Happiness is not an ideal of reason, but of imagination.
-Kant
We term happiness as an objective ends unto itself. We strive for it as if there’s a choice at the fork in the road that leads to it. When we say we are unhappy, we believe that there are externalities that can one day rid us of the burden entirely. It’s too simple to say that happiness is a state of mind, but honestly the reality might be even simpler than that…although perhaps crippling in its veracity. Happiness is a construction of our imagination, not a state which can be obtained. The harshness of life; this nasty, brutish, and short life (as Hobbes would say) that we’ve been given would be too much to bear if we weren’t mentally hardwired to think that the grass over there must be greener. We’ve built afterlives into our religions as a ‘just in case’ mechanism…something that can ultimately relieve us of the pain of a lack of happiness, if by chance we can’t even grasp some fleeting version of it in this life.
Imagine the freedom from this constructed burden if only we could realize that it’s a mental model designed to give us a reason, in our darkest hour, to put that one damn foot in front of the other, even if just one more time. If we could realize that the experiences of life are never bracketed by an objective good or bad, happy or sad, right or wrong…but only our subjective interpretation of them, we would be much less concerned with defining those ephemeral instances of it with a definition that means nothing. It’s our journey and it can only be how we experience it. Once we realize that there is no need to search for happiness because it doesn’t actually exist as a static state of being but rather only as a perception of possibility, we are free to experience every moment of our lives as a gift which is to be interpreted as nothing more than a small component of our journey through it.
