Tuesday, 26 May 2009

Happiness part 5 - Generational Malaise

Why is happiness an issue for many people of my generation. Why are we obsessed with 'finding ourselves'?

I think that part of it is to do with the hippy generation, who espoused 'self-discovery' and seemed to create a synonmyity between happiness and freedom.

Why did they become the same? Is freedom actually happiness? I believe that my parents generation, who came of age during the punk years but who probably never had anything to do with punk, were a blip and did things the old way. They sought responsibility, mortgages and kids. They were happy and they were unhappy. My parents' marriage is one of the only happy ones I know among people I went to school with.

I must say that I don't find sadness such an ungainly trait at all. I think that a wide-ranging emotional repertoire is essential to truly appreciate happiness for all that it is.

Anyway, this whole post was sparked by a shoot-the-breeze conversation with a guy at work. We are not the first generation who has been told how to think, but we are, in my opinion, the first generation to be courted by those who would seek to prescribe trains of thought.

Why do we desire to go searching for ourselves. I'm not much of a follower of The Alchemist or Coelhovian pop-psychology but why does my generation think it needs to experience *everything*? One is somehow less real if one hasn't such experience, it seems to be assumed.

Yet surely happiness, or sadness for that matter, do not rely on a great breadth of experience; that is they do not depend on the kind of experience like riding camels through the Sahara, or seeing the Forbidden City of Lhasa or any other thing marketed to us by Lonely Planet or Trailfinders. We are all in search of the real, the authentic, but tourism is tourism however we dress it up.

We all drink the same figurative Coca Cola in the same figurative branch of McDonalds in the same figurative city of a figurative country anywhere in the world. Things are the same the world over. Maybe our malaise is about a search for the real, which is simply difference that has been replaced with homogeneity.

Part one Part two Part three Part four

wrote Marc Jones at 23:52

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8 comments:

  1. "I don't find sadness such an ungainly trait"

    a broken link?
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  2. Yes it was broken but it's fixed now.
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  3. What do you think was the cause of your parent's happiness?
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  4. @ Sushi.

    Let me gestate that question for a few hours. I'll let you know.
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  5. does "common sense" exist?
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  6. for australians at least i guess there's that cultural cringe factor too, where we always think that anything of real value can only be found elsewhere.

    a friend of mine wondered aloud yesterday whether residents of paris stroll around thinking their city is crap, focusing on things that are gross.

    and then there's that hipster thing of always having arrived on any scene 'too late'.

    without physical needs we create our own mental ones, i guess.

    anyway i'm thinking aloud now and am perhaps not being cohesive :)
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  7. @ Sushi

    I do think that common sense exists. If not common sense, then at least a shared consensus that has its basis in parameters of acceptability and so on and such forth.

    My parents' happiness was based upon a lack of choices, I think. Being working class, it was basically assumed that they would leave school and enter employment and then get married. However, back then it was possible for people to earn enough to raise a family on one wage. Now it isn't, unless you're really lucky. So, although circumstances might not have been the same for them as for, perhaps, a couple of university graduates then (late seventies), they made the best of it. Nobody makes the best of things now. People don't fix things. They get something new instead, and perhaps I am as guilty of this kind of thing as other people.

    @ Peter

    I do believe that people in Paris wander around moaning how shit things are. They probably moan about the dog shit everywhere and how the streets are constantly teeming with fuckwit tourists. However, if asked whether they'd like to move to a different city but never be able to reside in Paris again, I dare say that most would say no.
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  8. My parents had limited choices as well and did not have the means to attend university.
    I have met a few couples that appeared to be happy together. Mutual respect and a lack of selfishness are a couple of key elements.
    Some people do fix things, but the lure of the new can be overwhelming considering the amount of effort "fixing" requires.


    --- Nor Elle "Silent Storm"
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