I to the time of wanting a girl that was like the one I wanted. I can't put a definite definition on it but there were girls I went out with that weren't quite it. Distance in some cases, driving for an hour to get to somebody when I was working and couldn't usually be bothered to do so sucked (for her, a decision I made on her behalf). :)
Since then I have had so many girls that I have liked and failed to get anywhere with that I have almost given up. :) I think it is the commitment thing that causes me a major problem. I am afraid to commit to people partly because I am sure that somewhere down the line I will screw up.
SO here I am now. Single and with a grand total of about 6 or seven months of being properly attached behind me. There are worse I suppose so I shouldn't complain too much. The one thing I want now though is somebody that is mine: somebody that I can say "this is my girlfriend" and be proud; somebody that I can happily sit and put my arm around at a party without worrying what the gossips will all say; somebody that I can sit and put my arm around, comfortable with what I am doing and that I am not going to "wig out". I want to be happily attached and safe in the knowledge that she feels about me the same as I feel about her.
What are the chances of this happening any time soon? Not good. Not really very good at all. So does this mean I am not happy? Well, yes and no. Yes, often when I am alone at home in bed or whatever I find my mind wondering the many universes of "what if". I'm sure there are many universes that are worse than the one I am in but I have difficulty conceiving of feasible ones. Yes, I might have been hideously disfigured and crippled in a car accident but that is not something I consider a valid "what if". "what if" universes are all based on the premise of "what if I". They relate to different choices that *I* could have made and I often think the world would have been better for me had I made other choices. On the other hand I know that the world could be a lot worse for other people in these "what if I" universes.
This makes me a lot happier most of the time. At least it gives my perceived downs some kind of meaning. I am unhappy so that others might be happy. Its a kind of rule in my life. I consider putting myself out to make other people's lives easier a normal everyday thing to do. Some people take advantage of the fact that I do this and I don't mind. Some I know appreciate it and don't mention it and others show their appreciation but "Thank you"s often seem so worthless.
I think I have worked out how I want to die when I do. I want to do giving my life for somebody else. Noble sacrifices are always the things that get to me in films or books. One person giving their life for others. It would seem to be the focal point of the philosophy that guides my life. What worries me more though is that sometimes I feel like praying for it to happen soon. This is when I know I am not happy.
Something depressed me so truly and deeply the other day which was just a simple observation of what another person felt. They said roughly that they were worried about their state of mind because they had stopped walking down the street and being happy that the sun was shining, the grass was green and so on. Just happy about being. It bought a tear to my eye because I had never realised there was such a state.
I never remember being happy for no reason. I remember being randomly happy for good reasons (Exams are over, start of holiday, etc.) but never just because. Final proof in my opinion that my default state of happiness is unhappiness.
I don't know what the average default state is. It could be that most people think as I do and that my one friend is a lucky exception. I hope not though, I hope that I am miserable compared to everybody else because that would mean that the world was a happier place.
OK. That has turned into a long rant about what makes me personally miserable and why I think it does rather than dealing with happiness in any kind of general terms.
So happiness in general. Some things make me happy, some stop me feeling sad. Are they the same thing or are they two different things. Is distraction from being miserable actually something that I can say makes me happy but doesn't quite reach far enough or is it just something that lessens the sadness.
Talking on IRC as an example. Often I will do it as a form of escape. While I am on IRC I am talking and not thinking about other things. If I am talking almost formulaically, giving the required answers when people say things rather than getting involved in the conversation am I just staving off sadness or does it actually make me happy. I know that sometimes I will get enticed into the conversation, something somebody will say or somebody will do will pique my interest and bring me to life but that is then a different situation.
Happiness is such an intangible thing that as I sit here I realise that my opening essay wasn't as off topic as I thought. Happiness and sadness are things that are only easily definable by example. So can you truly quantify it even in a long definition? Are their rules about what promotes happiness and what doesn't or are there just guidelines and generalisations?
I am made happy by many things, sadly, none of which seem to be coming to mind at the moment. Can I define what makes me happy except by listing all the possibilities and similarly with sadness? I can generalise some of them. I don't have to list every person being killed individually as things that make me sad but I can lump them into one thing of "friends dying" or whatever. The trouble is even that doesn't always apply.
