Mike and Ike Happiness
I spend far too much time contemplating happiness and what happiness is. Entire afternoons are wasted as I stare off into the distance wondering if I am happy or not because I keep wondering if I am really happy or if some gland just spurted some chemical and I think I’m happy due to that chemical effect but I’m not really happy.
I should mention I also spend far too much time contemplating the nature of reality, what is real, how can we know… I try to keep this to myself because it annoys other people too much.
Moving on… I recently read an article that said people with who remember their past in positive terms tend to be happier than people who look upon their past with negativity.
“…researchers found that people who tend to focus on regrets and negative experiences are not as satisfied with their lives as those who maintain a rosier view of the past.” (http://health.usnews.com/health-news/family-health/brain-and-behavior/articles/2011/05/10/fond-memories-of-the-past-make-for-a-happier-present)
This theory does seem to have a causal issue… do people with happy childhoods have happy adulthoods? Do people with crappy pasts have crappy futures? Obviously the answer is yes, but since I’m feeling playful I’m going to assume it is possible for a person with a crappy childhood to still remember the past fondly.
As I dealt with in my Defending My Life series and my post Learning to Forgive Yourself, I dwell a lot on my mistakes, the past, my regrets. I regret the actions I took, I regret the actions I didn’t take. That is something to keep in mind when people talk about regret. They always talk about the regret you feel if you don’t do something but they never point out you can regret doing something as well. “Life is pain, Princess. Anyone telling you differently is lying or trying to sell you something.” I may have misquoted that line and I will regret not looking it up after I hit that publish button.
We all know you don’t achieve a mental state of happiness. Happiness is not a destination, it is an emotion. Just like sadness. Mindless pursuit of happiness is pointless and bound to create intense feelings of ‘Waaaah!’ so we have to stop thinking like that. We aren’t here to be happy. We are here to be here and if we happen to find happiness – good for us, but the universe never wrote happiness in its Terms of Service. Happiness is most likely a bug in the system, not a feature, and in the next version upgrade, happiness and sadness will be done away with, replaced with a new emotional state controller. Until that upgrade, though, we chase happiness like we chase Easter Eggs in programs.
Back in eighth grade I was part of a group of students who go to get out of music class in order to write programs in the computer lab. The programs were supposed to be for the music students but really it was an excuse to incubate us and allow us the extra time to really learn how to use and program the computers. While working in a word processing program on the Commodore 64, I believe it was OmniWriter, one of my fellow computer nerds (Rich was his name, I actually recall the names of each and every one of those guys) hit a combination of keys and the computer came alive with a synth-tastic rendition of “Pomp and Circumstance”. It was one of the most thrilling moments of my life. This was a word processing program… it wasn’t supposed to play music!
Jump ahead a decade (or two *ahem*) and there I am sitting on my futon, yes, I’m a forty year old man with a futon, I know that is wrong but I plan on moving again in the future and I don’t want to have to move a big ol’ couch. Where was I? Right, I was on the sitting place, contemplating what happiness is and munching on Mike and Ikes – that crappy candy you only ever really get at the movies because you feel like you should get something… I mean what are you going to do with your hands while watching the movie and that popcorn is caloric murder… I tend to buy candy like that at the grocery store when it is on sale at the grocery store because I can sneak it into the movie theater and save like twenty bucks.
I was mindless eating my Mike and Ikes which I had opened because I just wanted a taste of something sweet. I shook the box to get some more out and discovered much to my dismay that I had eat them all. No more for me. Done. Kaput. I felt a sudden wave of regret (and shame) since I had eaten that last handful without really tasting and savoring them. I had slipped into the mindless munching of someone contemplating deep meaningful concepts like happiness.
I got up and went to toss the box in the garbage when I heard a rattle. “Pray tell, what’s this,” I thought to myself and peeked in the box. Oh joy, oh happiness! Look! Hidden from me, stuck to the bottom and now free, were three more Mike and Ikes. I actually recognized the feeling, it was that same feeling I had in that computer lab. It was joy, it was true happiness. Is that what happiness is? Unexpected wonderment? I think it is.
A few weeks ago I stilled my nerves and actually wrote to someone on OKCupid. I know it is a dating site and that is what people do, but I don’t. I see people, think about, then don’t. Because people are icky. I wrote, and heard nothing back. This is common. Yet, I felt I had screwed up. I was regretting the action I took. I completely understand someone not being interested in me ‘in that way’ because honestly, I’m a pile of neurosis, ‘rules’, and fear which can have two seconds of Woody Allen of cute and months upon months of headaches. My concern and problem was the proximity of this person to me in real life and Gah! my fear of judgment, failure and all that noise came crashing down on me. I had to at least make it so I could walk through my neighborhood with some dignity. I contacted her again, not to admonish her for not contacting me (please, who does this? Get a life.) but to clarify (that is usually a bad thing) and to release her, and thus me, from any social contract that may have accidentally formed by my first message. (Oh yes, you are getting a peek into the nutty world of a pessimistic introvert. It is like a Seinfeld episode… on crack.) She replied back with a very sweet message stating a lack of interest but still very ego affirming which was very kind of her and completely unnecessary. So I didn’t get the date but I was happy. An unexpected good thing came from a completely unexpected source.
This is not a happiness formula.
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About Sean
Sean D. Francis is a technologist, writer, and geek. He podcasts, makes video, and dabbles in all the geeky genres including horror, sci-fi, and fantasy. View all posts by Sean → This entry was posted in Thoughts and tagged happiness, regrets. Bookmark the permalink.← Universal Geek: Barfed Out by Space Slugs | Universal Geek: Farming for Gaga →
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