Friday, May 06, 2005
suddenly, i wish for time to pass faster. i want to pass this stage of bumming around and get on with real stuff, stuff that will contribute to the rest of my life. perhaps i will regret this, for bumming around is something many people wish to do but can never get the time to do.. actually i'd rather have intermitten bumming periods scheduled in between busy periods, and not just piled up all at once. that rings a bell with what sigmund freud wrote:
Human beings strive for happiness, they want to become happy and remain so. This striving has two goals, one negative, and one positive: on the one hand it aims at an absence of pain and unpleasurable experiences, on the other at strong feelings of pleasure. "Happiness", in the strict sense of the word, relates only to the latter. In conformity with the dichotomy in its aims, human activity develops in two directions, according to whether it seeks to realise-mainly or even exclusively- the one or the other of these aims.
What we call happiness, in the strictest sense of the word, arises from the fairly sudden satisfaction of pent-up needs. By its very nature, it can be no more than an episodic phenomenon. Any prolongation of a situation desired by the pleasure principle produces only a feeling of lukewarm comfort; we are so constituted that we can gain intense pleasure only from the contrast, and only very little from the condition itself.
Unhappiness is much less difficult to experience. It is no wonder that, under the pressure of these possibilities of suffering, people are used to tempering their claims to happiness, just as the pleasure principle itself has been transformed, under the influence of the external world, into the more modest "reality principle"; that one counts oneself lucky to have escaped unhappiness and survived suffering; and that in general the task of avoiding suffering pushes that of obtaining pleasure into the background.
What a beautiful insight. Any prolongation of a situation desired by the pleasure principle produces only a feeling of lukewarm comfort. Yes, isn't that happening to me now?
Man.. the creature who is never content. The creature whose dicontentment with the present leads to progress, and ironically, to his downfall too.
So, is happiness "feelings of pleasure" or merely "avoiding negative emotions"? I would like to think that the former is more of happiness, while the latter is what we call contentment. Already, it is so hard to be content, how difficult will the journey be towards happiness? Frued is indeed one genius who is in touch with naked human emotions, emotions that are raw and not masked by our pride or vanity. Psychology is a hard subject to tackle, for humans are superb creatures who are expertly skillful at covering up and making up how we feel, such that we do not know how we really feel sometimes.
Sigh, its saturday tomorrow. Time passes so agonizingly slowly. Either knock some sense into me, or knock some meaning into my life. You get hurt emotionally when you bum around too much.
