Durkheim knew

He had been sent to the Hell on Earth, but he didn't know how exactly he had been there. Everything was wrong, everything used to go wrong. His job was awful and even if he was very talented and creative, he used to be always seen as lazy and opportunist. He felt he hadn't friends because no one showed some sympathy for him. They were all self-seeking that always used to remember him in moments of extreme sadness and, after when they were feeling better, they ran from him as the Devil runs from the cross.

It was like if he had been excluded of the whole process. He swallowed too many things, tried to abstract the grieves, but the polite silence just corroded him, the hate corroded him. He cried of angry. He used to feel too many repressed hate. Why the hell he used to imprison himself in a life that was not his? Why did he receive indifference when he gave love? Why did he see everybody loving to live in that mask ball, in that theater piece of a foreseeable script? He couldn't fool himself. He was out and this isolation was killing him each day, each hour, each second.

Then he decided to accept the lugubrious world where he lived, even he desperately wanted to leave from. He just wanted to be one more, he wanted to be one more alienated, whatever, he just wanted not to feel rejected as he always was. But he discovered he couldn't find fullness even throwing himself spontaneously in the fire of the hell. Damn it! It was like the shitness of his life was a kind of black humor reality show, where he was reason of the laugh of normal and happy people.

He thought it was time to say enough. That he was been extremely altruistic in following the ruined values of justice from a society that avoided him. Why to be good with those that only slight him? Why to smile to those that showed him their middle finger? Why to count till ten when he was cursed in his job by his boss that studied only until the 4th grade? Why to be so nice and correct? Why didn't he fight back?

Then he blew up. He decided to destroy his life at all, doing to deserve all that repulsion he always felt. We would channelize his hate, we would be finally him, would be that mad and dangerous person he was labeled by never spoken words. He would go to the hell, but he wouldn't there by himself.

He robbed a machine-gun from a 14-year-aged trouble kid that was previously stabbed. We went in the fancier mall of the city wearing his best clothes. He bought a ticket to watch a remake of a Disney's fairytale. He entered into the crowded movies room and the machine-gun started to work. Brains flew everywhere and his eyes were shining for the first time in his life. We was born to kill. He felt pleasure in doing that. Everyone would pay with their lives for the sorrow he felt during all those years. The room became a swimming pool of blood and when he prince was about to kiss the Sleeping Beauty, he took off his own life with a shot in his mouth.

A note was found inside his pocket hours later and revealed to the necromaniac media. He had for forgiveness to the victims families, but he had received a divine mission. Necromaniacs demanded the death penalty in Brazil, even the murder had committed suicide. An office was prayed for him. His co-workers were shocked with such a behavior: “he was a very calm person”, they said. But the rotten society was unable to analyze what happened. It was the same society that used to disguise grief and horror by the massacre, but searched on the internet for pictures with their bodies all teared in pieces because it gives them sadistic pleasure. They hadn't notice they were all homicides. They didn't know it because they didn't know who had been Durkheim.

Anger never dies

Life isn't easy. Life isn't fair. Happiness isn't something unreachable, but it doesn't fall from the sky: you must deserve it, you have to fight for it.

Happiness is something everybody searches for. Who would be crazy to seek for unhappiness except for the crazy one? But what's happiness? Few people know, few people understand it because a lot of them think this is an universal concept while, actually, it is subjective.

Performance society tries to standardize this concept and those who lives in the immaturity constantly get frustrated by the constant feeling of unhappiness and emptiness. In this case, happiness isn't in the present time, but either in the future, lying in the hope that someday things will get better, or in the past, a time of sweet memories. This Eros love to the performance blinds and the individual gets incapable of questioning some things about oneself and the world and, consequently, of understanding the misery this one complains so much.

Laziness and cowardice are things so hard to fight against... snapping the bubble and leaving your comfort zone is so hard... “it's so comfortable to be small”, Kant would say... it's so hard to have the attitude to change: change yourself, change one's own reality. It's so much easier to curse and envy. It's so much easier trying to despise other's victories for the miserable of spirit feels less worse when feeling hurt by other's success and happiness.

In order to be happy, or unless feeling happy without appealling to its artificial means like drugs and anti-depressive pills one must, first of all, being humble to recognize one's own imperfections and vulnerabilities. It doesn't mean embracing the fail or being ridiculous. Ridiculous is thinking you're being ridiculous by confessing to yourself your own fears that might sound silly and childish, more ridiculous than this is having the romantic vision of life by thinking that happiness lies in a Hollywoodian amazing life or that is, necessarily, the standard of the society of performance.

Life isn't easy. Life isn't fair. Happiness isn't something unreachable, but it doesn't fall from the sky: you must deserve it, you have to fight for it. It includes some sacrifices and the path to happiness may be, ironically, torturous in the beginning. Leaving the comfort zone never is easy, letting go the tutor's hand and walking in total dark it's quite despairing, but if you want to be free, dare to break with your immaturity! You have to try at least! Falling, crying and being eternally traumatized with the pain will never help anyone to get anywhere, except if it has an appeal to the people's pity, that isn't neither a little virtuous and it is pathetic, it's being proud of one's own cowardice.

