Out Of The Trap And After The Carrot

Well kids, we all know that nothing ever turns out the way we plan it; prime examples include Nick Donato's broken arm, my own higher education career, and who could forget the escape to the islands in Dawn of the Dead? You could cull countless examples from movies, literature, television shows, and certainly your own personal experiences, but dwelling on them would be needless. We've already been over the ramifications of the Cosmic Mouse Trap; the question, then, is: what do you do once you've gotten yourself out of the trap? The answer lies in following what I like to call the Cosmic Carrot.

What is the Cosmic Carrot, you ask? Well, in a word, happiness. You see, after a lot of thinking and one epiphanous shower (the greatest revelations are always given through interaction with water somehow) I realized something about happiness. Happiness is not, as people commonly think, a state of being, but rather a goal to be achieved, with one minor caveat: it is largely unachievable. Thus, happiness is like the carrot laid out before us, enticing us to trot along the path of life like a horse in hopes of one day devouring that carrot. It's not about reaching the carrot; realistically, that's everyone's objective, and that's as it should be. But the main purpose of the carrot itself is not to be eaten. It exists simply to motivate us to keep going.

So why is happiness a virtually unattainable goal? In order to answer that question, we have to look at what happiness is and where it comes from. Bear in mind, I'm not saying that you can never be happy. People are often happy at any given point in time, just as people are often warm at any given point in time. The problem is that happiness, like warmness, fluctuates with the temperature of the times. I'm willing to bet that most people never experience a longstanding sense of happiness, for one simple reason. Happiness is achieved through obtaining what you want, whether that comes from circumstances, people, objects, accomplishments, etc. I'm sure you're familiar with the phrase "the grass is always greener on the other side." If you don't have it, you want it, simply because you don't have it. My boy Teddy Geiger once said "you always want what you can't have," which is an apt way of putting it. I'd actually take that one step further, and say you only want what you can't have (which, in fact, is why I think the most sought-after girls seem to be single more often than not, but that's a whole separate issue). To extrapolate, not only do you want it if you don't have it, but you don't want it if you do have it. Want, by definition, is a state of pursuit, so once you've acquired whatever it is you're trying to obtain, how can you "want" it any longer? It's already yours. Thus, you can never be in possession of what it is you want, and if whatever you want is always out of reach, happiness really is never completely achievable.

Now that we've established that happiness is essentially an illusory bribe designed to propel us forward, what's to stop us from being completely miserable all the time? Well, the answer here is actually based on the premise of wanting. The way I see it, to want is a good thing, as long as the possibility of getting what you want is plausible. But like I said, once you get it, it's no longer an issue of "wanting" but an issue of "having." And soon, once you have that thing, it either passes away or you no longer want it, leaving you to move on to something else... and that's precisely the answer to the question posed at the beginning of the paragraph. It's not having the things you want, or even necessarily getting them that makes you happy. What makes you happy is knowing that you will or might have them in the future. Happiness is all about having something to look forward to, something that you can look to and say "things aren't great right now, but whenever this happens/I get that thing, things will be better." It's about having something to hope for, whether that hope is unfounded or not (which is why I've come to believe that false hope is better than none at all). Just like the horse and his carrot, it's about what's in front of you, not what you've currently got. If you get the carrot, you don't need to chase it anymore, so you stop moving. If there is no carrot, what's the motivation for moving at all?

As an application to my own personal experience, I always looked forward to going back to school at the end of summer, and I realized a while back that I would no longer be able to look forward to that anymore, which was quite a downer, I must admit. I figured I would take solace in the fact that I'd probably have a lot more free time in the near future, not realizing that I was doing exactly what I'm describing in this paragraph. And then, the other day it hit me. For the last week or two, since I finished working on those dance DVDs that had been occupying a lot of my time, I hadn't been doing much of anything. I would get up, eat, watch TV, sit on my bed and beebop around the internet, watch a movie, etc. But to be honest, I wasn't really having all that great of a time, which didn't make much sense to me, because I had the opportunity that I've always wanted... lots of free time and no real responsibility. I felt stuck, and I lacked the motivation to really do anything about it. I was a horse with no carrot. Then, the other day, whilst participating in an activity I would normally hate, I found myself feeling more alive than I have in a while. I was helping my dad move boxes from our shed to our driveway for a garage sale we're having this weekend, and though it wasn't much fun, I thought about how I wanted to be finished so I could go play the computer game I've been absorbed in for the past few days. And then it struck me like a 2x4 to the forehead. I wasn't exactly happy while I was working, but I had something to look forward to at the end of the work, which is what made it bearable. That's how you keep yourself from being miserable, even in the face of adverse circumstances... by having a light at the end of the tunnel, or a carrot that you can chase after.

The bigger epiphany hit me, like I said, while I was in the shower the other day. For a while now, I've been wondering what to do with my life. Up till now, school is the only thing I've ever known, and I wasn't ready to get a job, exactly. I was too hung up on getting a job that would make me "happy," doing something that I would enjoy, finding my purpose in life, that kind of thing. My parents have, for quite some time, wanted me to take a job that I don't think I would enjoy very much, and I've been fighting it every step of the way, not wanting to consign my life to going to work every day at a job that I can't stand. But in the shower, I finally put everything that I've discussed already in this blog together for myself, and realized that, for lack of any better idea, I should just take that job. If I sit around waiting forever, I'll just be in the same place I am right now: nowhere, with nothing to look forward to. But if I take that job, even if it doesn't ever really amount to anything, and even if I hate it (in fact, especially if I hate it), I will, at the very least, be able to look forward to being done for the day. Sure, things aren't turning out how I'd really like them to, but that small consolation is all I really need to maintain day-to-day happiness. Suffice it to say I find it very clever that the founding fathers included the "pursuit of happiness" as an inalienable right. You can't guarantee that everyone has what they want, but you can guarantee them something to want in the first place.

The bottom line is it's really all about is playing with the hand you're dealt, as they say. If you find yourself in the Cosmic Mouse Trap, take it from me: stop dwelling on how the trap has stunted your progress, take a good hard look at your surroundings, and start looking for the carrot again, in whatever form it may come, even if it's pointing you in a different direction than you originally intended to go. Just catching sight of the Cosmic Carrot may be enough to get you out of the trap.