Happy?

Last Sunday a neighbor’s dog bit my hand

Photo by charlesdeluvio on Unsplash

Last Sunday a neighbor’s dog bit my hand. Nothing serious. It didn’t break the skin and wasn’t painful. I stupidly pet it on the head, despite knowing dogs are often wary of strangers coming in from above.

Of course, the first thing I thought was “I’m gonna get the rabies”.

In reality, the odds of getting rabies from this bite are zero. But a couple days later I caught myself thinking, “well, if I get it I get it.”

It’s not that I want to die. I’m just indifferent. I’d miss the people I care about, but then again I wouldn’t know the difference.

Most would tell me I have a lot to live for. I do. But then again, I don’t. What is the point of all this? What is the point of life? It can’t be to work at some meaningless corporate job, or to prepare for impending doom.

All my actions are a means to an end. What many would consider to be my hobbies - growing food, exercising, reading, writing - I do to survive. Everything is tracked, measured, evaluated against an invisible benchmark looming in the background. While intangible, there’s something satisfying about seeing progress, but I’m not sure if that satisfaction = happiness.

I’m not even sure if happiness is even a thing anymore.

Perhaps asking for the kind of happiness I used to experience as a child is not possible as a middle-aged adult. The other day I spent hours figuring out what I do for pure enjoyment. I found nothing. All my actions are connected to a measurement or purpose.

I think many other middle-aged people are similarly trapped by productivity. We’re released to the world indebted to schools and later to mortgage lenders. The countdown to homelessness begins the second we graduate, forcing us into the corporate machine. Our hobbies left behind, as we no longer have time or money to support them. God forbid wasting energy on something that doesn’t have a return-on-investment when you’ve got bills to pay. Time is money. We are conditioned to feel low-key guilt when doing something without a tangible result or metric. When I was a kid I did things just for the joy of the activity itself.

After twenty-five years of digging ditches only to fill them up again, we forget how to be happy. We learn to crave the dopamine hits provided by the system, as they’re the only rewards available.

Then you finally get to the other side and realize you’re rudderless without purpose.

Personally, I have a full cup of “purposeful” work and have mostly disconnected from the corporate tragic-com. Others, who have tied their entire personality to their jobs, are poorly equipped for the realization that they no longer know how to have fun. Some fill their needs with alcohol or drugs. Some continue working until they die. At least I have something else to do.

True play and unstructured fun actually require a decent amount of cognitive bandwidth and executive function. But by the time the corporate sausage-maker squeezes us out the other side, we are cognitively burned out. When your brain is constantly running background calculations on bills your mental tank is simply too empty for creative, unstructured fun.

I need to re-learn how to have fun. I’m not there yet, but I’m dreaming up things I want to do just for the sake of doing them. Not to become competent or to support a goal, although that’s where my head naturally goes. Perhaps I already do have fun and can’t recognize it. It’s a language I need to both speak and understand.

Tell me, is it still OK to be happy?

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Thank you for reading.

My name is Sarah and I run Collapse2050 by myself. It is a passion project to explore humanity’s frightening future - a topic traditional media ignores.

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Sarah