Projecting your own imperfections on others using them as weapon and shield may even sound smart initially, but who really losses with this? You may harm someone, but if this person has the minimum of maturity and self-love, he won't let himself to be affected by the words of someone who seems to have a disturbed feeling of pleasure in the sorrow and in gnawing hates. He just doesn't care, he's doing what the resentful child always wanted to do but was too coward to even try: he is being happy, he is living the life! That's way the feeling of envy and despise face to the other's success.

Nobody likes this type of negative people. Nobody likes people that are always complaining about the same problems every single day projecting the reason of their unhappiness on others. Nobody likes people that are always in the defensive ready to attack and that refuses help and refuses to help oneself. Nobody likes people that got traumatized after their first and only fail that start to think that nobody and nothing worth. That the world is bad, that people envy him, that everybody's an ignorant and that, as long as he hadn't born in a golden crib, he is destined to be a never recognized talented person. Then, he doesn't understand why the world turns it back to him and, thanks to his shameful arrogance, he thinks the world is wrong and unfair, but he's never able to recognize that HE is the problem. It's so much practical projecting this imperfection on another one and being sarcastic... Is it being happy?

Well, happiness is subjective. If an individual is happy gnawing hates, good for him, although it is very dubious. In order to be happy, it is not necessary to have all that the performance society implies for us to be and to have, and it doesn't mean as well, refusing everything it sells us. The most important thing is being in peace with yourself, doing what you like, being surrounded by people that are with you to plus, not to subtract you and to let you down, feeling bizarrely happy by trying to bring you down for the misery they spontaneously decided to live with.

References

FERRY, Luc. Qu'est-ce qu'une vie réussie? France: Grasset et Fasquelle, 2002.

COMTE-SPONVILLE, André. Petit traité des grandes vertus. Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1995.

KANT, Immanuel. Answering the question: What is Enlightment? Königsberg: Büsching Magazine, September 30th 1784.

Sometimes I feel so angry at you

Look at us micro kids with both of our hearts blocked.

Sometimes I feel so angry at you. You can impact in my mood, usually for worse. And then I feel so angry at me and the anger I feel at you doubles because I feel myself extremely ridiculous.

Ridiculous because I notice I am a mere Eros' puppet, that my limbic system is defective. I keep on making the same childish mistakes, being a slave of my selfish desires, allowing myself to be threw by someone who's just giving me a shit! It seems I never develop the necessary antibodies to stop being enchanted by those who step on me, but no, I'm an accident masochist.

I hate myself for being extremely lenient many times and insist on thinking that everybody is good, that some people just have a hard temper to deal with but, deeply, they are lovely. It even sounds arrogant of me to think I'll be the one who will change everything, that will transform a violent pit-bull into a graceful pink-colored poodle.

But that's alright. I have never had the talent to pretend to be someone I'm not, I have never had the talent to pretend I have the virtues I still don't. I find myself now in this embarrassing situation of not knowing how to behave and policing the way I show you my affect. If I'm kind, you may arrogantly understand it as I'm really suffering of love to you. If I control my words, I feel like suffocating myself with a pillow on my face. I wish that the tactic of the measured care was absolute and obvious. I run the risk of torturing me by seeing you dating another one in the end.

It's hard for me to say that, even there's some trace of possibility that we may have some future, it's remote. If you really liked me, you'd be more receptive to my praises instead of always throwing me cold water. If you really liked me, you wouldn't try all the time to show yourself off as someone as intelligent and understood about life as I am. It seems like you constantly try to make me feel inferior.

In the few moments you were kind, maybe you were experiencing a moment of weakness and I was the fool of the moment that would listen to you without criticizing. Or because your options were scarce. Or because you had seen something good in me, until the moment you woke up and saw me just like another insignificant person in your life. Have you ever give me a chance? Have you ever tried to see something special in me?

No! It seems I'll always be someone you just don't dispose at all because for you, I don't make any difference. I can't see too much of you because you create barriers around you as if I was unable to overstep them. I'd like to know you better, but you don't allow me. In this moment, I'd like to be sure you're really an asshole. Maybe then I can feel angry at you in peace and feel better with myself.

Light and darkness

It's quite common to compare things of the past and the present. At the same time we had breakthroughs in medicine, in technology and in the achievement of respect for minority or historically repressed groups (women, homosexuals, black people, handicaps), it seems that society haven't evolved that much in the way of thinking. The critical thinking, that is not that complex once you see the positive and negative points of the things, it seems more as a “gift” than an ability that may be developed since one's childhood.

Maybe the excess of information generated by television media and internet has atrophied our brains or we lost focus on what's worthy to know. In order to absorb all, including useful and useless, literary works were ruminated for those who are lazy to think. Besides, the “opinions leaderships” still exist. Instead of listening to who have a cause knowledge (professors, experts, researches), many are based on the opinion of tendentious or sensationalist journalists and controversial celebrities, interested on the maintaining of the status quo.

