Happy New Year Chumps

2021. Another end.

2022. Another beginning.

More resolutions and promises. Another pack of lies we tell ourselves and others that amount to this: this year will be better IF I change myself.

Richer. Thinner. Prettier. Smarter. More productive, desirable, lovable. Better job, house, location. The list goes on.

And it is all 100% low grade bullshit.

Science has gotten a bad name since the moron-a-thon labeled life-saving vaccines a plot to steal the freedom they never had, but that same science tells us this about happiness: most of it is determined at birth. It is genetic. No different than how tall you are. It is how tall you were destined to be.

And all the self-help and smiley-face books and YouTube and Tik Tok babbling doesn’t change a thing.

You are congenitally happy or you are not.

If you are, wonderful. Keep sleeping.

And if you are not, it may be because you have been given the intelligence to see life for what it is: a mostly meaningless experience to which we have been told to assign meaning. And we are the only species to have an ego so outsized to do so. It is why we feel guilt and fear and shame. It is why we believe there is something external that can make it all right.

And for most in modernity, that something is money. Even in the face of overwhelming evidence that money beyond that required for food, shelter, and clothing, has no long term impact on satisfaction or happiness, most go all in on the fantasy of more and work in jobs they hate believing money will make their miserable lives different once they have “enough,” not understanding that enough is a decision, not an amount.

The most intelligent people I have ever known are the most melancholy, reflective and often sad. They call bullshit on, well, nearly everything. They realize that happiness is mostly feigned, always temporary, and that most people are too stupid to know it which is why most of the brightest are loners or surround themselves with few others like themselves.

Most men lead lives of quiet desperation and go to the grave with the song still in them.

HENRY DAVID THOREAU

They know 99%+ of their fellow humans give a shit about one thing - themselves, and that care, compassion and concern is a cheap vaudeville act that we learn and believe because because we want to believe it. No one wants to believe we are all competing for the same crap and willing to chew the nuts off our competitors to get it.

We want to believe that we are important. We are not. None of us. We want to believe we won’t die, even to the point of believing in fairies, or if we do die, at least we won’t die alone, even though dying is always alone. We believe there is the perfect partner out there, somewhere who will love us more than they love themselves, the one who magically resolves our lives and of whom we never tire. We want to believe we will be remembered even though we know as a matter of certainty we won’t. Don’t believe it? Who was your great-grandfather? I rest my case. Dead is dead. You’re not on the ladder to crawl over anymore. You can’t do anything for anyone else. You are irrelevant. Forgotten. In short order.

Back to the smartest and most intuitive: many have committed suicide, and most have considered it, not because they are profoundly unhappy, but because they can’t come up with a credible reason for living. Others in the know look at life as a game in which they are players, but mostly observers, a game they don’t take seriously, don’t strive to win, but live each moment as it is, not judging what it should be, not laboring under the illusion that it should be fair, and not taking it personally if only because they know the only truth that matters:

It doesn’t matter.

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