I recall when I was at school a friend of mine died in a car crash. I still remember him from time to time, we got on well and he had a lot of friends. I felt nothing when I heard he died, I still don't really. It didn't make me sad really, i just kind of shrugged and said "fair enough". Same happened when my Nan died. I loved her but hadn't really seen her that often since going to university so her death didn't really hit me particularly at all. I didn't shed a single tear for her.
However, when Erin died, my brother's girlfriend I was very upset. Not so much because of her but for my brother. He had really liked her and she was really good for him. I cried at the funeral partly because my brother wasn't and partly because she clearly had so many friends and had left behind a lot of things. I didn't cry because she was dead but because other people were upset by her death.
Does that tell you something about me? I don't know. It doesn't mean to say that I won't ever cry for anybody at their death but just that I still feel something less than maybe I should. It tells me that I still seem to live in a single moment. I'm not upset because somebody is dead because in that one moment it is no different to them just being elsewhere. My imaginary friend Jimmy could be dead or he could just not be here with me now. Does it make any difference? In the future it does, yes, in the present? no.
I've just been thinking about the people that I do love greatly and I will be upset when I hear they pass away (and apologies for staying on this morbid subject). Its the people who have become a habitual part of my life that I will cry about. My parents who have always been with me. My brother and sister who are just part of the world. They always have been and they always should be.
My cat, Timmy, died recently. He was 17 or something like that and we had had him since he was just a kitten. Most of my life he had been there and he was great. I remember him scratching my when we bought him home in the car and I remember all the times I've been at home, maxed out on the couch with him on my lap as I watched tele. Him coming up and sitting on my bed in the morning... I cried for my cat but not for my grandmother. Is that right? is that normal? It seems to me out of whack but it isn't. I saw that cat every day for the majority of my life. I've had great fun with him. My Nan however was great and lovely and funny at times too but she wasn't part of my life in the same way that Timmy was.
So off of that morbid conversation now. What makes me happy and sad seems to be split into two camps. There is the world stuff. Things that are to me universal constants or the breaking of them. My longing for a proper relationship seems to be a universal constant, so long unfulfilled that it has become a part of my life. Then there are other universal constants and when they change it has an affect on me. My cat was a universal constant and then suddenly he wasn't. That was going to have a profound affect on me.
The other side of it is the smaller localised instantaneous stuff. Having fun with friends, completing a computer game or maybe having a bad argument with a friend or failing an exam. These things tend to affect me on a much more localised scale, bringing up or down the happiness at a particular time but not in any long term way and in a way that will stop having any effect after some time.
The one flaw with this is that there is some crossover. The localised stuff can hook into some of my global constants and find purchase. My low self esteem is a global constant pretty much. It is vastly improved on what it was but it is still there as a global permanent downer in my life. I think I am crap and this makes me miserable. Localised things such as failing an exam only get me down in the short term but they leave a part of themselves in the global constant that of self-esteem. That exam can come back and haunt me at any time.
The other slight problem with my psyche working like this is that the global level of mood stuff only actually seems to work in the downward direction. I can't think of anything like that that will bring me up permanently. Immediate family and a few friends are global constants but the good things with them don't seem to fall into this camp. They don't seem to raise my overall background global happiness, they just work in the short term. This seems to be the symptom of something underlying my mind. The bad stuff sticks and the good stuff just flows off. Why? I don't know.
Anyway, it is getting far too late. I've been writing this for a couple of hours and I want to go to bed and rest my bloody neck which is killing me. And I still sometimes think I write too much. :)
We all go through ups and downs. Its the way of life. On the great happiness scale you go up and you go down. How do you measure that happiness though except as relative to yourself. What about your default level of happiness, should that be neither happy nor sad or should it always be happy?
I'm about to spew out a load of waffle, most of it detailing what I think makes up some of why I am happy and sad. Some of it missing out large chunks of information that I don't think other people want to know or maybe that I don't want other people to know...
I would appreciate comments on any of what I say below. None of it is sensitive to me really so I am happy for people to say what they will and would appreciate people's honest opinions. And I won't take offence if you say that I am talking a grand self-pitying pile of shit. :) So, on with the plot...
