Is my happiness stupid

Sometimes I read my old writing, and I wonder if I’ve become less contemplative and rather complacent with how I observe the world. As if I let everything wash over me without reaction. This might be because I’ve lost most of the angst I harbored in my heart for lots of my teenagehood, or perhaps, a result of my shallowness, which is extremely hard for me to admit and confess to.

I feel very stuck at the surface these days. Like all I do is feel happy, then upset, and maybe bored in between. Almost like one of those Mr. Men books (Mr. Happy, Mr. Messy, Mr. Grumpy, etc.) you receive when learning about emotions and words for the first time. The most basic set of feelings that couldn’t possibly express the true nature of what it is to be alive. I don’t know where the raw discomfort I had with the world went. I fear that without it, I am just a shallow shell of a person letting life flow through her but not out of her.

The problem is that I am so content and satisfied with my life, which, in all honesty, is not a problem at all. Unironically, I just dilly-dally through life happy as a clam. In fact, I don’t think I’ve ever enjoyed life as much as I have these days, but something about my happiness feels fake. At the same time, I know it’s true because I sleep every night with a cozy warmth in my heart, yet I can’t help but bash myself in the head a little when I think about how immature this state of contentness is with the world as it is. Maybe a better way to put it is that my happiness feels unjustified, shallow. I feel like a toddler wading around the comfort of the kiddie pool, completely unbeknownst to a tsunami closely approaching.

When I was fourteen, I forced myself to read all these existential and philosophical novels, no matter if I enjoyed them or not, because I convinced myself that I needed to for the culture and the knowledge. These books were ones by Dostoyevsky, Kafka, and the like. I look back at that time of my life, as depressed as I was, with a pride for my pursuit of media so deeply embedded in the academic realm and cultural discourse. I don’t know if I would even do that today. I feel so caught up in the little fantasies of my day that I don’t dedicate time to enrich my mind as I should.

One part of my mind tells me that I am having fun and I should just surrender to the beauty of life around me without a second thought. The other part of it tells me that I need to think more, feel more, know more, in order to be the most well-formed version of myself I can be. I know I should listen to that second part.

I don’t want to wake up one day in a few years and realize my brain has atrophied because I’ve succumbed too early to the simple pleasures of life. I have no idea if this is a healthy mindset or not, but I trust that my dormant hunger for more is something that I should listen to because no one else is responsible for my personal development besides myself, which is something that I’ve only come to realize after my first year of living alone.

I was always acutely aware of the fact that high school dictated many parts of my routine, both social and academic, but being in a new country, higher education, and living alone has completely turned my way of life on its head (naturally). Something tells me that this is what the post-grad experience is like… except I am experiencing it earlier on.

I mean, I am completely in control of the way I live now. If I never wanted to pick up a book again, I don’t think anyone would stop me. Having this level of agency is what sent me down this initial spiral (something I’m realizing as I currently write this sentence). Maybe that’s the source of my dread, “dread”. The fact that no one holds me accountable for what I do or don’t do scares me. I know it’s a part of growing up. I can either accept it and continue to cultivate my knowledge for the sake of it or fall into a state of futile indifference, which I refuse to do.

I guess that means I will just have to keep trying to know the world more than I do now, which will not be a very difficult threshold to pass.