How to be happy like a cat
The Cat Attitude For Happiness
Explore the pessimistic philosophy of being happy like a cat
Most of us would agree that cats and humans are vastly different.
We tend to think of ourselves as more developed, as a higher species, not just because of our superior intelligence but also because we gave ourselves the gift of morality and ethics.
Unlike cats, we know about what’s good and evil, right and wrong, and we aspire to transcend our animalistic tendencies to improve morally and make the world a better place, which of course we have been striving for ever since the time we originated on this beautiful planet earth.
Cats, on the other hand, don’t care about morals. They don’t have ambitions to improve the world either, nor themselves. In fact, they have evolved with a no care attitude which makes them very different from humans in terms of evolution.
Most of the time, cats come across as utterly indifferent. They don’t seem to care about other cats and aren’t too attached to their owners. But does this mean that cats are immoral, heartless creatures? Don’t they have the emotions of love and attachment? Are cats, devoid of ethics and virtue?
According to Feline Philosophy, cats have ethics and are also capable of love and affection. In contrast to humans, cats don’t have religions, moral philosophies, or any other external system that provides them with ethics or rules to live, and most importantly they don’t need such things to live a fully-fledged feline life.
A cat’s ethics comes from within, as it already knows how to live. As a matter of fact, cats do not take moral value lessons from school and depend on their natural instincts of behavior. This makes us humans realize that we largely act on the rules and morals established by our fellow humans rather than our natural human instinct. What may seem natural to you today may be something programmed inside you by your friends, family, school, and other people who play a part in the learning process.
So, we can see that a cat’s philosophy is an antiphilosophy, as it challenges traditional philosophy and offers a more primal (or perhaps more feline) approach to life instead.
Let us take the example of a person who had convinced his cat to become a vegetarian. He had trained his cat to only have a vegetarian diet. Convinced with the cat’s behavior he began revealing the world about his vegetarian cat.
He had seriously believed that his cat had chosen a meatless diet, but that wasn’t the case! It turned out that the cat had been supplementing his diet by catching fish from the backyard pond. (Time to laugh out loud)
The cat wasn’t interested in his owner’s moral idea of eliminating meat from the menu for the sake of other animals. Cats are hypercarnivores by nature, meaning that their bodies need meat to thrive. A vegetarian diet may be acceptable for omnivores like humans, but it’s not suitable for cats.
Nevertheless, the cat wasn’t offended by his owner’s attempt to push a vegetarian diet and remained faithful to his inborn nature.
The man’s intention to impose human morality onto his cat was pretty questionable. Cats don’t need morals to live. They already know what they need and how to live their lives.
In the above example, the man could have learned something from the cat and not the other way around. Humans seem generally dissatisfied with their nature, and they’re on a continual quest to be something they’re not, sometimes to absurd levels.
They also suffer from continual existential angst. Hence, they cling to philosophy and religion, hoping to answer their many questions and retrieve a sense of meaning.
They need morals (or rules) to determine what’s good and evil, how to improve, how not to be bad people.
These morals and rules are essentially the product of human imagination. So, none of our morals are inherently true, as they’re value judgments.
People who claim they’re moral simply express their emotions and how they feel about things and use facts, from time to time, to support their value judgments. People are nevertheless willing to impose their often irrational morality on others, defend it with violence, prosecute those who don’t conform, and silence those who disagree.
Cats, on the other hand, seem perfectly fine with being cats. And unless their safety or comfort is threatened, they’re content with the world around them.
Even if they encounter those silly people that feel the need to change everything in the world, they just acceptingly ignore them and walk away. Cats simply do what’s suitable for cats, disregarding artificial moral philosophies, religious doctrines, and ideologies.
Cat ethics come from within and are not taught to them. For example, cats can be extremely brave and excellent providers and protectors of their young. But they don’t do it for praise and approval from other cats or their owners, for that matter. In other cases, they decide to run away from a situation simply because for survival purposes when that’s the best course of action.
Most importantly they don’t beat themselves up for being cowardly afterward, either. This natural, pure philosophy of cats relieves them from a great burden: which is that they don’t ruminate and worry about what’s good and evil, moral and immoral, what they should and shouldn’t have done, and what other cats might think of them.
Historically they were never domesticated by humans. Dogs, for example, have partly become humans, and, like cows and horses, many dogs have learned to serve us by performing tasks.
Cats are not like that. Their hunting skills can be helpful, but they don’t hunt on command. Around 12,000 years ago, cats started living together with people in farming communities in the Near East, now situated in Turkey, Iraq, and Israel.
Humans quickly saw the usefulness of cats as they hunted rodents and other animals that affected their grain storage. Therefore, humans put cats on farms and ships, so they traveled along and conquered the rest of the world.
It’s cats who benefit the most from their relationship with humans. To this day, humans have served as steady food supplies and offered them shelter. Cats can be useful to humans (to some degree), but they mainly just like their company. At the same time, cats don’t need us.
They can be very fond of their human companions but don’t cling to them. If they like to be with us, they stay; otherwise, they leave. If we give them food, they’ll take it. But if we stop feeding them, they’ll start hunting again like a pro.
Cats aren’t group species but highly individualistic and self-determined mammals. As opposed to humans, they don’t care about group identity or a sense of belonging. They don’t feel the need to have a group identity and certainly don’t care about what other cats think of them.
Also, cats find it easy to live alone, unlike most humans who cannot bear their own company and continually look for all kinds of diversions to cope with their innate restlessness and to walk away from the reality of life.
Cats are not self-conscious and don’t find meaning in constructing a story about their lives. Whereas humans are obsessed with stories. They tend to create stories that explain their existence in the world. Their stories may be so fragile that they need continual confirmation. Therefore, they turn to religion and philosophy for less fragile, more secure stories.
Even though cats can meet with great adversities, these impact them differently, as they don’t create stories or a ‘history’ out of them, nor do they construct a possible future. History and the future hardly concern them, and they don’t dwell on concepts like death and disease.
They eat and sleep when they feel the need and defend themselves and their young if they have to, but don’t spend their time worrying about these things.
Yet, despite the inability to create stories, cats are a very successful species that has spread worldwide and thrives to this day.
What do cats teach us about happiness?
First of all, we shouldn’t try to become cats. We are human, and we can’t change that. It’s our nature to create stories and be discontent with how things are. There will probably always be some form of religion, and we’ll always be interested in philosophy.
If cats could grasp our philosophical ideas, they probably wouldn’t take them too seriously but play with them as they would play with a ball of wool. After all, philosophy is obsolete to them, but it could be amusing.
So, the conclusion is to listen to your natural instincts rather than learn from others around you, be it a cat or a human.
Do read the article: Your Reality Is Never About The Situation But Your Thoughts About It by Esther George
