Dear xenopustex:

Your comment about having a “happiness problem” makes me think of something I read and agree with, don’t remember the exact words, something like: we are not born to be happy; we are born to survive. What this means to me is the fact that indeed, every living thing in nature is there to keep living, at least until adequate reproduction. Animals are not born to be happy but to survive and reproduce. Having evolved from animals, and reproduction no longer a must (thanks to our brain thinking), still, we are not born to be happy.

Being happy, or mental well being is a great benefit and very desirable of course. But the reason we are not happy, and most people are not happy at any one time, it seems to me, is because we had to do something to survive and that something does not make us happy, but has kept us alive, surviving.

For example, and I will be guessing because I don’t have the facts of your childhood, only that you were raised by your grandparents and your mother worked and lived a distance away, your mother is living with you and makes negative comments regularly. You were not close to either her or your father (who intended to disinherit you later). That’s all I know, if I got these few details right. So I will be guessing (the following is therefore fiction, but let me know if anything happens to be true):

Living with your grandparents, they instilled in you a strong value of being industrious, of working hard and you took on that value, working hard, going through law school, and spending countless hours, most of your life in your legal career. Your grandparents also talked to you about honesty, integrity, honor… only they didn’t walk their talk in the relationships in their lives: maybe they gossiped, punished, bitter.. manipulated, hid the truth.

And so you focused on being industrious but the rest, you were confused about and wanted to simply avoid. If honesty, integrity and honor with people ends up in the dysfunctional relationship you saw between your grandparents, between them and their adult children, relatives, others… better stay away from all of that.

Later on, as a prosecutor, seeing the lack of honesty, integrity and honor day after day made your jaded self even more so.

And now you are indeed, pessimistic. That is an unhappy state of mind and you want to be happy, optimistic and so you want to learn how to be optimistic, how to be happy.

Let me know, if you will, if my fiction has a non fiction element for you, correct where needs to be corrected, elaborate if you’d like and we can take it further, in the search for happiness, perhaps.

anita