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You have to find happiness every day in order to be happy.
It is sitting there waiting for you but not given. It requires awareness, which is usually occupied and distracted by attempting to build or buy happiness.
This means happiness is a choice of where we focus.
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There is joy in discovering your body to be functional.
Productive movement is also termed “labor,” often negatively associated with “work.” However, the system that has captured natural joy (movement as an accomplishment) has replaced it (or displaced it) with an abstracted fulfillment: intellectual insight.
Yet, academic pleasure offers me less joy than utilitarian physicality.
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Either the individual can self-regulate (manage/order/pain) or self-allow (entropy/pleasure/excitement), and it needs to be a combination of both to live fully.
We crave pleasure, which was originally an evolutionary trait to promote survival, but today our survival requires restraint.
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If you know the past and the present, your chances of predicting the future are strong.
However, when you don’t understand the past, and the present is chaotic, why would you -metaphorically- till your fields or build new things? Why make a long-term consistent effort?
You may be equally well off speculating if no sense can be made of the world: it is all risk and chaos.
Choosing to labor without high odds of success versus not laboring with an equal likelihood of success proves the creator insane to toil in times of upheaval.
Some people reduce the world. Logically, their frivolity makes sense, yet the absurdity of the creator will be the ones building our future, even as the gambler leeches from productive men and machines.
As well, there will be some who do neither: neither risk nor build, but remain frozen, perhaps intellectually dense and action sparse, abiding in the currents.
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Ideology, politics, philosophy, or religion work to redirect bodily energy (fleshly, libidinal desire) into grand tasks, but one must always return to the body.
In beliefs, you can transgress (or backslide) into primordial alignment: carnality, gluttony, or sloth. But even if you are a paragon of discipline till the end, your flesh takes the vengeance of death: your will versus the body’s ultimate return.
The question remains if the "grand task" is worth the suffering effort. Is the fight perpetual, with an always deferred victory requiring more effort? If so, you haveyou’ren not pleasure, but pain and named its purpose.
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In response to yesterday: happiness may be a choice, but it is a political choice.
We are socially compelled to be happy: it is a desire we must urgently pursue and sacrifice to achieve. However, to choose happiness when faced with the pain and suffering of others, or a global catastrophe, requires a convoluted contradictory stance.
Nietzsche says we should instead pursue "joy", which involves sacrifice and may include suffering over the long term to achieve a goal that is great and rewarding. Others, such as Timothy Brennan, say "pleasure" is preferable.
"Happiness" is now politicized and commoditized, enfolded within an individualistic imperative for emancipatory freedom. Our blind pursuit of happiness has become an entitled right.
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You’ve heard happiness is a choice, but don’t believe it.
When we pursue status and toys we lose happiness.
Happiness is fleeting and only arrives when you desublimate (cease to be self-aware).
Caught in your desire, you are engrossed in what "you" want.
Happiness requires you to lose yourself in the present, which is a choice to no longer want.
