Will we burn in heaven // the way we do down here?

[winterkoninkje]

What ever happened to happiness, unblemished, unqualified? When did skepticism become the norm? Or is age the fading of our old questions, the forgetting of old uncertainties, and mitigation of our concerns. Has it always been this way, or is it our stories to ourselves which become faerie tales as we grow apart from them? Or is it merely once more the chill portent of that childhood legacy. Everyone says the wings are black, but they never remember how fuzzy the feathers, how cruelty can be soft. Cool means refreshing, and yet cold is just another word for numb.

The worst part of chronic depression is how it's always changing. If it were a static thing we could grow accustomed to it; acclimation is the natural course of the body and the mind. We heal what we can, and null the rest hoping that distance and decay will cure what fever and fortitude cannot. For a splinter, a severed limb, a love lost, this works as well as anything. But scorched earth tactics cannot defeat a parasite. Like any virus it evolves to survive.

Our bodies autonomically quarantine the infected loci, a basal response beneath conscious appreciation. In the early development of the disease, it eventually bursts through these walls in crippling waves. But such catastrophes can be damaging to the host, and in time it learns subtler methods of control. Even in its maturer forms, symptomatic threads are eventually uncovered by the mind's eye. Once higher consciousness notices, however, it soon finds that the majority of its support has been damaged or sacrificed to the cause. The synthetic forms of thought are the most wrecked, for they are the most powerful adversary to depression, and also the most alike with the disease and so its best fuel. What remains is but an analytic shell, powerful struts to keep higher consciousness suspended above the battlefield, but the weakest weapon to turn against the now rampant foe.

Long-time veteran of these wars it's hard to remain objective. Each time we hope, naïvely —knowingly naïvely—, that this time will be the last. Or that the next time we'll get to wage our skill against new recruits, inexperienced youths, on the other side. We pray to only have to kill children, but we inevitably murder men. And the next time is more of the same: always different, always subtler. Against such an opponent the only alternative to naïveté is paranoia. But what they don't tell in the textbooks and health classes is that these two are of the same coin, two names for the same denial, the same inability to let go of the fingers at your throat.

Comments

[theotherjay.livejournal.com]

Right now, many of us are better fed, housed, and cared for than at any point in human history, though this isn't so relevant... it's the relative value of what we have, versus what we know is possible, that causes problems. Much of the unrest in the developing world is probably explainable by its glimpses, through mass media, to the conditions in the industrialized world. And even in those parts, inequality is staggering, and we have a powerful cultural narrative of personal responsibility for that inequality, which is broadcast through increasingly pervasive media...

I don't think people were ever any happier than we are now. I think that now we just have a lot more tools for diagnosing various kinds and causes of unhappiness, and for discussing it with each other.

I also think, strongly, that Happiness isn't much of a worthy goal, in life. Happiness is the result of achieving your goals. Try for honor, or for kindness, or for solving an intractable problem or saying something important, and happiness will follow. But "the direct pursuit of happiness is a sure recipe for an unhappy life."

[winterkoninkje.livejournal.com]

I also think, strongly, that Happiness isn't much of a worthy goal, in life.

As a goal in and of itself, perhaps not. However, there's a difference between pursuit of happiness and pursuit of non-misery. In as far as the latter has its basis in (neuro)chemical issues and its resolution in anti-(neuro)chemical treatments I do think it's a worthy goal for enabling the pursuit of other goals; and in as far as it has its basis in psychosocial issues and its resolution in introspection, I think it's a worthy goal in and of itself (the dangers of omphaloskepsis aside).