J
Today I hung out with J! While driving home I was thinking about something, specifically that quote about how life has its way of making sure that everyone drinks its equal share from the cup of misery. Both people in relationships, and people not in relationships still manage to find misery in different ways. And I feel like anecdotally in life I have felt the same. I think there have been very degrees, but even when things my life are going pretty much perfect, I have a fair share of misery, and when things are significantly worse than that I have a comparable share of misery. I think there are obvious counterpoints of this innocence that once I do address a lot of my fundamental needs I do feel like life is pretty damn great, like right now I feel happy in life. But that aside, I think there is an argument to make about the fact that you might not be able to optimize away misery from life. Like after all, even now when I feel like my life is in the best spot it’s ever been in arguably, I was suicidal just a few weeks ago. And I don’t think that sounds pretty ideal if I’m being honest lol. But so the interesting conclusion comes from thinking about if you cannot optimize for avoiding misery, is there a point of really anything at all. And I think that maybe the point is to aim to optimize happiness, instead of learning from misery. In a way that I cannot verbalize I see this different from hedonism, because I think this is not the blind pursuit, but rather the understanding that even if you do the right things you will still have your fair sheriff misery in life. There are the obvious things, like people around you dying, or life circumstances that you cannot control, but including that there are things like maybe choosing the wrong partner or having to go down a certain path to learn a lesson in life. I think it is inevitable that you will face this type of misery in life, and maybe it isn’t worth it to take that as a signal of something going wrong. Maybe we should just try to play as much as possible and enjoy life where we can.