Weblog
You may have noticed that while I do not waste time with colloquial greetings, I do find a certain intangible reward in busying myself with matters of philosophical and often psychological profundity. I also like to confuse the Hell out of my readers with a grab bag of random witticisms and lexical inconsistencies, but in the end, all you seem to care about is the fact that I sound smart. It’s one thing to put one SAT word after another and call it a treatise on the everlasting plight of lab rats and the evil creation of Satan that is frozen yogurt, but it’s something else when a man, in a matter of concise, unerring action, can prove the world wrong and God an elusory fabrication of the human mind.
Life-long ambitions of mine aside though, I’d like you to consider the following premise, not as a… well, premise, but as a perfectly viable scenario of how things may or may not be: You are the average human being, and while that may not sound satisfactory to you now, for the purposes of illustrating this scenario, I’d also like you to see yourself as an overall happy person. Hence, you are not sad, and in fact, you are perfectly content with your biyearly excursions to the local theme park and five-star eateries. In effect, you are who you are, and until now, you haven’t had any reason to doubt your so-far justified existence.
But then there’s Dick. A kindly gentleman of the name Richard. You might say he’s the not-so-average human being, but by no means does that make him sad. Like you, he is content. He is happy, and although you probably don’t know it, he is much happier than you are. I’ll let you decide for yourself in a minute if that’s supposed to make you feel worse about yourself, but for the moment, know that you will never be as happy as he is. While his lifestyle may differ little from your own, he’s well versed in the ways of kneading concession-stand cotton candy (commonly found at most theme parks) into little saccharose figurines that resemble Snow White’s seven dwarfs. As bizarre as that sounds, get this:
You and I… we think that’s cool.
And so it is with unparalleled skill that Dick can single-handedly make the world cooler than pie. In short, he is happier than you are, because he is smarter than you are. He runs faster than you do; he can climb higher than you can; and everything you can do, he can do better.
“So what, right? I mean, I’m happy. Isn’t that enough?”
I’m not sure what I hoped to accomplish by relating that particular premise to you, but I’ve been thinking lately that it is not life as a blessing or privilege that we take for granted, but rather human fellowship. Are we perhaps too idealistic to believe that mankind is willing to recognize the petty ambitions of people who, dare I say it, just don’t make the cut? Take a look around. You know as well as I do that the better, happier, more fruitful lives aren’t for everyone. With each passing day, I myself am more and more amazed by the fact that those with more complex levels of inborn intelligence see things that others don’t. They naturally comprehend life’s more impressive wonders and can assign special meaning to things that most don’t even recognize. Maybe you’re one of them, and maybe you’re not. Whatever the case, don’t be so quick to sit comfortably just because someone told you that happiness is subjective, or that happiness is fundamentally immeasurable. The limits to our personal joys seem to be determined by congenital intellect — something we are born with and are powerless to change. I’d like to accept it as a plain and simple fact that I am as happy as I’ll ever be, but I know regardless of how fortunate I may feel at any given time, I’ll always wonder how happy I really am.
So I ask you, is it enough that I can be happy, even if someone else can fathom a level of happiness I’ll never be able to understand for myself? How does it make you feel to know that certain people are simply born more able and more fit to think, to act, and to live than you are? Does that matter? Should it matter? Like a Huxlian form of natural selection, the lesser creatures aren’t weeded out by virtue of strengths and weaknesses, but rather left to subsist in relative, mediocre happiness, unknowing of what bliss they have been denied by their own inherent deficiencies. It’s disheartening at best, but maybe the day will come when I am proven wrong. Maybe a humble servant of heroic prowess and gallantry will come around and give us all something to gaze upon in universal wonder. He will raise cities and defy gods, and he will remake the world as it was in the eyes of a people forsaken by its own kind.
“Eventually… eventually, we will lead them into the day.”