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How strange it is that such normal, eternal human emotions as stress, anxiety and depression are now placed under the category of mental-health problems. Although worry can be debilitating in extreme cases, it’s natural to fret about money, one’s looks or feel low about life from time to time. Schizophrenia, bipolar disorder, the clinical depression which leaves people unable to get out of bed for days: these are conditions that properly fall under the category of mental illness.
Why have normal human emotions and utterly rational responses (‘I must find a way of paying next month’s rent’) now become pathologised? Why are negative feelings regarded as an aberration or a problem? It’s because we think happiness is the norm of the human condition, when it isn’t. It never has been.
First, there is the medicalisation of the human experience. Ever since Freud and the move to try and turn psychology into a science or branch of medicine, unhappiness has become viewed as something to be cured. It isn’t. Life is struggle. It is failure, misery, disappointment and smashed dreams.
Secondly, capitalism has perpetuated this myth with the notion that happiness is a commodity that can be bought. The pharmaceutical industry, with its assortment of happy-pills, is but the most obvious example here, but you only have to look at advertisements to see how this operates, with products that promise to make us more popular, envied and sexually desirable. In our Age of Entitlement, with its understanding that everything should be free, there is a further heightened expectation that happiness should be on tap.
Those who expect happiness are guaranteed never to attain it. Happiness is not and nor should it be a goal, but a consequence. It is what results after you have toiled, overcome obstacles, achieved your aims through blood, sweat and tears. Happiness comes through embracing, employing and then overcoming stress, anxiety and depression.
And as that great misery-guts, Arthur Schopenhauer, asked: where would we be without life’s troubles? ‘Certain is that work, worry, labour and trouble, form the lot of almost all men their whole life long. But if all wishes were fulfilled as soon as they arose, how would men occupy their lives? What would they do with their time? If the world were a paradise of luxury and ease, a land flowing with milk and honey’, he wrote in On the Suffering of The World (1850) ‘men would either die of boredom or hang themselves’.
Why are negative feelings regarded as an aberration or a problem?
If every therapist and psychotherapist on the planet could repeat this to their clients, like a mantra, again and again, there would be fewer therapists and psychotherapists. Because it works. Very quickly. Realising that what you're worrying about and stressing over doesn't really matter so much in the grand scheme of things is the door to freedom and healing. And the little profanity 'F**k It' is the key to that door. Ask anyone who's come close to death, or lost someone close to them, or discovered they have a serious disease and they'll say the same thing: that the little things don't matter, F**k It... enjoy life in every moment for what it is, not what you want it to be... worry less, live more... remember what's important and forget the rest.
originally posted by: MystikMushroom
Happiness is not a destination. It isn't something that exists on "someday island".
Happiness exists right here, right now like a radio transmission.
It is up to you whether or not you choose to tune yourself to it or not ....by changing the way you frame your perspective.
No one can give you happiness. No "thing" can give you happiness. You choose to allow yourself to feel it or not.
Some of the happiest people I know have very little and are dirt poor with a ton of problems. The difference in these people is that they don't see their situation as having "problems" but rather as "challenges". These people take a different approach and have a different perspective on the world ... and perspective = reality.
It really is how you perceive things, and perception can be changed just by willing it.
Patrick took all my observations and formed the perfect words. Enough said.
Happiness is not a fallacy, it's just one of a gamut of emotions that is experienced as one transits through life, for which there are innumerable pills.