Navigating (Part 5)

It has been noted by many an obnoxious person that what makes a person happy and what makes her comfortable may be two different things. You can be comfortable with something that makes you unhappy, which is why you don't change it; you're used to what you have. This is - if not common knowledge - commonly admonished.

But on the other side of that admonishment is that happiness, in that context, isn't what anybody is quite thinking of when they talk about a happy life. Most of the time, they mean a comfortable life. They mean a comfortable life that isn't replicating harmful patterns. The mode of comfort is replication, the opposite of change.

Marx introduced the idea of social reproduction, that the way a social group outlives the lifespan of a single generation is the replication of ideas. But the self is also an idea, and it also exists via replication. Most of our identities are ideas, even the stuff that isn't overtly political - like being a cheese lover or a book nerd. To become happier, you have to change the replication that is the self.

This is what the admonishers don't tell you - likely because the only thing they can definitely identify about your situation is that some or all of is existential and haven't fully realized the implications of what they're saying - choosing happiness is a violence on the self. It is not only saying "this situation is not good enough for me," it is in fact also, and mostly saying, "I am not good enough. A different me is necessary."

The narrative is that because you are not good enough for you, that this is good for your character and not abuse. But there's a lot of overlap and I don't know why we don't hold this truth when we talk about people who could be happy but make the same bad decisions over and over. There is a way in which this act, too, is one of self love, though it may not be the right act.

In experience, we (everyone who is capable of thinking about the meaning of experience) know this. Perhaps it isn't articulated a such, but I do think everyone understands this, understands that the effort to make change seem graceful, like some kind of pokemon evolve, is beautiful, beautiful garbage. It's helpful to say it. It's helpful for our own recognition of ourselves.

With no evidence except experience and instinct, I suspect that the violence in change is natural -- as in inherent to the natural world, not something that we choose. I stand before a forest of ideas here, so dense and so absorbing that it's almost painful. For example, what if we've been reading Hobbes and Locke wrong this entire time? What if the noble warrior and the savage are the intellectual exploration of the process of change, from the two-sides-of-the-same-coin perspectives of good for your character and violence on the self. (Granted, by we, I mean my high school criminal civil law class from 2004).

Another example: if we have decided that the violence committed to the self on behalf of the self carries the same weight and properties as violence committed against you by others, can violence committed against you be reclaimed for self improvement? What pops into my head is that Taylor Swift has a pond in her living room with coy fish in it, an image of happiness that belies the story of how she used to push her unpopular classmates on the stairs in high school. Why does this pop into my head? Two reasons: one, if Taylor Swift wanted to be happy, she would throw herself down the stairs. At the bottom she would have crossed the line, the one that holds us from each other. Two, a question (not loaded, a question): can violence be transmuted? If Taylor Swift pushes you down the stairs, can that violence be the same violence that provokes your change? A change you want? Or do you have to throw yourself?

And we are still left with the question of what the coy fish pond is, being that it is beautiful, relaxing, even spiritual -- but perhaps none of those things. This is is thicket we must make our way through, it's not easy but part of of trying to understand this is to say, if the coy fish pond is not happiness, what is it? And how is it different from what happens at the bottom of the stairs?

The coy fish pond can be bought. For a stupid amount of money, of course, money which after a certain point does seem to reproduce by itself. It's part of a system, and I don't think capitalism covers it. I don't think it's only a question of various entities creating false expectations about how wealth will make you happy. My line of thought always comes back to bigger questions about systems that were not made by man. Right? What if capitalism, in one of its modes, acts as a way for everyone, including the rich, to commit a group self harm by replicating an entire system of "happiness" that is also an act of group self love, a way of avoiding the violent destruction of the people we know as ourselves.

You start in to a forest like this and each tree can stop you dead in your tracks, it really can. There's just so much here. Because when you start to talk to about -- oh here's another question that just popped into my head --- when Jesus tells people to "turn the other cheek," what does that mean in this new context of violence to the self as necessary in any self improvement process, and how could the new testament compare to the old, much more violent, testament?

Is this why animals don't have the same kind of consciousness? Are they capable of the kind of self harm necessary for happiness? Is the bar on what an animal can be the degree to which he can overcome reflex and comfort to destroy himself? Or rather, his self? My god my god my god, you see? you see?

You can lose the forest for the trees and the forest is (the forest always is) the thing that is bigger than people, whatever that thing is. That's what you're looking for. In this case, it's tricky because it's clothed in very individual language, but it is, in fact, about the human condition.

It is not only saying "this situation is not good enough for me," it is in fact also, and mostly saying, "I am not good enough. A different me is necessary."