I so relate to MMA fighter, commentator, and podcaster Joe Rogan, who explained his happiness only comes from struggle. His struggles earning him recognition and financial success, nothing he really cares about unless he solves his next self-assigned struggle.
Care Is Love
In his own way, Joe cares about something bigger than himself, the reason why he reaches out and “struggles” splendidly to interview people who are well versed in societal aspects poised to improve humanity. That is the real definition of love, the genuine curiosity and care for something bigger than your own sweet self that makes you want to engage in an effort to improve your proximal development to produce a new version of the way you see yourself.
My happiness comes from gradually overcoming concurrently oscillating interwoven waves of different kinds of struggles, both business and personal, continually pushing against the artificial and undesirable boundaries of boredom, mediocrity, enslavement, entrapment, injustice, and foregone conclusions in life. Struggles that I am adamant to pair with the precious and devoted love respecting my struggles and resilient enough to cope with the sacrifices I am willing to make to overcome those struggles.
Overcoming
The key to keeping things on the rails is the assessment of happiness as a consequence, not a cause. In reality, happiness is the outcome, again, a consequence of the causal overcoming of obstacles that make you grow and expand your horizon into worthwhile endeavors aligned with your propensity to make a difference in this world. To be recognized for your accomplishments and know your life truly matters.
The confounding of cause and consequence, so omnipresent in a society that systemically promotes and reveres rebels without a cause, in the words of Nietzsche, promulgates grave and widespread depravity of reason. The cheap depravity of reason that sells all-too-many cheap self-help books to innocent greater-fools, desperately wishing for a better life in a society that spoonfeeds them scraps of hope swept up from its communal kitchen floor.
Be Somebody
Everyone can be happy, as long as you consider happiness a moving target -a dance- a direct consequence of the work you are prepared to put in to overcome life’s treasured struggles. Struggles that leave behind the cold at heart, fragile in disposition, ambivalent defectors of determination who shun and walk away from confrontation, responsibility, and accountability, hoping for an easy-peasy “cover girl” life.
Be a fighter, or you’ll be a nobody.
