What a shortsighted goal, to navigate life making your choices, because you think they will make you happy, and in the least amount of time as well? If it feels good, you think it must be right. Your ignorance of the capitalistic roots of most images and implication around you, hide the fact that you are craving dopamine hits, and basic antediluvian things like drugs, sex, alcohol, and spending money, are central. If that wasn’t a clear enough picture, in more recent years a large industry has built up for thrill seekers: skydiving, zipwires, bungee jumping, and for the ultrarich, fatal journeys to the wreck of the Titanic, and/or jaunts towards the Moon!
Then you a have a life changing event; because you will, and you curtail the dopamine cycle. Your emotional thrills equate to stories you can tell people, whether how crazy you were: the “live fast die young” rubbish, or the impossible job of trying to make someone feel what you felt, when you were floating in a chamber and looking at our Earth, from 80, 90, or however many miles high in space, before going back down again. But both what and where is your treasure: the truly tangible stuff?
What makes us happy anyway? The question misses the point, because as with the brain chemical type hits above, even longer term, perceived good times, come and they go, because external influences are at play. That’s why we say,
“everything turns around”,
"this too shall pass",
“what goes around comes around”,
“as one door closes, another opens” &
“the tide will change”, etc.
Jesus Christ is reported in the Gospel of John, Chapter 6, as being insistent about the food people should eat. Christ said their ancestors ate ‘manna’ and died, but his “food” gave everlasting life. He'd lost many followers by the end of that increasingly strong discourse.
Pursuing feelings should be a folly, if only by understanding that thoughts alone can affect them, and vice versa. Work, toil, labour, pain, and time, require virtues for them to be endured, especially as their outcomes are not accurately predictable, and they’re a distance away.
Even the most holy amongst us, don’t know what God is. God is a mystery, and that means faith is involved. Sometimes, like I’m trying to say, we should wholeheartedly pursue a path with very few short-term rewards, and just hope for the best!! I think this is something Jesus meant. He wanted us to try and mimic him, because we might find joy and peace that way.
Life takes faith. We don’t know where we are going. Short-term pleasure gives a sort-term well known result. People even see psychics because they don’t like not knowing. Matters may be worse, if we know of people who did nothing but labour with no fun at all. It looks so relevant to me, that Jesus accepted Crucifixion, for multiple reasons, including the one in this context.
I think joy is the satisfaction that occurs, after you’ve chosen your poison, i.e., you’ve embarked on a route with little immediacy of pleasure; possibly with little happiness at all, but you have the faith; maybe even the “faith, hope and love” (as St Paul said), to know it’s the *only* deal.
Everyone around you, with the Internet in their pockets, buying and having things delivered often the next day, eliminating social logistics with Facebook, etc., are distracted. Digital smiles proliferate, everyone is telling everyone else, that they are happy. And you? Swallow your poison, and hope you become God !