I didn't have a great childhood. I spent a fair bit of it being bullied at school and thoroughly hating my childhood. It was my surname that did it. "Venus the Penis" was a most unoriginal refrain that haunted me from the age of about 5. It seemed to me at that age that everybody that I wasn't actually friends with would taunt me and be rude and as I entered a new school I found even people I didn't know doing this to me. Quite probably this is why I am the shy person I am who always assumes that strangers will dislike me and resent my presence, the evidence in my youth seemed to suggest it.
The fact is though that after a while I started getting resilient to the names. As the old phrase went "sticks and stones will break my bones but words will never hurt me". A ludicrous assertion as I think most people probably realise. Looking back I think I just built big walls around the core of me. I stopped those words that hurt me but I stopped a lot more at the same time and withdrew into myself a lot.
I wasn't as miserable as I was but I don't know if I could say I was really happy.
I went to a boys only primary school and then from there moved onto a school that was boys only except for the sixth form. I made a couple of new friends but not many. In all the time that I was at school there are about 6 people that I would say I became good friends with. The rest were people I would hang around with and wouldn't feel uncomfortable with by default.
I was happyish. I went out with people. I smiled and laughed and joked with them but it never lasted longer than the moment. I'd never really thought about it until just then but I think even in the old days there was a touch of the depressive about me. I definitely remember going out for a walk one time near home. Never enjoyed walking but it was time to be alone, just listening to music on my walkman. This one time I just started crying for no reason. Not big uncontrollable sobs but just a huge dark cloud hanging over me and a couple of tears escaping from somewhere inside of me to the outside world and the outside me.
Is till recall the thought I had at the time. I'd read a star trek book recently dealing with the old days of the Vulcans. I don't recall it clearly but it was basically saying that they weren't emotionless entirely, just that they were very mentally disciplined to keep their emotions under control. But every now and then the emotions would leak out (or something) and that just reminded me of how I felt. Just once I clearly perceived the barriers in my mind and a glimpse of the poor little me inside.
OK. I feel that I have slipped into melodrama slightly at this point. At the time the moment was just a minor moment of worry, a slight confusion of why I was feeling like I did before getting on with my life. As with all memories though it is now being re-evaluated in light of more recent experiences.
And I get a horrible feeling that the majority of the comments I get on this will be to do with corrections on my understanding of Vulcans. :)
Anyway, on with the self-psychiatry. Analysing myself to try to understand the world and other people better and to give you some idea of me and my life.
I was probably about 15 when I first really got to know any girls. Shocking to some people I'm sure. You hear of some people who have had kids by that age but here was me with no social experience with girls since I was 4. (though as an aside I still remember my next door neighbour, a girl called Annette who I kissed when I was 4 and it still sticks in my memory. Just a kiss on the cheek but a strong memory none-the-less.)
Anyway, I remember this time clearly. We'd just started parties and drinking and stuff when we got to know girls. :) The Matt Keen Parties really did go down in legend to the local area - well known to the extent that when in a pub somebody said they recognised me and quoted the Keen parties as where they thought we'd met.
Anyway, I met girls and found that they were nice people. They seemed to be nice to me which was good unlike random blokes who as discussed earlier were nasty to me. Maybe this is why I tend to prefer spending time with girls than with boys. It could of course be because they are more attractive though, who knows. :)
I went out with two girls for a grand total of a fortnight each. Both of them failing for the same reason: When going out with a girl I had a bad tendency to not know what to do and to avoid the situation and hope it will go away. :) Strangely enough this got me dumped fairly quickly. :)
Friends of mine tended to have more success with women. Relationships lasting longer than a month (an impressive achievement in those days and the friend who hit three months was a champion). :)
I'm not sure where this is going really. Seems to be detouring but I suppose it gets to this point of being able to try to explain why I am at my state of happiness or unhappiness. I inherently believe that people are nice. I always believe this. I also believe that people will be nasty to me. So I guess since they are nice people they probably have good reason to be nasty to me. Then you get the other side of I really wanted to be with a girl but I had proved that it wasn't to be. Because of who I was they didn't want to be with me. All those fantasies I had (no, not that sort) of getting a girlfriend who would encourage me and get me over these hang-ups and so on never materialised and just left me looking around at people who had what I wanted while I had nothing.
