Happiness is something we all strive for, something we grow up yearning for. We constantly seek out experiences and ideas that bring us joy, even if it's just for a fleeting moment. When we're young, happiness feels pure and untainted, and we can find it in the simplest things – like a scoop of ice cream, a snack after school, or watching our favorite cartoon.
But even then, sometimes we miss out on these little joys. Your favorite ice cream flavor might be out of stock, your mom might forget to buy snacks for one evening, or your favorite show might not air one weekend. In those moments, it feels like the end of the world, and we throw a fit. Our parents look down at us and think it’s silly because, from their perspective, these things are not truly out of reach. They know there will always be other ways to make up for these small disappointments.
Then we start seeing differently once we are a couple of years older. We learn about our hobbies and find things and people that excite us. And even at this time, they don’t feel like placeholders, we wish our hobbies could turn into dreams, we hope our best friends will be there on our wedding day and we even make plans. But now we start to understand life, in painful bits.
Yet we still desire to grow up and leave the shell because we seem convinced that freedom equates to happiness. Instead of savoring our last moments of carefree joy, we spend them on the edge, hoping to get away and the day finally comes.
We walk into adulthood with our arms outstretched. We are happy, briefly, and we hope and dream that we will get to do all the things we wish to do. Now happiness is less attained by simple things but by big achievements, a house, a car, a job… a promotion, and the list goes on and on. Society convinces us that we need to work for our happiness, that we don’t have a moment to catch a breath and so naïvely, we believe it.
For a moment, it feels like we have things figured out like we’re on the right path. But then, one day, we’re walking down the road and suddenly break down. It all becomes overwhelming. We feel too grown to cry and can’t pinpoint where this resentment comes from. Is it towards ourselves? Our lives? Our friends?
The feeling lingers for days, and then we redirect our focus to something else. A promotion, of course—that will solve everything. We spend a whole year working towards it, and we get it. We feel something, and we tell ourselves it must be happiness. It feels like happiness, but somehow, it’s different.
So, we try to get to the root of the problem and understand our feelings. We sit down with a journal and realize it’s been years since we felt that personal, intimate happiness. We remember it from fleeting moments—a trip with friends, messing up a recipe in the kitchen. We call our friends, trying to recapture that feeling, but somehow, it still feels different.
We go back and think about how things were simpler in the past, or how we should have listened to our parents or taken that trip with our friends again. The thing is things changed the second we left home, the second we grew. Now we get to understand why ignorance is bliss and how we’ll have to borrow happiness from things, from people, until we learn how to cultivate it on our own.
What drives us to the edge is that we were not taught how to do that. We grow up knowing our time is borrowed, and now we find ourselves living on borrowed happiness. No bowl of ice cream can fill that void, and while there are better shows, they don’t bring the same comfort. We can buy ourselves anything in the world, but we don’t want just anything—we’re searching for something that can’t be bought.
Now on Friday Evenings, we curl up on the couch with our favorite bowl of ice cream and promise ourselves that we will start living again. That we will feel something again… But there is rent… there are utilities…we need to save…we need to take care of ourselves.
Perhaps, eventually, happiness will stop feeling foreign but for now, it just has to say goodbye.
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