​​

The Myth of “Eternal Happiness” is not just passed down from generations to generations.

In Fact, this Myth is constantly dispelled by our ancestors.
With advice like: “Don’t spend it all in one place”, or “It isn’t the destination that matters, it’s the journey”.

The Myth

What I am talking about is the myth that we all have held as truth in our minds whether or not we would like to believe it.
It is the myth, that if we just get one more materialistic possession, or pass this one course, or finally get that raise, or make any “big break” we were aiming for, then we have finally reached our greatest potential in life, and we will finally be happy.
However, life still moves on just like it always has.
What happened, You ask?
I bought the thing I wanted, and I finally made my big break! why am I not happy?
Well, that’s why it’s called a myth.
You see, humans incite the fetish of breaking through the present world and into the never-ending happiness of the future – because they underestimate not only what makes them happy in the future, but they also fall victim to a myth that can be treated.

My Favorite Quote

From the great Zig Ziglar:

“Money won’t make you happy… but everybody wants to find out for themselves.” – Zig Ziglar
This Quote Underpins my views on life and thoroughly elevates my views on free will. Near the begging, I described how our ancestors, who have lived life long enough to rise above the myth, give us advice on how to live life correctly.
However, you can say it’s because I am a hot headed teen, or I have an expanded view of free will – but I do not believe we should deride or despise people that fall to this myth.
Zig Ziglar’s Quote is not to be interpreted as “well, some people do fall for this myth, let us pity them”. In My opinion, we should interpret it as “allowing each and every individual to make their own mistakes, even if it is falling for the easily avoidable myth.

My reasoning is this:

Imagine a timeline where immediately, all the grizzled, life beaten adults of the world parted all their knowledge of living a good life unto their children (when the children were old enough to comprehend the world of course), and all those children listened and made not one mistake that the adults had previously.
Their lives would be insanely devoid of emotion, excitement, and would bode more akin to a real life version of The 
Truman Show.
Most Importantly, the necessary development of the human brain would be suppressed, as the coddled life, free of “bad” choices would immediately remove the change for learning and reflection in this specific group of growing children.Removing the option of living, by making your own individual choices, is probably the greatest crime to free will.

Feasibility

Of course, this little story is nothing more than a thought experiment – an initial fear exacerbated to the extreme by the slippery slope.
While in the real world, some children listen to their parents and some don’t – the argument I am trying to counter is the one with the notion that the “right” choices lead society to prosper.

Bad Choices? Good choices? More like life experience.

So what if little Billy stole money from his mother’s purse as a child, or teenager Debbie got hitched to the guy that her mother warned her was a bad apple, or even adult frank spending all his money on fancy cars?
What people miss here is the aftermath, and why they miss it is because we humans love to view other people’s choices as caused by their personality, and we view our own choices as events that happened to us.
What they are missing, is the full life that each and every one of these people lives when they are allowed to make their own choices, either “good” or “bad”.
While Billy may have stolen money and got in trouble, he has that beautiful memory of his mischievous childhood which sticks with him forever. Likewise, with Debbie – she may have hooked up with the wrong guy, but she learned from the experience and became better at finding new partners. However, she wouldn’t want to forget the experience she had with her bad apple – it is a piece of what made her who she is today. Finally, Frank may have spent his last dollar bill on his new Ferrari, but after he goes through his depression and realizes what actually matters to him – he can always have that story to tell his students – when he becomes a motivational speaker. 🙂

Final Thoughts

I haven’t lived on this earth long enough to truly know all the good and bad choices that can come up in someone’s life. However, I do think a major idea that plagues society is putting other people down for the choices they make. The first reason humans put others down is in their nature, and it is difficult to combat – viewing other’s choices as their personality but views our choices as events that happen to us. While this itself is an important point to address, and I’m sure there have been volumes written on the subject, What I’m more concerned about is our pursuit of a “perfect society”. This perfect society would have a default moral and ethical code where one would only make the “right choices”, and life would be perfect. Herein lies my fear.
We were born to live in conflict, and we become greater through it. We also grow internally after each new experience, but we grow the most when we are put in stressful situations.
When we all make the right choices, where is the stress? where is the growing, the learning, the advancement?Humanity will shrivel into pasty, dull, weaklings, devoid of any abstract notion of actual “life”. For in my definition, life means “happenings”. If every choice is good, and there is no pain, no thought, and no conflict, life isn’t something that happened, it is just another mirage that finally succeeded in its quest to blinds us from our true nature.

Notes

Don’t get me wrong, I want life to better for humans, and I want to build robots that further that cause. Also, when I say I appreciate conflict, I don’t mean believing that world wars make us rise above our station like General Erich Ludendorff did in WWI.
All I’m saying is that free will should not be suppressed in making choices, and even if we ever have robot servants, we do not forget to engage in mentally, physically, and emotionally demanding activities.
It is these events that make us live life to the fullest.