Chapter 1: To lead a happy life

Meet Paswan
Jul 24, 2017 · 3 min read

How do i start?

It all started 6 million years ago, with the emergence of last common ancestor of Humans and Chimpanzees. This blip in time is the reason for all suffering there is today. A time when things were simple; You were a chimpanzee with the most basic of needs. Eat. Shit. Sleep. Procreate. How did you get here then? How did a chimpanzee get existential crisis? How did you start indulging in fictional things like Money, Religion, Taxes? Were your ancestors happier than you are today?

70,000 years ago, Homo Sapiens had the (mis)fortune of going through the “Cognitive revolution”. Like every other revolution it led to a change of social structure. From a social structure of fulfilling their basic needs (Food, Shelter, Sex) and being factual, they went to being fictional. Now our dear chimp could talk about the beehive in the tree, AND the spirit that inhabits the tree. Now, this may seem as the best thing that could have ever happened to mankind; but was it?

Happiness (According to me) can be defined quite easily with a mathematical equation.

If your expectation of things < The actual reality; it results in happiness.

If your expectation of things > The actual reality; it results in sadness.

if your expectation of things = The actual reality; it doesn’t elicit a response.

The comedian knew what was up

This definition is subject to the fact that we are measuring happiness at certain points in time.

Now, before the cognitive revolution, everything that homo sapiens engaged in was factual. If someone said someone fights like a tiger; that someone was a tiger. This resulted in managing expectations of people. There was no legroom for story telling. What you expected is what was the reality. No happiness, no sadness.

Then came the time after the cognitive revolution. Fiction gave the homo sapien the ability to imagine the unreal, to believe in things that did not exist. The Homo sapien then started to blur the boundaries of facts, and create a mathematical “expectation range” of the same hard fact. The expectations could be below the hard reality of the fact, or above it. Thus resulting in the invention of Happiness and Sadness. As the degrees of fiction increased, so did the range of expectations, and so did the steepness of the roller coaster of emotions.

The point of all of this, is that there is no point. You are riding a roller coaster of emotions of your own making. There is no thing as being happy, nor is there anything as being sad. These are social constructs that you have made because of your (now) dependence on fiction (Thereby answering the question, that we are actually not happier than our ancestors; “Progress” is a scam). In reality, your happiness or sadness is of no consequence. Its a circular process, a closed system. You are like a dog chasing its tail, with the minor exception that the Dog doesn't imagine its tail.

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