I'm promoting another long comment no one will read to a post. Hopefully maximizing its chance. The topic was fake happiness. Heck, that's the reason I started the Omnibus Omnia on LinkedIn: to discuss topics like this. But no one is interested. Just some bots spewing trite clichés and vomit. People just want to click on the trifles and stay happy with the fiction that's being spun, and LinkedIn is happy as long as it has traffic. And that's why most people have this pit inside that's slowly rotting. People have turned everything into passive entertainment—television—and turned their thinking off. Thinking seems to be work, and the prevalent idea is that if you're not getting paid for it, you don't better do it. I disagree. Sure, you'll make money, but you won't be able to answer or think through life like that and we'll increasingly look like that mask I've sketched, a dystopian dystrophic version of ourselves.
Is not our reality a meticulously curated gallery of societal constructs, artificially erected edifices that shape and restrict the contours of our existence? Our thoughts, our dreams, and our fears—are they not constrained by these invisible fetters, these insidious norms that dictate the rhythm of our lives? Are we not ensnared in this complex web of perceptions, the veracity of which we seldom question, and in our quest to be happy, are we not offering fealty to these phantom realities? The answers are yes, and we are screwed.
This happiness is the crowned monarch of virtues, the heralded goal of life's hallowed path. Yet, what if the reality we're seeking to be happy with is but an illusion, a grand narrative spun from the loom of collective fictions? What if that is making us unhappy? The issue is that the fictions that we have created to get the world to work have trapped us because we've started believing in them. Most people don't know what reality is today, and to wake them up, it would take peeling an onion several layers deep, and no one's interested.
This trend of trying to force the appearance that everything is okay all of the time is more than an imposition; it's an incarceration. This modern-day prison is the reason why people lead a contrived, artificial existence. And in leading this life, some of them come unmoored from their real selves and self-worth, which feeds the feeling of being alienated in an increasingly individualistic society. As a species, we are not specially rigged for happiness; that circuit is driven by other survival imperatives.
We are that animal that defecates, fornicates, and fights and also fibs, and we should attempt to strip away the layers of fib, to shatter the mirrors of illusion, and to lay bare the naked essence of our species. Only then can we navigate the labyrinth of life without losing ourselves in its beguiling twists and turns. For it is one thing to be wearing a mask to the world and quite another to be wearing a mask inside, which is the reason for our angst.