When I was alone I didn't see the good things in life except from the point of view that other people had them and I didn't. Again I emphasize that this wasn't the way it was at the time. I never really thought about it much. Oh yes, I often thought how nice it would be to have a girlfriend and had crushes on many people who I hoped would like me one day and never did or turned me down. I have good memories of that time but also those memories come attached to memories of all the things I missed out on at the time.
University arrived. I ran away from people again. I spent so long telling myself and actually believing that I didn't care what other people thought but if that was so then why was I so afraid to go and talk to people and find out what they thought of me and whether they could be my friend. I slowly built up friends though through those on my course that I was forced into interaction with. That and the people I bumped into down in the computer room night after night as I explored the excitement of the internet.
It was the beginning of my second year when I was at a party where I knew virtually nobody. I chatted lots with a girl called Emma since she was one of the few people I knew and didn't seem inclined to rush off anywhere. When I came to head home at about 4AM (ah, those good old student days) she walked with me to get away from the party. I remember getting to college and some vague awkwardness as I asked her in. I was absolutely knackered but I was being polite. She came in and we chatted and stuff. I can't remember the order of events but I do recall her telling me that she had been waiting all night for me to kiss her (there was a funny line there but my crap memory has consigned it to oblivion) followed by us kissing, me falling asleep on my bed through exhaustion, her doing some washing up and tidying my room...
We went out for a while and in the end I had a dilemma of really liking another girl. This was quickly followed up by insecurity of her spending a lot of time with another friend. This problem was adequately solved by me hiding for a few weeks after which she started going out with my friend Stuart. No hard feelings really, especially since last I heard they were still together several years later. :)
A period in my life as a pined after another girl and in my own feeble way attempted to woo her. It worked to the extent that she was considering jumping on somebody else to try to fend me off. Eventually I persuaded her to go out with me and we went out and it was almost like I had imagined, somebody who was willing to take the sweet innocent me and tell me how I should do things.
It was some of the happiest moments of my life. In between a whole lot of insecurity of course but I was happy there. And then in a vicious twist of irony she had a dilemma of liking another guy so she dumped me to go out with him.
Never really looked at it like that and I can't help but find it mildly amusing. Back was I to the time of wanting a girl that was like the one I wanted. I can't put a definite definition on it but there were girls I went out with that weren't quite it. Distance in some cases, driving for an hour to get to somebody when I was working and couldn't usually be bothered to do so sucked (for her, a decision I made on her behalf). :)
Since then I have had so many girls that I have liked and failed to get anywhere with that I have almost given up. :) I think it is the commitment thing that causes me a major problem. I am afraid to commit to people partly because I am sure that somewhere down the line I will screw up.
SO here I am now. Single and with a grand total of about 6 or seven months of being properly attached behind me. There are worse I suppose so I shouldn't complain too much. The one thing I want now though is somebody that is mine: somebody that I can say "this is my girlfriend" and be proud; somebody that I can happily sit and put my arm around at a party without worrying what the gossips will all say; somebody that I can sit and put my arm around, comfortable with what I am doing and that I am not going to "wig out". I want to be happily attached and safe in the knowledge that she feels about me the same as I feel about her.
What are the chances of this happening any time soon? Not good. Not really very good at all. So does this mean I am not happy? Well, yes and no. Yes, often when I am alone at home in bed or whatever I find my mind wondering the many universes of "what if". I'm sure there are many universes that are worse than the one I am in but I have difficulty conceiving of feasible ones. Yes, I might have been hideously disfigured and crippled in a car accident but that is not something I consider a valid "what if". "what if" universes are all based on the premise of "what if I". They relate to different choices that *I* could have made and I often think the world would have been better for me had I made other choices. On the other hand I know that the world could be a lot worse for other people in these "what if I" universes.
This makes me a lot happier most of the time. At least it gives my perceived downs some kind of meaning. I am unhappy so that others might be happy. Its a kind of rule in my life. I consider putting myself out to make other people's lives easier a normal everyday thing to do. Some people take advantage of the fact that I do this and I don't mind. Some I know appreciate it and don't mention it and others show their appreciation but "Thank you"s often seem so worthless.
