No the title is not a typo. The more I go see Dark Matter, this being my fourth since March, the more I have to report back. I am being to think we make our own happiness, out of a preselected number of resources. Like when you are born based on who your patents are and your demographics you are alloted a certain amount of tools and resources. Because happiness is a really abstract concept let's say you are building a house instead. You are born Bill Gates's legitimate cis hereto male child. You are given money, connections, labor, land, and nice materials at birth to later build a house. Let's say you make the best of your silver spoon life and when it is time to build your house you have acquired beach front land, legendary architect and contractors, Brazilian red wood, and weapons grade metals, plus you still have labor. Now if you became a crack head and squandered your silver spoon life now all you are left with is a premade mediocre house on 25% of your original land. What if you are born black in America, the one we all imagine the government is keeping down (they are keeping black people down but not all by themselves black people are actively participating in their own disenfranchisement but I digress) such a cis hetero male black person is given hand me down tools, shack materials. But no land, money, connections, or labor. If they over come all odds they can end with a bit of money, small decent piece of land ( at high interest rate), okay materials, and the skills and knowledge of how to build a house. They will then spend the rest of their life building the house as their life expectancy is much shorter than the rest of the general population, but the spouse may enjoy the house in her later years. Now if the same black boy just lived life chances are he would either see all that he had stripped from him when he was inevitably imprisoned or he would build a shack after gaining the knowledge and skill of how to do so and die in debt because of the land he bought to build a shack without money. If I was building a house when I was born I would have been given connections, tools, decent amount of resources. I now also have the knowledge and understanding of what goes into building house and the ability to acquire land at a decent interest rate that I would be able to pay off before I retired. However, I know all of the people I have to hurt in order to build my house. I know what it really means to have money and how that money some how still ends up funding occupations or military ventures. I acquired a moral compass, ethics, ideal conditions for building a house. I can no longer, with good conscience, commit to such actions as building a house. The system that we preside in, building a house has such negative ramifications that it is not worth it. The only way to build a house is to dismantle the system. So in a way academia stripped me of everything that I was born with. Left me completely unable to achieve what every human should be able to which is build a house, be happy. Walking around knowing that you can't build the house everyone expects you to (which is way more than you will ever be able to) just fills you with doom, despair, and anxiety. Or you are only able to actually build your house as you approach death, because you have literally been killing yourself to achieve it. We see it all the time people work themselves to death, put themselves through hell, live miserably, and for what? To eventually be able to build a house? To eventually be able to do make our own happiness which will make us happy, regardless of how we continue to grow and change, for the rest of your life? We are being sold an unobtainable dream and told to go obtain it. And we try our hardest which normally leads to misery or temporary happiness but nothing like what we were promised. A cyanide happiness that is actually killing us, plus we are still unhappy. Which I for one think it's bull shit. I don't want to have to live in unhappiness forever and I doubt want the answer to achieving happiness to be dismantling the systems. I think we should be okay with temporary happiness in all its forms. If that means a person's smile that makes you feel a little less lonely or a large cup of coffee on Mondays. Why aren't these small temporary happiness enough. Would we all rather lead miserable lives and die for an irrational fantasy? If we took more stock in the good and stopped sensationalizing tragedy wouldn't our outlook on the world change.
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