Happiness as a Paradox

The only legitimate reason I have for discussing happiness or trust online is out of my own unhappiness or distrust.  As a society we are constantly engaging a paradox of happiness and trust because we are not facing our unhappiness or distrust, otherwise our conversation would be about unhappiness not happiness and distrust not trust. 

If I am truly happy why would I need to talk about happiness and if I am truly happy the only reason I have for talking about happiness is to placate or soothe or divert people from their unhappiness, and the same thing applies to trust, which actually placates, or soothes or diverts their distrust. 

We all have moments of sadness but sadness is not the same thing as unhappiness.  There are unhappy people who attend funerals who are sad also that someone has died.  I have that odd experience of being happy at a funeral but sad for the family and loved ones for the person who has passed.  In such a case where I am happy at a funeral, I will be so because I know for a fact that the person who passed lived a great life and I am happy for that person and acknowledge that life with the happiness for a person who got to live like that.

Yet those funerals remain the exception and not the rule, they remain the rare moment rather than the common moment and that is because we do not get close to seeing how much unhappiness we express through the guise of happiness talk and how much distrust we express through the guise of trust talk.  We all know that we were a mask but we don't know the paradoxical relationship we have to that mask.

Now the strange thing I find is that if we confront unhappiness head on or distrust head on, that is a recipe for depression.  If we awaken ourselves to an abject reality that abject reality will coming weighing us down, because there is a weight or extreme heaviness with unhappiness and distrust, that we prop up with happiness and trust talk, but the moment that support or prop fails us, guess what comes down on us hard - the actuality of our unhappiness and distrust.

If I am very happy I am evaporating unhappiness but acknowledging the need for sadness.  If I am highly trusting I am evaporating distrust but acknowledging the need for vigilance and due diligence.   It is not a yin-yang thing going on here, it is simply quality of being.  If happiness is an outcome of trying to be happy and trust is an outcome of trying to be trusting then the weight of unhappiness and distrust are cosmetically hidden, as cosmetic as the need for personal branding is.

Can you see how personal branding helps us to hide our unhappiness and distrust and yet seek us to project happiness and trust as an image.  I just cannot live that way, sorry but I don't want to subscribe to society's notion of the need for personal brand, because for me it is society's denial that the reality of modern societal life is sitting on a foundation of deep unhappiness and distrust. 

Since this superficial foundation exists and so long as it exists, we subconsciously know that this is not congruent but consciously we are shaping ourselves into a societal product, which is what personal branding makes us - which is why ironcially I am not against branding - because I think branding is absolutely essential to showcase the best product or service, nor do I protest against those people whose name is the product - but it is also up to those people to tackle the Faustian bargain they have then made with personal branding.

I am not a guru who is sent to this planet to liberate the world to happiness and trust, nor am I saint to deal with the massive under-current of unhappiness and distrust which only exists because it is our default currency because of the societal system we maintain.  We cannot overthrow that system because we cannot overthrow ourselves.  Every time some revolutionary gets us to overthrow this system, we only replace it with a system that itself has not tackled the superficial foundation of a society that oozes with toxins under the skin, though the make up looks really good !

I like the mind Alan Watts had because he is one of the few people, (like Jiddu Krishnnamurti) who see the world more closer to as I do, but that does not mean that I have an answer for my own unhappiness and distrust, because how can I mop up those dark waters when I co-exist in a society that creates that hidden swamp.  I feel the wetness of unhappiness and distrust but I do so because we are all wet.   Yet I am at times dry enough to experience happiness, though I am not anywhere near dry enough to experience trust.  I would not write this if I was experiencing trust !