“Every man who is not helping to bring about a better state of affairs for the future is helping to perpetuate the current misery, and is therefore the enemy of his own children” – Robert Tressall, The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists.

I love the now, I’m happy and I love my life, love my wife in common law (fiancé), love my pets, and I love my home. I am well enough and can still put my socks on every morning without needing to sit down, or steady myself by some means. Apparently that is a good yard stick. I have Fish & Chips every Friday with my close pal, we laugh like idiots, and shoot the shit like two old muckers at a park bench on a summers day. Sometimes chewing the insignificant, sometimes getting into the depths, and always relaying stories of our technical endeavours. I have, in my personal life, erased all bullshit and removed nearly everything that annoys me, becoming mostly calm and without turmoil save for the odd flat tyre or roof leak. Of course I utterly hate my job, but then don’t most people?

Creeping into this happy existence is the imagining that tomorrow may hold ruinous challenges now unforeseen. In an earlier post I talked about stepping in the same river twice and how it was not possible to direct your own life, that every effort to stand still could be undone by the sort of absurdity that Camus was so big on. It is ridiculous to think that we can live life only in the moment I suppose, but a necessary component of being happy is to turn off the part of the mind that imagines tomorrow, or at least dull it a little with elation, drugs, alcohol, busyness or yoga. What I like to do is write, this keeps me focussed. If I can’t achieve this I employ a different, less successful pastime, I try to play a guitar. This week I have been struggling to learn the modes of the Diatonic scale. You wouldn’t believe how difficult this is when you do not possess and ounce of musical talent.

I don’t often write about how happy I am, I mostly criticise things, and I do this because it is easier to write about what annoys, and easier to write when annoyed. Just ask yourself if you are more likely to do a fb rant than some post about how much you are enjoying life in general, the rant mostly wins that battle. Writing is my way of pouring this onto a page, that way I feel I have put a full stop on it, taken it as far as I can. To ruminate is to keep chewing a problem that you just can’t solve, long after the problem has happened you cannot let go of it.

I’m mostly convinced that unhappiness in the mind is the result of a, for most people, false evaluation in the mind’s eye. To look inside is introspective, to look outside is extrospective, to look at now is perspective, to look at the past is retrospective, to look at the future is prospective. Contained in each of these looks, is the object of what is or has been observed, apart from the future look, that cannot be seen or known. Because we cannot know the future we might employ a series of guesses based on experience you may imagine, but no, the brain is a devious bastard that has a mechanism built in which has only the purpose of self protection, this mechanism is an evolutionary imperative that postulates the very worst futures so as to prep the psyche for eventualities that are very rarely going to manifest, but might.

The mind of a human is a pessimist and a skeptic, it is preparing for conflict, and drought, and loss, and injury, and destitution, and any other bad thing that is remotely possible, simply because that is it’s job. However, this mechanism is not your pal, it causes the jitters, it makes you prepare for unlikely wild events, it readies the fight or flight instinct at the wrong times, in short it ruins the now. What it does not do in abundance is to make you ready for glorious times to come, progress, happiness, at least it does not do this naturally. We make it do those by employing the rational effects of actions that secure the future for our future selves; to this end we take out insurance, we bank some money, we write a will and we get on the property ladder. We accumulate lots of stuff we feel we might benefit from one day.

None of this actually works 100%, so we employ another mechanism of the mind that participates, we desire for the future, we look forward to things. You book that holiday, you fancy a Chinese meal for the end of the week, you let yourself have a reward but only when you are finished, buy that item by paying it off until you can possess it (we do this in reverse now with credit), you get the horn and enjoy the anticipation of some slap and tickle. Still we cannot stave off thoughts of a terrible future, so we employ yet another tactic, we distract ourselves with busyness or with labour, a hobby or burning midnight oil for our employer. One is worthwhile, the other is almost pointless, I’ll let you decide. We don’t worry when we focus, and it doesn’t really matter what we are focussing on, could be tiddlywinks or guitar modes.

With these multiple strategies we somewhat cease to think of the future and all the turmoil that it may bring. A better, but oft less used, strategy would be to use experience, to realise that you are here because many bad things could have happened, or maybe did happen, yet you remain. To say “I know things will be okay because things have been okay up until now” to the self, to reassure that it is more likely that the future will be just as bland and eventless than the now is now. This is not to say that bad things do not happen, but to realise that you cannot get ahead of them by worrying about them. Your worry, unless accompanied by rational precaution, is as effective as trying to solve algebra by chewing bubble gum (borrowed that from a song).

Again we are fighting our own brain here, for some people at least. If I were to intend to toss a coin 10 times, and for the first 9 times it landed Heads up, there are 3 types of people who will be responding to a choice given to pick the result of toss 10. One type imagines that Tails is overdue to happen and chooses it, another figures the pattern must be the result of a defect that makes Heads more likely every time and bets accordingly, the last just picks any outcome at random because they know that the preceding 9 tosses make no difference whatsoever to this last one. You have to figure out what type you are, and work against what you are likely to think. I have no way of making this easy for you in offering anything else, I too struggle, and that’s why I write.

My personal bug bear is that I wish for better circumstances in one aspect of my life, but content myself with what I can put up with because of every other aspect of my life. Yes I whinge plenty, but I still stand still, mainly because I am fundamentally happy, or maybe because I am not yet beaten back by the aspect I refer to. My lack of forward motion is the result of thinking I might ruin the reasonably good (overall) now for the sake of an indeterminable future, but then I must realise that my risk aversion is a form of debilitation, my own fear that needs to be conquered. I have no will to power, but I also wish to be unrestrained, unshackled, from the chains of someone else’s power, someone else’s stupidity, someone else’s whim.

A long time ago I wrote a post that imagined a desire to be less intellectual, some might think that rather aloof but that is not what I was getting at, I truly believe that intellect is a dreadful burden, and to be stupider by nature is to be more easily made happy. If you just don’t think about it, it isn’t difficult, that’s the rule. Drawing from one of my favourite psychological studies, I would cite the people on the earliest plateau of the Dunning Kruger graph (mount stupid) as the happiest people of all, simply because they are too foolish to know what to be concerned about.

Maybe I will take my own advice, or read my own words again and take a risk, but I might leave it till tomorrow, for now I am happy enough.

Paul S Wilson