STREET DOGS

When you try to stay on the surface of the water, you sink; but when you try to sink, you float. — Alan Watts

It’s only relatively recently that [we] have begun to think of happiness as … an obligation or entitlement, a natural human right. This had an unintended effect. When we think of happiness as our natural condition — the way we ought to be — it becomes natural to blame ourselves or others when we are not happy, as if somehow we’ve been done an injustice or have done something wrong.

I think this has created a new and very modern pressure, a new type of unhappiness. — Darrin McMahon

The startling conclusion at which they had all arrived, in different ways, was this: that the effort to try to feel happy is often precisely the thing that makes us miserable. And that it is our constant efforts to eliminate the negative — insecurity, uncertainty, failure or sadness — that is what causes us to feel so insecure, anxious, uncertain or unhappy.

They didn’t see this conclusion as depressing, though. Instead, they argued that it pointed to an alternative approach, a “negative path” to happiness, that entailed taking a radically different stance towards those things that most of us spend our lives trying hard to avoid. It involved learning to enjoy uncertainty, embracing insecurity, stopping trying to think positively, becoming familiar with failure, even learning to value death.

In short, all these people seemed to agree that in order to be truly happy, we might actually need to be willing to experience more negative emotions — or, at the very least, to learn to stop running quite so hard from them. — Oliver Burkeman

If we can’t arrange our own happiness, it’s a conceit beyond vulgarity to arrange the happiness of those who come after us. —