To be happy is achievable by improving yourself, by making yourself better.
It does not mean that you will not find any suffering.
To be happy is to be happy with yourself, to be satisfied enough with the results of your efforts and the understanding, the awareness, the honest knowledge that you did everything that was necessary and possible, within your reach and while respecting other people, to make yourself the best version of yourself.
We need to reconsider our valuation of the eldest. We currently dismiss and undervalue older people. To be old is not necessarily what it is to be respected. What it is to be respected and value is the wisdom that aging brings.
Of course we do not see it in every person: wisdom from aging. It is provably because the goal, the aim of every human being in modern societies slashes the idea of getting older as getting wiser, of time as a constrain, as an imposition of reality on ourselves that demands from us -as the only meaningful answer- to improve.
Contrary, our current civilization prices the image of youth. But in comparison with the wisdom of the old, youth is dumb and stupid, ignorant, self-focused, unaware, blind to any other manifestation of being than themselves, and this is totally understandable and acceptable for youth to be so. But is this what we want to value the most? Is this what we want to value only?
The Devil
“To pretend,
to fake,
to perform,
to act,
to say words with an aura of wisdom,
but to say those words behind the curtains,
with amplifiers,
behind the screen
of this computer in which you are reading these words now;
behind your clothes
that have the intention to make me believe that you are my friend and trustable.
How much of what you say is true?
Because you list achievements in your words.
You talk with the assumption that I recognize a list of your achievements implied in your words
that make your words worth something.
And you dig your heals so much in your ground of fakeness and pretension
that you end demanding from me to take the same attitude.
And I am honest
and relaxed
and mobile, versatile, adaptable,
but committed to my values,
and you end taking the approach of supporting other fake people
and pretend that I do not exist,
but I do exist.”
We need to understand that reality is our work of art. If we no not make our life and our environment, the world we live in, our cities, our neighborhoods, our places, our offices, our skyscrapers the manifestation of a Aesthetics that equal Ethics, we are worthless.
Impersonal
An answer is: not to personalize, not to do anything for ourselves as a goal, to choose an Ideal: Beauty, Goodness, Art…
Piously worshiping Life.