can there be happiness in dullness?
The past few days have had me wondering what our motivations were to do anything long term and what that meant for our happiness. Are we happiest when our reward is in the future or the present? Are we happiest when we do something for ourselves or for others? Do we have to like the path to the reward to be ultimately content or does contentedness depend on finding joy in the present? Are we happier when we reach a goal or when the goal matters less than the journey there? Can we find happiness when the means aren’t the ends?1
As someone with ADHD, I require a lot of motivation to keep at a task. It is easiest for me to finish something if the process itself is fun. For example, I wouldn’t push through a degree that promises good social standing when the curriculum is of no interest to me. I’ve tried that in the past, but that was a personal low I don’t want to get into. It suffices to say that I wasn’t happy with the promise of a good end—the path there had to be enticing by itself. I wish I was exaggerating when saying that dullness with this syndrome can feel like divine punishment. This is a disabling feature now, but in the past it may have made us better equipped for survival.
Going through life, though, one hears a lot of the „no pain, no gain“ mindset. If we don’t make sacrifices, if we don’t risk what we have now, we may never attain what we don’t have yet, so it goes. This mindset is so pervasive that it has guided the economic policies of the neoliberal elite since the first neoliberal coups in the ’70s, like the cuts to social services that people depend on now promising to stimulate the economy to be self-servicing in the future. One comes across it in fitness where we go to the gym to attain the perfect body. One can see it in the way we ridicule people who pick the path of least resistance as well.
It almost seems like „no pain, no gain“ always coincides with situations where the options are artificially limited to produce a specific outcome and hide the reality behind an illusion of choice. Neoliberals want for private enterprises to replace the welfare state so that everyone fends for themselves and is therefore weaker and more easily dominated, and they keep repeating their lies at every crisis—hoping that they become truth by repetition—when they cry for more privatization and de-regulation. On the other hand, skinny people want their position in the beauty hierarchy affirmed so they expect those who don’t conform to perform suffering to attain a certain body to prove its desirability as if the choice were only between upholding the standard and being miserable or upholding the standard and being less miserable. Both make us all stand on shaky ground.
This mindset stems from very ideological diagnoses of problems and their equally ideological solutions. It wants us to distrust our gut and believe that what is so heavily resisted and disliked is actually the natural order of things; that nurturing our needs now is an excrement that would make us all lazy and reliant on others. And what perfect imagery to symbolize this excrement than with the manufactured undesirability of fatness? Any undesirable attribute of ours becomes a personal failing because we didn’t want to experience pain alone so it is our fault there is no gain for us individually. It delegates the effort for social transformation entirely to the individual as a self-contained microcosm capable of achieving anything despite the odds as the general rule—a utopian fantasy.
It is hard to find happiness in a state of constant struggle against tradition, and there may be no amount of pain that can unleash any gain. Despite never being able to witness the gains in our lifetimes, it is still important to act. Even if it’s futile, inaction makes one question why one exists if not to try. The only road to happiness may lie in finding others equally dissatisfied with the same thing as us and suffering it together. Years of loneliness that are now behind me have only convinced me that I’d rather be pissed at something with another than by myself. Sometimes the validation that we’re not alone in being pissed by what’s pissing us off is all we need to move on with our lives. And sometimes that’s enough.
This is my most Carrie Bradshaw post to date.↩