I’ve recently watched a youtube video, by one of the very well known youtubers. His video was titled “Forced Positivity”. Essentially during the whole video he talks about how there is this trend of people who are acting as if they are happy all the time, and are not being honest with themselves. He then makes the distinction that constant happiness can not be achieved and to be honest is better then to be happy. During the whole video he gave off a sense of bitterness. This had me thinking about several different things. I would have to ask a couple of questions and ponder them.
Why has modern society become complacent with misery,
or rather the lack of true happiness that we see in today’s world. Modern society has skewed the image of happiness to this superficial fleeing emotions. Now this youtuber is known to be very well off and makes more money in a year then like 90% of the worlds population, he also has a very beautiful girlfriends and a loving family and friends. So why then does he come off as bitter? you can almost see it in his eyes that he just isn’t happy, as he would put it “I’m just ok…”.
You kind of have to sit back and think about the wise old proverb that “things” cannot buy you happiness, but neither can family and friends apparently. Whats he missing?
I’ve always like to view true happiness as not an overly chipper emotions, but rather a state of internal harmony and a content spirit. You are not in need or want of anything. Not only that, but you come to a realization, that you have no control over your own life so you leave it to the powers that be. When we try to control every aspect of our lives we’ll just end up driving ourselves insane. When we try to fulfill our lives with things such as money, success, friends, fun etc… we end up becoming internally empty.
This “emptiness” is what causes bitterness, depression, loneliness, sadness and so on. The truly sad thing is we’ve made this the norm. Everyone feels these things and we’ve just accepted it… we’ve stopped asking the question: is there something better then this?
I’m not going to list off “the top 5 things you can do to be happy!” because that’s non-sensical. Rather I implore the reader to meditate on what it truly means to be happy, and how can he achieve that True happiness?
The Solitary Scribe.
The Solitary Scribe 