Running With Scissors

Cheerful Pessimism

A lot has been said a about happiness, and none of it seem to be particularly cheerful.

Most great thinkers believed that happiness and luck are two forces that are invariably tied to one another, and as such, they are as fickle as they are brittle.

Plato, for example, said that happiness can only be achieved by being virtuous and fulfilling one's civic duty. One look at your local DMV would tell you that no-one there is particularly happy to fulfill their civic duty, so Plato can go suck it for all we care.

St. Augustine of Hippo was famously quoted with saying that true happiness comes from giving your life to the service of God, for it is truly the truest form of love. We tried reaching God for comments, but God seems to be sending us to voicemail. As such, we cannot state that this is particularly true.

Advocating for a more pragmatic approach, Michel de Montaigne stated that happiness is not a state of being, but little subjective moments in life that one must strive for.

We don't have to go that far to find an even more pragmatic approach, as Sagittarius Æ's chief scientist—Ilfort the Wise—once said that happiness is constantly pushing the orgasm button in your exo-suit over and over again until your brain literally fries from pleasure. He was also the inventor of said orgasm button, so he might've been a bit biased.

Of course, those answers only apply if you believe that happiness is something that actually exists, and not merely a trick of the brain to make this everlasting merry-go-round of feces that is life be moderately more tolerable. For that particular view on happiness, we must seek out the most cheerful nihilist philosophy has to offer: Blaise Pascal.

He was a hunchback, incredibly prone to sickness, and a mathematician to boot, so he might've been a bit biased towards unhappiness. After a near-death experience, he began fiddling with philosophy, releasing his most famous book, the Pensées, as a treatise on why life sucks, especially if you are a sickly, hunchbacked mathematician.

He stated that happiness is an illusion—a mere misdirection to distract us from the misery of everyday existence. Boredom, in particular, was a subject he tackled with extreme prejudice, saying that we mix up being busy with being happy, as it distracts us from thinking about how unhappy we actually are.

One of his most accurate and poignant quotes is perhaps the greatest summary of this particular brand of philosophy: "All of man's unhappiness comes from his inability to stay peacefully alone in his room."

If you have ever traveled in some sort of public transportation system, you might find this statement to be terrifyingly accurate.

A person who would've agreed with Pascal on this point was James Truman-Conelly, who had found himself to be very unhappy with his inability to be peacefully alone in his room.

But it wasn't that he was bored and wanted a distraction—he loved to be in his office on 715 East Street, thank you very much. His unhappiness stemmed from the fact that he could not stay there much longer, since doom was sure to come, as soon as doom could figure out how to navigate the vertical maze that was 715 East Street.

The lights in his office were turned off, and the man himself was cowering under his desk while anxiously licking a decidedly empty packet of ketchup. He was so tense that even the slightest sound could've made him jump on the spot, which his phone was kind enough to show us in action.

His generic ringtone rang and rung around the room, making the man panic so much that his cocobolo desk toppled over. He was very much on edge, and sudden narrative alliterations were not helping him at all.

"What? Who?" he said to his phone. But his phone didn't answer, which was very rude on its part. He then decided to take the call, waiting to receive an answer to the two questions that had plagued him for the last second and a half.