i've been having conversations with a friend i recently met in class. conversations about questions i rarely hear people ask. i'm not really sure why she kept on asking them but in a way, i enjoy answering.
because of those conversations, i realized that people have forgotten to ask about certain things. perhaps many have already given up their hopes of at least getting close to an answer. but for us, maybe we are just a bit more persistent.
on happiness
i'd like to share an insight [my take] on [the state of] happiness and sadness since a conversation with this friend once touched on this topic and we never really had the chance to talk about it much.
anyway, the gist of it was that she categorized herself as emo and in some part of our long conversation, it was mentioned that i am a happy person. in a way, we both just agreed on what we thought were true but thinking now, i realized otherwise. she is far more happy than i am.
[before i go further, i'll just clarify that beyond this point, i will be assuming that emo is being in the state of sadness or the state of looking for sadness, and happiness is the absence/lack of sadness and vice versa. this is to keep things simple and in a way, avoid branching of topics]
let me ask you a couple of questions...
what is more believable?
1. to say that i am a happy person OR
2. to say that i want to be happy?
in her case,
1. to say that she is a sad person OR
2. to say that she prefers to look at/for sad things?
in both cases, i think the latter statements are more valid.
hence i'll proceed to my next point.
the word 'want' is essential to what i want to point out. you see, when we start to want, it means that we feel that what we have right now is not what we want. perhaps we want more of what we have, or on the other hand, we might want the exact opposite of what we have. this might be the same with happiness and sadness.
since i'm looking for [wanting] happiness, currently, that makes me sad. and since she's looking for sadness, it might be that she lacks sadness in her current state, and following the assumption made above, it follows that she is currently happy.
[another assumption for simplicity's sake: one can only be truly happy then truly sad and vice versa. also, one can't be happy now then happier later and vice versa]
simply put,
i want to be happy in the future = i am sad now
she wants to be sad in the future = she is happy now
this is because aiming for happiness means that you are in fact not happy about your current state and looking for sadness means that you are lacking sadness [which means that for a tiniest bit, you are happy].
anyway, this insight does not aim to confine happiness and sadness into a simple black and white kind of statement. rather, it simply questions one's claim [specifically our claim] on identifying people amongst the happy and amongst the sad.
i'm not stating any fact. i, however, am just trying to present a topic for further arguments.
maybe you're already itching to rebut every word above.
feel free.
__________
what do you think ma'am evil genius?
am i happy?