We progressed here... we regressed there... Its like walking on a treadmill: we walk and keep in the same place but, if we stop, we'll fall. We can compare the society along the years with water in its different states of matters: water, vapor, ice... At the same time it changes its shape, it doesn't change its essence: it remains water, the same water of ever. And at the same time society changed in the last years, decades, centuries, it seems it behaves similar. The critical sense is an ability developed by few people, while many still venerate fame, money and power.

The problem of its lack of good sense is that almost everything seems to be divided only into “right” and “wrong”. This duality always exist, as if both, apparently antagonistic, couldn't coexist, or then, a third, forth, fifth way of thinking. We see this philosophy mainly on YouTube, news websites comments and in people's day by day talk. For a group of people, being humble to admit you don't know many about a certain issue sounds like a “certificate of lack of culture”. In order to not be out of the “well-informed” people, some convert themselves to clichezism. Among them, there's a desperate necessity to show off: if one is not handsome, hot and even nice, he tends to convert to clichezism to sounds intelligent and wants to pass the impression of being cult and having a strong personality.

And so, people start having a generalized vision of everything with it's two opposite currents, as well as stimulates ignorance and the reinforcement of several kinds of prejudice. When talking about things of Brazil, we have the chauvinists (in a few number) that blindly love their country and the pessimistic that thing that anything about Brazil works or is good. In politics, there's still a childish fight between petistas and tucanos, that try to defend their beloved parties speaking about Mensalão to not to talk about Cachoeira and about Cachoeira to not to talk about Mensalão (as if corruption was restricted to only one political party). When one speaks of religion, the bigot religious fill public institutions with crucifixes and defend the moralism to embase their prejudices. Atheists are used to be as bigot as religious are when attacking religious as a way to fight back. While some people are right and sincere, others are nasty and false. These are some examples of this cliche and immature thinking, as if everything were obvious and simple to be understood and with a already created formula to solve them.

That's why its disappointing for us to be already in 2012, 21st century, in an era that used to be imagined as that that men would stop with wars and think of the common good, and we notice that society changed not that much in its essence. Many still behave a selfish and irresponsible way: money is our modern god, a basic and finite natural resource (water) is still wasted, consuming keeps strong and alive destroying the natural resources for some people to feel better in having material goods that others can't afford, lots are still dying in traffic violence because of alcohol and etc. It's disappointing to see that with so many information available for anyone who wants to access it, clichezism is getting stronger and discouraging the critical thinking, without meaning to be rude or alienated to a narrow-minded view that everything has to be divided into light or darkness.

An amazing life

We are subjected to several kinds of dictatorships in our society. Many of them are imposed in a subtle manner, but very present. There's no one putting a gun against our heads pushing us to do a certain thing. It's the society, the culture who put this invisible gun. But the hand that shots never is theirs, but ours. The choice is ours.

One of the dictatorships is the happiness'. It doesn't mean that happiness is a bad thing, obviously it isn't, but you just can't concept it. What makes one happy, may make another one unhappy. The happiness dictatorship doesn't take it into consideration and establishes a standard. And this standard seems to be accessible only to those who have money – lots of money.

Happiness is having a big and comfortable life, having an imported car, being able to go abroad, having a pretty skin, a pretty hair, a pretty body, a nice job, going to best parties and eating and drinking the best the money can provide you. Fame, power and money: if you have the three, you would be happy according with the dictatorship.

But we know that the rich people also cry. What's the point in having these stuff if people approach you by interest? How is it possible to be happy living surrounded by safeguards and living in a fancy prison? Anyway, few people perceive this dictatorship. Few people think critically, maturely, wisely. Many prefer to live in the bubble of their ignorance, happy with their convictions and carpedienzist lifestyles.

In order to be happy, you have to think big, fly high. Happiness, then, stays attached to things that are usually unreal or inaccessible to many people. In the seek for the dream, people live in the future and forget about the present. And in the seek for “big and better” things, the smallest ones start to be ignored.

Following the happiness dictatorship is not enough, it's necessary to show it off. By behaving in this way, we will be contributing to the guns to be put against people's heads, perpetuating the cycle. We need to assure others and ourselves that this dictatorship brings happiness. Who's out, is treated as someone unhappy and influenced to believe he's really unhappy, starting to question his self-esteem.

In order for us to be happy, we must have an amazing life. We should feel ashamed of ourselves of doing simple and worthless things, specially, talking about them. We must have horror to the trivial, to the routine. And we must, of course, practice the exercise of self-affirmation. Everything must have be great, in the contrary, it's despicable and deserving of depreciating adjectives carefully chosen, because it's necessary to destroy the self-esteem of the people for us to feel better with ourselves.

But the truth is that almost anybody lives a Hollywoodian life. Almost anybody lives the life so intensively that causes good envy commentaries: “Wow! What a Carpe Diem well-followed!” We are driven to treat the celebrities as gods and foolishly believe that money brings all the material stuffs, that brings fame, that brings success, that brings love and finally happiness. And in this blind search for happiness, we leave the life pass away because we were always living in the future, never in the present.