Much has been said and written about the whole idea of humans pursuing happiness, as an important part of our journey through life. But what is that, really? And does it actually add anything meaningful to our quality of life?
Which got me to thinking that we — well, at least this holds true for ME — are going to have difficulty finding anything that resembles happiness, if we can’t dig up some enthusiasm about what we’re doing.
And that’s often a place where we run into a roadblock. After all, an awful lot of people feel stuck in ”grind culture” and don’t see any way out… and when you feel trapped it becomes very difficult to approach anything with enthusiasm.
Goodness knows that I have attended a large number of ”life purpose” and self-development seminars and retreats over the years, and I never really came away from very many of them with any degree of enthusiasm.
The train of thought was invariably the same: There were lots of tips and ideas on how to be true to ourselves and work with the things we love, but they invariably would collide with the reality of most people’s lives. A bit like an imaginary situation in which you are given plans on how to find freedom in life, and then you discover that in order to find that freedom, you already have to have the freedom to engage in the pursuit. A bit like paying to take a very long chairlift to a great ski spot, but when you get there, you discover that you have to hike, on foot, another 2000 feet up the mountain, and the facilities close in five minutes.
”This is a great plan… IN THEORY.”
Alas, most of us don’t live in a theoretical world!
I don’t know about you, but in order to have enthusiasm for any kind of undertaking, I need to have some kind of assurance that there’s at least a reasonable chance we’ll end up at a positive outcome. Absent that, I pretty much feel little different than I would from throwing $5.00 at a lottery ticket.
Perhaps that’s one of the things that troubles me about being alive and trying to accomplish anything, in our day and age. All too often it feels like we might have a goal; a purpose; even some ambition… but we discover that ”the powers that be” keep moving the goalposts so we actually never end up where we hoped we might. And so… that all important enthusiasm starts to wane and is soon replaced with something that feels more like resignation.
And that’s hardly what you need, in the pursuit of happiness. Or even a measure of contentment.
Because I am a bit of a "numbers geek," I keep a lot of history related to my time spent at Hive... and it's a bit of an example of the whole enthusiasm thing.
We set goals, but perhaps those goals are at least somewhat predicated on Hive in a certain price range.
But you end up falling short, so revise your goals downwards the following year... and then you end up falling short again the next year, so you revise your goals down once again... and so, there comes a time when you just can't dig up any enthusiasm anymore, you end up constantly holding your breath and waiting for yet another wheel to fall off the cart.
Maybe this is simply life. Maybe failure is the norm, and success is the newsworthy exception, and we need to dail in our ambitions, accordingly.
In the meantime, I'm still going to try to find some enthusiasm!
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