I think I have worked out how I want to die when I do. I want to do giving my life for somebody else. Noble sacrifices are always the things that get to me in films or books. One person giving their life for others. It would seem to be the focal point of the philosophy that guides my life. What worries me more though is that sometimes I feel like praying for it to happen soon. This is when I know I am not happy.
Something depressed me so truly and deeply the other day which was just a simple observation of what another person felt. They said roughly that they were worried about their state of mind because they had stopped walking down the street and being happy that the sun was shining, the grass was green and so on. Just happy about being. It bought a tear to my eye because I had never realised there was such a state.
I never remember being happy for no reason. I remember being randomly happy for good reasons (Exams are over, start of holiday, etc.) but never just because. Final proof in my opinion that my default state of happiness is unhappiness.
I don't know what the average default state is. It could be that most people think as I do and that my one friend is a lucky exception. I hope not though, I hope that I am miserable compared to everybody else because that would mean that the world was a happier place.
OK. That has turned into a long rant about what makes me personally miserable and why I think it does rather than dealing with happiness in any kind of general terms.
So happiness in general. Some things make me happy, some stop me feeling sad. Are they the same thing or are they two different things. Is distraction from being miserable actually something that I can say makes me happy but doesn't quite reach far enough or is it just something that lessens the sadness.
Talking on IRC as an example. Often I will do it as a form of escape. While I am on IRC I am talking and not thinking about other things. If I am talking almost formulaically, giving the required answers when people say things rather than getting involved in the conversation am I just staving off sadness or does it actually make me happy. I know that sometimes I will get enticed into the conversation, something somebody will say or somebody will do will pique my interest and bring me to life but that is then a different situation.
Happiness is such an intangible thing that as I sit here I realise that my opening essay wasn't as off topic as I thought. Happiness and sadness are things that are only easily definable by example. So can you truly quantify it even in a long definition? Are their rules about what promotes happiness and what doesn't or are there just guidelines and generalisations?
I am made happy by many things, sadly, none of which seem to be coming to mind at the moment. Can I define what makes me happy except by listing all the possibilities and similarly with sadness? I can generalise some of them. I don't have to list every person being killed individually as things that make me sad but I can lump them into one thing of "friends dying" or whatever. The trouble is even that doesn't always apply.
I recall when I was at school a friend of mine died in a car crash. I still remember him from time to time, we got on well and he had a lot of friends. I felt nothing when I heard he died, I still don't really. It didn't make me sad really, i just kind of shrugged and said "fair enough". Same happened when my Nan died. I loved her but hadn't really seen her that often since going to university so her death didn't really hit me particularly at all. I didn't shed a single tear for her.
However, when Erin died, my brother's girlfriend I was very upset. Not so much because of her but for my brother. He had really liked her and she was really good for him. I cried at the funeral partly because my brother wasn't and partly because she clearly had so many friends and had left behind a lot of things. I didn't cry because she was dead but because other people were upset by her death.
Does that tell you something about me? I don't know. It doesn't mean to say that I won't ever cry for anybody at their death but just that I still feel something less than maybe I should. It tells me that I still seem to live in a single moment. I'm not upset because somebody is dead because in that one moment it is no different to them just being elsewhere. My imaginary friend Jimmy could be dead or he could just not be here with me now. Does it make any difference? In the future it does, yes, in the present? no.
I've just been thinking about the people that I do love greatly and I will be upset when I hear they pass away (and apologies for staying on this morbid subject). Its the people who have become a habitual part of my life that I will cry about. My parents who have always been with me. My brother and sister who are just part of the world. They always have been and they always should be.
My cat, Timmy, died recently. He was 17 or something like that and we had had him since he was just a kitten. Most of my life he had been there and he was great. I remember him scratching my when we bought him home in the car and I remember all the times I've been at home, maxed out on the couch with him on my lap as I watched tele. Him coming up and sitting on my bed in the morning... I cried for my cat but not for my grandmother. Is that right? is that normal? It seems to me out of whack but it isn't. I saw that cat every day for the majority of my life. I've had great fun with him. My Nan however was great and lovely and funny at times too but she wasn't part of my life in the same way that Timmy was.
