Happiness may be attained at times but it cannot be preserved forever unless you lived in a vacuum where nothing ever happened or changed – which would in turn make you unhappy again by its sheer boredom. Happiness is a fragile emotion easily torn down by the first blow of life and expectations of happiness are dangerous, putting you into an absolutely wrong psychological state for what will need to be done in the whole of life. Expectations are our great torturers with an array of instruments designed to break every single thing inside, but reason which controls the expectations, and the narratives we produce from them, to fit the reality is the antidote.

The healthy balanced individual takes into consideration the complexity of the environment it lives in and responds accordingly – this is survival. Happiness is not the right response in every situation – there will be times when you’ll need to feel sad, need to be aggressive, scared, vulnerable… life cannot unfold in the polarities of happy and unhappy in anything as complex and with so many moving parts as a human being and the world it lives in. Searching for just happiness trivializes life because there are much more valuable aspects to take into consideration that will, at times, trump your need to just be happy – the most important missions for greater good like searching for solutions to illnesses, global problems or issues, taking care of the sick, building something, learning and relearning – won’t make you happy all the time, well they won’t most of the time, but they will reward you with the intrinsic satisfaction.

Once you realize the purpose of this life is not just happiness, as if you were living trapped in a perpetual filtered social media post, you’ll feel relief, because you’ve already known this to be true from your experience of life so far, and by articulating it you’re relieved of the shame of suffering (in the mass produced new idea of eternal happiness and bliss as the base line of a supposed human reality). You’ll not justify your existence by finding everlasting happiness, contrary to the “they lived happily ever after” fairytale programing, but by finding purpose or losing yourself in searching one. Life is pain and joy intertwined and there is beauty in these dynamic opposites