Proxy Happiness
Let’s talk about proxy happiness.
What’s proxy happiness, you ask? The short answer is, that it’s a distraction. The longer answer is that it’s a distraction from your problem that makes you feel happy temporarily. The long answer is as follows:
It’s everything that makes you forget your problem, the ones that feel good to do and experience but doesn’t help you in any way to solve your problem, in fact, you just ignore said problems because you don’t want to deal with them now. Your proxy happiness doesn’t help you in any way aside from making you happy only at the moment, and once the moment has passed, you’ll feel the dread of your problems coming at you again, so you seek that proxy again to forget the dread.
It’s also a form of lying to yourself, essentially. The professional way, that is often times by not even realizing that you are lying to yourself at the moment until someone mentions it to your face.
Is it good? I guess, if that helps you take a break for a bit so you can face your problems more readily later on. But if, after the happy proxy goes away, you still feel like you can’t deal with your problems, and so you go on the circle to get back to your sweet little proxy darling, there’s no use to it aside from being just that, a distraction.
The question now is, do you want to live for the rest of your life with your proxy, or to finally be free of the shackles and one day feel the true happiness?
Staying with your proxy happiness can feel really good, to the point that it can become an addiction. That’s when it gets dangerous.
Proxy comes in any form, because it differs from person to person.
A normal person might find a small sense of assurance of the day simply from doing things right in the morning: waking up early, having their coffee and healthy breakfast, not opening work emails first, reading good news about the world, smooth traffic on their way to work; typical stuff like that. That kind of stable life would not seem like anything like an addiction, they are in fact, perfectly normal. However, once trouble hits them, something that changes that normalcy and disturbs the balance, the happiness that they usually take for granted goes poof. So in a weird sense, normalcy can also be a form of proxy happiness.
Just take the pandemic as an example. Most normal people in the world went on their way, up and about just like usual, until suddenly there’s this global super contagious virus all around you. It’s a problem, and clearly, one that everyone can relate to. Immediately, your small pleasures are not an option anymore. Everything is different, and there’s no time to even mourn for it.
As capitalism won’t allow us to grieve. So the world had to move on, and quickly.
So people have to find another form of proxy during the pandemic, right? Without it, you might go crazy. Some turned to find new hobbies at home, some went to work even harder to compensate for the change of office dealings, some had social media and content to overconsume, some dwelled in their solitude and found themselves proxy peace, some had alcohol and drown in it, some came back to their old habits and felt good about it.
Not everything that people do is a proxy for happiness, of course. There is actual, true happiness after all.
(It’s just that I’m unfamiliar with it so I can’t talk about it much)
Some people might find a blessing in disguise during the pandemic, and eventually arrived at their true calling.
The baseline to overcome proxy happiness to gain the true happiness is the readiness to struggle and the acceptance that struggle is inevitable. You cannot deny it all the time.
It’s like you can’t work on a rubik’s cube if you don’t acknowledge the rubik’s cube sitting in front of you.
In this very simple example, the proxy happiness could be anything, from choosing to do any other activities that you enjoy more, or simply walking away from that spot and looking away from the cube for as long as you can. All that you will be doing is ignore the cube, or distract yourself. You feel good while doing it, because for a moment you truly and honestly forget there’s even an unsolved rubik’s cube right there in the room of your life.
But doing that doesn’t, and will never, make the cube disappear or solve itself.
That’s why, you need to eventually face the riddle, and solve it.
Take a break if you need to, I’m not saying that proxy happiness is necessarily a bad thing at all, they just come in many forms, negative or positive. What’s important is for you to realize that what you’re feeling is a proxy and a distraction and a lie, not the true emotions that will stay with you. And that’s always entirely up to you to face your reality or not. Being scared is normal, and that’s alright. But you will have to deal with things, eventually. In the end, that’s what life is.
Trust me, once you manage to overcome your glaring problems, it doesn’t even matter how long it will take or how difficult it will be, once you finish the struggle, you will gain that one true happiness.
No more proxy, no more distraction, no more lying to yourself.
