Vivat Libertas

...actually, the positive thinking sort of worked. Well, not quite, but sort of. What worked better for me wasn't trying to cultivate a happy happy shiny shiny attitude. It was doing what my body told me to do and getting some sleep. It was doing what my mind told me to do and getting out of the house to see some green space. It was seeing my amazing boyfriend and holding him, spending time with him, spending time just talking and making music and exploring new things. It was realising that I have really, really good friends, who care about me and actually want to spend time with me. It was realising that all of those things have been there since the beginning and I'm only just noticing them. It was going to parties and dancing badly and ending up covered in my friend's soft toys. It was diving deep into physics books and connecting with what made me love physics - with the strange and beautiful and elegant ways of viewing the world - and drawing on that to stud...

This formula doesn't even make that much sense and it's still  a better tool for finding happiness than what we've ever come up with. We Westerners seem to be on a quest for happiness. It's a quest as old as dirt, and in the thousands of years we've been on it we appear to have made no progress. And we call ourselves smart. I think that might need a little more consideration... ...Right, that's the obligatory misanthropy over with, so let's get back on track! Anyway, we're still on this quest today and still just as clueless. At this point, I'd love to turn to positive thinking (I reserve judgement on positive psychology in academia, as opposed to positive psychology in the media, due to not knowing enough about it) and absolutely fucking rip into it - and, for those of you who like some invective mixed in with a good dose of cynicism, disillusionment and disgust with the status quo, and maybe, hopefully, even a glimpse of some logic, I sha...

So atheism and happiness seems to be bouncing around, as ever, around atheist circles on the internet as to who's happier: atheists or theists? (As far as I'm aware agnostics get marginalised at times; for reasons I'll go into later, the argument doesn't interest me that much.) People put forth study after study, shiny graph after shiny graph, hell, they even whip out some anecdotal evidence if they're feeling a bit lazy. And the flamewars, they burn...They very quickly seem to degenerate into personal attacks and essentially seem to run on stupid. Call me an idealist, but I expected better from people. After seeing people fuck up so much, I still expected better from them. I'm an idiot. But I digress. All these arguments hinge on the idea that whether atheists or theists are happier actually matters to whether atheism or theism is right, which - as the quote in the picture helps to illustrate, and as common sense should show - simply isn't true. Hap...

I do wonder about whether it is possible to be happy sometimes; in fairness, I wonder about it much less than I used to, before I knew that I could actually be happy. (Even so, stick me in the middle of a despairing episode, one where I have trouble speaking or walking, and I'll still moan about whether I'll actually recover from it, despite clearly having done so in the past. Emotions are far too powerful for their own good.) These days, having actually been happy, I generally don't think about it as much - until someone else, someone in despair, brings it up. This really is just the hand-wringing of the privileged and disgustingly aloof, but what the hell can I do for them? What can I tell them that isn't an outright lie? It doesn't get better, after all. You don't get happiness on a silver platter - if ever. Nobody's got one overarching answer to finding happiness, and anyone who says otherwise is lying or being stupid. That's not really something t...