Searching For Happiness In All The Wrong Places

Happiness.

I’ve read about it, thought about it, written a book about it, and lectured on it.

The only thing I haven’t done with happiness is actually feel it.

Which is embarrassing to say just 13 days before my 70th birthday.

I could be glib about this milestone, as so many are, and recite some self-serving bullshit like, “You are only as old as you feel.”

No.

You are as old you are, no more, no less.

The question is how much have you learned in the years you won’t get back.  What have you learned that you can use now?

Or maybe the real question is whether you are happy.  Not in the sense of the temporary euphoria that comes with a new toy, or a new fuck toy, but a profound satisfaction that comes from knowing that you discovered and followed your passion.

Many in my generation said our passion was peace.

History says we settled for a piece of the action instead.

No matter how long our hair was in 1969, the odds are we abandoned our dreams of peace and love and equality and in its place inserted money, the almighty fucking dollar.

We saw the beginning of the end of Empire, and were the first generation to call bullshit on the “greatest nation,” one that venerates money and violence.

Yet, we fell into the abyss anyway.

No, we jumped into it.

And the generations that followed ours have learned nothing from history and have continued to make the same mistakes over and over and over believing more will become enough and that we can and should kill anyone who doesn’t bow to our greatness.

That was and is the existential error.

Not only by abandoning our higher principles, but in selling the only thing we have ever really had or will have:  time.

For most of us that meant the grind of a meaningless job or starting a business making shit for landfills, getting up to an alarm clock, mind-numbing traffic, meetings that accomplished nothing, countless hours in airports sitting in cheap plastic seats waiting for planes that would never come, rental cars in early mornings trying to find still another address where we didn’t want to be, living fantasies of vanquishing competitors and in the process dehumanizing them in order to justify fucking them over without a tinge of guilt, never considering that the competition itself was an illusion, a sleight of hand trick, pure bullshit created and fed to us by those who had a vested interested in our pissing away our lives.

Yes, you.  And yes, me.

Which brings me to the photo above sent to me by an old friend.  He took it last week in San Antonio, Texas.

There was something about this picture that piqued my interest, something I couldn’t put my finger on until it struck me that this is what happiness looks like:  finding your passion, pursuing it, making others happy, not competing with imaginary enemies, all while politely asking for your needs to be met.

November 13, 2021

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