Nov 18 2021 : Happiness and Lack as “Problems”
Nov 18, 2021
Kentucky has little significance to me; the weather is extreme and rarely consistent. I am aware that some will disagree but sometimes we have to admit to ourselves that we simply love complaining. It must be one of those days where I have the desire to be miserable and completely immerse myself in it. After all, happiness must be a scam, a sly commodity that we are all willing to spend top dollar on. Don’t know how to be happy? Go to your nearest bookstore and grab yourself a nice “help book”.
The art of being miserable is rarely embraced or taught. I don’t want to be cured. I want to live in my poetic, pathological chaos. My “daddy or mommy issues” is a funny way of saying there’s a problem. But it often reminds me of a funny line my friend used to say concerning his daily drinking: “I’m not an alcoholic if I don’t find it to be a problem”. The point made is that it’s only a problem if we believe it’s a problem.
Not being happy, is a glorified problem we truly believe in. As if, we don’t already pretend to partake enjoyment of out being utterly miserable. If I had one wish, it would be for people to be more open about this “forbidden” enjoyment. Our concern for happiness exemplifies the extent of this enjoyment by making it a problem. This creates an interesting dilemma worth philosophical exploration.
The fundamental root of happiness as a problem is the way we understand lack itself. Lack is the primordial problem yet it is us that created/produced lack to be a “problem”. Yes, you feel as if you are “lacking” something, something vital in life but it is how we interpret that feeling that lack itself becomes constructed. How do we determine that sadness is the result of lacking something? Rather than sadness driving you to create something? If anything, emotions are the primordial labor of all productivity. It’s only when we refuse to confront those emotions head on, that we “are missing something”, that we are “lacking something”.
To what extent are you willing to become happy? In attempt to answer this question, we are unconsciously or consciously already driving ourselves to create a circumstance/ mindset where we can be “happy”. The desire is productive/ creative as a whole. A problem is not because we lack a solution but because we enjoy constructing a problem. Philosophy is not philosophy because it provides solutions but because it has historically criticized assumptions and problematized them. Or perhaps, a more intimate example, when a close friend says, “you didn’t show up for my birthday, I thought we were best friends?”