"We all want to be happy, and we're all going to die. . . . You
     might say those are the only two unchallengeably true facts that
     apply to every human being on this planet."   --William Boyd

     Everyone has their addiction. Mine is to chocolate. A friend of mine's is to Pepsi.
But besides those personal addictions, we're all adicted to just one thing: Happiness.
Happiness is great stuff, but it's also extremely rare. So we covet it. We pay a lot of
money and put ourselves through a lot of heartache just to get it. Happiness is the drug
everyone's tried, and everyone's hooked on.

     When you look at it on a biological level, (I'm sometimes dismayed at how beautiful,
wonderfull things get munched down into humble biological processes) happiness is just
like any drug: It's a cascade of chemicals in your brain that stimulates certain areas
and causes an overall change in you're physiology for a breif amount of time. What
makes happiness so unique is that evolution has taught us to go for this high above all
others. When you're feeling happiness, it's a sign that all is well, your body is not in any
great duress, and you're life (that is, the bottom level parts of it) are working out. How
nice that our brains would give us a reward for providing the best environment for the
body that nourishes it. So we know what happiness is: A carrot that you're brain
dangles in front of itself to try to get you to make things be allright. Something to try to
coax you into surviving to the best of your skills.

     But when you boil it down to that, "...the persuit of happiness" sounds like a pretty
base thing. All things do when you crush 'em to death under the weight of logic. Let's
look a happiness from a more... outside perspective:

     Happiness, then, is really about contrast. I enjoy living in my house, but I can't say
that I've ever been HAPPY about living here, because I'm quite used to it. I've grown
accustomed to liking my house. Therefor, there's no contrast between how I'd feel
about not living in this house and how I feel about living in my house, because the
former feeling is totally irrelevant, and besides, I can't remember what it felt like NOT
to. This isn't making any sense. Look: If we all ate chocolate every day, we wouldn't
think that chocolate was such a wonderfull thing (Which it is). Sure, we'd still not mind
eating it, because it is something we like, but we wouldn't be aware that we were
HAPPY about eating it everyday, because we'd not know what it was like to have to do
WITHOUT it.

     The bottom line is that the Persuit of Happiness is the persuit of a high, a state of
well-being and elation that your brain gives you when things are going allright. You can
artificially produce it with other chemicals, like chocolate, or heroine, or what have you.
You can get that same feeling that your brain says, "Oh, yeah....gimme some more of
THAT!", with other stuff, besides happiness.

     I don't know what I was trying to do with this essay. Make people less satisfied with
the idea of human emotions? There USED to be something divine about emotions. Now
they're lowly electro-chemical responses. I just found this interesting is all: How all of
us humans chase this thing called happiness in any way that we can, because it feels oh
so good.
 
 

Original Site:    http://userzweb.lightspeed.net/bvshart/hap.html