Is Personal Happiness Paramount?

Hello! I'm back, alive and well, all things considered. I guess I've been under the quarantine doldrums. There hasn't been much going on and nothing has really inspired me to sit here and write. I've been watching a lot of TV...Netflix specifically.

Last night we watched "Crazy Rich Asians". It's a fairly innocuous love story that has echos of Cinderella and other starred crossed love tales. (No, that's not a spoiler.) As I was boggling at the money and life style of "comfortable" Singaporeans, I almost missed the underlying theme of culture. (Spoiler alert!) The hero's mother has an interesting objection to the chosen heroine: American-Chinese and Chinese-Chinese are not the same. A-C's only think about their own personal happiness, whereas C-C's put family before all else. The cultures are inherently incompatible.

Being raised in North America, I was affronted. What's wrong with wanting to be happy? As the heroine points out "Don't you want your son to be happy?" The answer is a very solid chirp of crickets. Now, of course the mother would, ideally, like her son to be "happy". What construes "happy" might have a different definition in her mind. But, I digress, as usual.

This morning, I woke up thinking that, maybe, Mum (yup, complete British English - know your history) was on to something. The West seems to be struggling. It's reflected in the anti-mask wearers, the "personal rights" protesters, the folks for whom inconvenience is anathema. Our own personal comfort supersedes all other considerations. Perhaps this is why China is so dominant currently. (Yeah, there are other factors to be sure.)

We've done it to ourselves, in fairness. We've moved from subsistence level survival to the luxury of, well..luxury. By some measures, even our poverty has tones of luxuriousness. Okay, I'm going down a slippery slope here, but bear with me.

Let me reference another Netflix revelation from "Dracula". The Count, Vlad, comes to land (England) after having been submerged under the sea for around 200 years. He breaks into someone's house. (Now, as I can see, this person is by no means wealthy. Everything in the kitchen is dated, the furniture has seen better days, the car's a beater...etc etc.) When Dracula meets the female inhabitant he wants to know if she's rich. He's not wrong. Life in the 1600 -1800s was vastly different from life now. He lived in a huge drafty castle with few (if any windows) fireplaces to try and fight of the drafts (not that he cared, of course), poor hygienic practices, fledgling medical knowledge, rudimentary technology for almost everything and here he is in a house that has things like refrigerators, ovens, flushing toilet, cupboards full of food (granted it's most likely highly processed, but what does he know about that?) and machines that can take you places without the need for animals and running water for heaven's sake! He's thrilled about smart phones.

My point? We neither see our blessing and we are programmed (quite literally) to be dissatisfied with them. (That's called commercialism, kids.) I'm guilty of it...I plague myself with "if only" this or "if only" that. Am I content with all the things I do have? Often, no, sadly. I have to practice being grateful for these incredible luxuries that modern life supplies us. I have to work at not buying into the "your life will be amazing if you own/buy [fill in the blank]". We really need to get back to enjoying things like spending time with those we love, with getting outside and appreciating nature,helping those in need and with being amazed that we actually DO know where our next meal is coming from. We're bloody lucky in that.

Why can happiness not stem from helping those around us do better? Why is my inconvenience (Mask? I'm not wearing a stupid mask!) more important that an other's suffering? (Oh, yes, capitalists, I know socialism is the gateway political theory to communism.) Humanity didn't get this far by being egocentric, at least not individually. We got here through cooperation and doing things for the greater good of humankind.

So let's be kind to each other. Let's put the safety of others before our own comfort. Let's work together and make things better, instead of using shopping therapy like it actually works.

Rant over.