So off of that morbid conversation now. What makes me happy and sad seems to be split into two camps. There is the world stuff. Things that are to me universal constants or the breaking of them. My longing for a proper relationship seems to be a universal constant, so long unfulfilled that it has become a part of my life. Then there are other universal constants and when they change it has an affect on me. My cat was a universal constant and then suddenly he wasn't. That was going to have a profound affect on me.
The other side of it is the smaller localised instantaneous stuff. Having fun with friends, completing a computer game or maybe having a bad argument with a friend or failing an exam. These things tend to affect me on a much more localised scale, bringing up or down the happiness at a particular time but not in any long term way and in a way that will stop having any effect after some time.
The one flaw with this is that there is some crossover. The localised stuff can hook into some of my global constants and find purchase. My low self esteem is a global constant pretty much. It is vastly improved on what it was but it is still there as a global permanent downer in my life. I think I am crap and this makes me miserable. Localised things such as failing an exam only get me down in the short term but they leave a part of themselves in the global constant that of self-esteem. That exam can come back and haunt me at any time.
The other slight problem with my psyche working like this is that the global level of mood stuff only actually seems to work in the downward direction. I can't think of anything like that that will bring me up permanently. Immediate family and a few friends are global constants but the good things with them don't seem to fall into this camp. They don't seem to raise my overall background global happiness, they just work in the short term. This seems to be the symptom of something underlying my mind. The bad stuff sticks and the good stuff just flows off. Why? I don't know.
Anyway, it is getting far too late. I've been writing this for a couple of hours and I want to go to bed and rest my bloody neck which is killing me. And I still sometimes think I write too much. :)
Re: More self-pitying shite...
Date: 2002-01-08 04:59 pm (UTC)I would also like to appologise for the failings of LJ and my inability to work it right, as between us we are the reason this is so badly formatted.
Re: More self-pitying shite...
Date: 2002-01-09 12:07 am (UTC)Just wondering and not sure if the lack of identity was a deliberate thing or just an oversight...
Actually I have another question: "What is a MacMillan nurse?"
Oh, and as for ranting about brothers. Get yourself a live journal and do it there. :) Live Journals are fun. :)
Re: More self-pitying shite...
Date: 2002-01-09 06:14 am (UTC)MacMillan nurses are the really nice people from MacMillan cancer relief (www.macmillan.org.uk) who look after terminally ill patients in their own homes.
Finally, I don't think a LiveJournal is for me. The various times I have tried keeping a diary I always failed after about two or three months.
Re: More self-pitying shite...
Date: 2002-01-09 12:03 pm (UTC)Oh, and you can still sign your name at the bottom of a post, even if it is being posted anonymously. :)
Re: More self-pitying shite...
Date: 2002-01-09 05:24 pm (UTC)Ah, I think I have been misleading on the brother front, the second funeral was his (I think this fact may have been lost trimming it for LJ), so looking for people with brothers will be a dead end here. Basically I didn't care if _you_ knew who I am, however there could be all sorts of weirdos (and roleplayers) reading this, and this is one of the reasons I don't like the idea of an online journal. Oh well, I will sign this one so all you curious people out there will find out. Incidently, who owns the content of LJ? will they be selling it in the future, or providing a google-style interface to it? The privacy policy page says nothing about the content of the journals. Oh and the other reason, was that I didn't want to give the impression I was trying to get more sympathy than you, or do "one better".
David
Re: More self-pitying shite...
Date: 2002-01-10 01:10 pm (UTC)As for the Live Journal thing, I figure that I don't mind those who know me reading what I write here (I don't make anything publically available that I would object to people reading). Those who don't know me, the strangers and weirdos that you speak of I don't care about since there is not a lot they can do with the information since they don't know me.
I suppose I do have a tendency to not think of people onthe internet as real people though so I am happy to say things on here that I wouldn't say to most people's face. I just tend to be a lot more shy and withdrawn in real life than I am on the internet.
Oh, and I don't really give a monkeys about privacy policy. ITs my life and I will write about it wherever I want. If they sell stuff I write for huge amounts of money then I think I'd be almost as happy knowing that I produced such valuable stuff as I would be with the hard cash. :)