The Pretence of Happiness

If you look closely, you'll see that truly, no one in this world is happy.

The very life you've received and suffer in unhappiness for—someone across the world may be fighting tooth and nail just to have it.

The job you hold and languish in despair over—ten other people may be standing in line right now, yearning for it.

And yet, what brings you such joy you cannot sleep—that very same thing might keep another awake in sorrow.

Happiness means something different to each person. Life means something different to each. Each human, each mind, its own.

The work that brings you delight may bore another doing the identical thing. The person you love with fierce intensity—someone else may despise with equal venom.

A human life is rather like a wood apple. Colourful outside, strikingly beautiful; hollow within, repulsive. Everyone polishes the surface to a gleam like robots, so no one can discern the flaws beneath from a glance above. We all wear a peculiar mask. No one is truly happy, yet everyone wears the pretence of happiness all the same.

Neat, polished, branded clothes and shoes we drape upon ourselves—and beneath this veneer we carry forward an unfit, colourless, worthless life of unhappiness.

Some have no money and thus no joy; others have neither money nor happiness at all.

Some fight to live while others are desperate to die.

Like a boat with a hole in its hull, unhappiness seeps into our vessel of happiness and drags it under. We sink with it. What do we drown in? Unhappiness, restlessness, and deprivation.

There is only one place where all humanity on earth is one and the same: we all go to bed at night, cradling in our deepest hearts the same shade of sorrow, shaped differently in each of us.

And those who are neither happy nor sad—they are exhausted beyond measure. Our days neither float in joy nor sink in sorrow; they simply wear away in weariness.