Hey ya'll. I'm just particularly happy right now and I wanted to talk a bit about my relationship with the phenomenon known broadly as "fun", and how I came to have more fun than I ever have in my life.
In recent times, I've achieved an unprecedented level of happiness. Ever since I heard the phrase "life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness", I took the idea of "the pursuit of happiness" literally and began trying to "crack the code", so to speak. I tried to distill happiness down to a formula.
In pursuit of such, for several years of my adult life I lived as a hedonist. I am thoroughly versed in the hedonistic philosophies and at one point I believed with all my heart that the path to happiness was paved with good times; that being happy was a direct function of how much fun you were having.
And fun I had. I had so much fun, I nearly died twice (a total of 4 life-threatening experiences over my lifetime). But enough was never enough. I wanted more, and more, and more. Before long, the type of fun I was having would become dull to me. I would need something else to amuse me. So I sampled nearly everything anyone would remotely consider "fun" to the highest degree possible, but nothing could satisfy me.
Nothing this world had to offer could rid me of the hollow feeling I knew as "feeling normal". I had no idea just how empty my life was. No wonder I wanted to die; I was essentially a living corpse anyway.
It turns out that I had it completely backwards the whole time. Being happy doesn't come from having fun, having fun comes from being happy. To condense 9 years of work into a sentence fragment, my happiness came from reconciling with everything that was torturing me. But that's not the point; I quickly found that once I had become happy, having fun took little or no effort at all.
I had fun at work today. I had fun driving home. I had fun going into a Walmart full of people. I had fun cooking dinner. Hell, just the other day, all I was doing was sitting around and thinking, and you know what? I had fun doing it. I had fun going to the gas station. I had fun paying for my gas and some brake fluid. I had fun locating the brake fluid reservoir. I had fun adding the brake fluid.
The point is: man seeks to have fun, but he is not naturally hedonistic; no, he seeks peace. He seeks to be whole. He seeks to be full, not empty, and once he is the world is like one gigantic playground. The world is mine because my world is mine. It no longer belongs to my abusers. It no longer belongs to the memories of traumas past. I am the king of my world, and cot-damn does it feel good to be the king.
In recent times, I've achieved an unprecedented level of happiness. Ever since I heard the phrase "life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness", I took the idea of "the pursuit of happiness" literally and began trying to "crack the code", so to speak. I tried to distill happiness down to a formula.
In pursuit of such, for several years of my adult life I lived as a hedonist. I am thoroughly versed in the hedonistic philosophies and at one point I believed with all my heart that the path to happiness was paved with good times; that being happy was a direct function of how much fun you were having.
And fun I had. I had so much fun, I nearly died twice (a total of 4 life-threatening experiences over my lifetime). But enough was never enough. I wanted more, and more, and more. Before long, the type of fun I was having would become dull to me. I would need something else to amuse me. So I sampled nearly everything anyone would remotely consider "fun" to the highest degree possible, but nothing could satisfy me.
Nothing this world had to offer could rid me of the hollow feeling I knew as "feeling normal". I had no idea just how empty my life was. No wonder I wanted to die; I was essentially a living corpse anyway.
It turns out that I had it completely backwards the whole time. Being happy doesn't come from having fun, having fun comes from being happy. To condense 9 years of work into a sentence fragment, my happiness came from reconciling with everything that was torturing me. But that's not the point; I quickly found that once I had become happy, having fun took little or no effort at all.
I had fun at work today. I had fun driving home. I had fun going into a Walmart full of people. I had fun cooking dinner. Hell, just the other day, all I was doing was sitting around and thinking, and you know what? I had fun doing it. I had fun going to the gas station. I had fun paying for my gas and some brake fluid. I had fun locating the brake fluid reservoir. I had fun adding the brake fluid.
The point is: man seeks to have fun, but he is not naturally hedonistic; no, he seeks peace. He seeks to be whole. He seeks to be full, not empty, and once he is the world is like one gigantic playground. The world is mine because my world is mine. It no longer belongs to my abusers. It no longer belongs to the memories of traumas past. I am the king of my world, and cot-damn does it feel good to be the king.
