“I suddenly realise that I am all fake inside. I realise I am eternally afraid.” — a 40-year-old confesses.
You are in luck. Recognising that there is something fake about you is the best thing that’s happened to you since you were born. Ninety nine per cent of us go through life never realising this. And you are eternally afraid? Yes again. The sad fact is that human beings are not designed to endure too much happiness.
The few rare smiles and genuine laughter usually get slashed by shards of doubt and fear. In a whole day, the amount of time you are physically able to feel lighthearted, giddy and delighted cannot be more than a few minutes, if at all. The happy hormones are beyond our voluntary reach. They surface rarely and recede rapidly. If there is a button somewhere with which we can turn them on — well, we have no idea where it is.
Fear buttons are everywhere. Our endocrine glands are good at churning out endless amounts of fear hormones. Therefore it’s very easy to feel a negative emotion but very hard to sustain a happy feeling.
And this is about youth who roughly spend 90 per cent of their life feeling various forms of fear and 10 per cent (or less) in feeling joy and happiness. Middle age is worse — everything gets brittle and patience snaps easily. Your so called happiness is just a grim grunt of satisfaction at besting an opponent or worse — watching someone else lose.
By the time you begin your forties you live and breathe only the lower emotions. You discover fake happiness and spurious joy — all forms of fear in disguise.
Old age is unspeakably worse — everything is coloured by fear — of disaster, death and disease. That’s why my heart leaps out whenever I see a happy old man, smiling to himself and feeling good about life. They are so rare and precious — we need to gather all happy old people and learn about life from them. Their personal triumph of joy over misery contains the secret to mankind’s eventual redemption.
Why is this so, couldn’t it have been otherwise? Why do our default emotions have to be in the negative range — all doubt, rage, anger, jealousy, greed, fear and worry? Why can’t we turn it around and keep our default emotions as happiness, joy, contentment, love? Well, most of us can’t — not easily at least. To the rest of us it’s almost impossible.
Not satisfied with this, are you? Well, I haven’t finished either. Watch out for this space next week.