Just for the hell of it (Generations on life and happiness).
To go for what you want just for the hell of it seems reckless and anarchical, but is it?
In this day and age when the Baby Boomer Generation has achieved so much and whose characteristics are:
Baby Boomer Generation (those born in post WWII from 1945 to 1964).✓ Born after World War II. The name of this generation refers to the "Baby Boom" - rebound in the birth rate - of those years.
✓ Work as a way of being and existing: stable, long-term, addictive, not necessarily working in what they love to do.
✓ They do not spend much time on leisure and recreational activities.
✓ Women of this generation entered the labour market. While the traditional family ideal persists, structures begin to break down.
There was a survey conducted recently in which they asked people of old age (this Generation mostly), and also people who were sick in hospitals what they regreted the most and what they would have liked to have done more of in their lives, and they all practically said to have worked less and travelled more.
I suppose their responses are in great part, due to their generational characteristics.
The truth is that this Generation (some of whom have already died, and most of whom are close to dying) has decimated and they are still effectively decimating the Earth´s natural resources through industrial and warfare activity, and in doing so they have greatly polluted the air and the oceans and contributed considerably to the rise in global atmospheric temperature*, which in turn has killed off approximately 60% of animal species** and most importantly perhaps, they don´t really care as their main goal in life was and has been to make money regardless of the consequences.
* See footnotes at the end.
In any case, that generation fathered the GenXers whose characteristics are:
Generation X (born between 1965 and 1981).✓ According to a study by the University of Michigan, men and women X work hard but achieve a balance, they are happy with their own lives.
✓ They are the ones who saw the birth of the Internet and technological advances. They are marked by great social changes.
✓ As they are a generation in transition - they were called Lost Generation and even Peter Pan Generation - they can make the relationship between technology and “face-to-face” active social life coexist in a balanced way: they have participation within the events of their community.
✓ They are more likely to be employed (they accept orders of institutional hierarchy) and balance the energy between work, children and leisure time.
✓ They are the parents of Millennials, they made adaptive efforts to raise the vertiginous next generation.
And they (of whom I am a member, as I was born in 1967), have continued to contribute to the global turmoil, as that´s what we were taught was the right thing to do by our elders.
I won´t go down the path of arguing on Wall Streets´ most famous fictitional character, Gordon Gekko´s greed quote, and whether it is good or not, the truth is that we must learn to balance much more than our checkbooks and bank accounts.
Because we have now left an ecologically bankrupt mortgage for the future generations to solve as 16-Year-Old Climate Activist Greta Thunberg explains:
Nowadays we are learning that perhaps we could have gone another way, in search for alternative fuels and caring more for our quality of lives in terms of our health and the environment and that of others on planet Earth (including animals).
Now I am not a vegan nor do I support that notion for a good reason, and although I won´t go into the science of it (teeth, stomachs, brain and muscle development, et al), we humans are carnivore-omnivores, not herbivores*.
*See footnotes at the end.
So no, that´s not the way to stop greenhouse gases (aka less farm animals), we just have to do it on a more utalitarianistically humane and less industrialized way, in fact, everything we do has to be less industrialized, as our genes were not initially designed to consume and breathe so many harmful chemicals in our food and in our drink and in our air and in our water.
So our generation was unable to stop the previous one in this decimation process.
Then came the Y Generation whose characteristics are:
Generation Y or Millennials (born between 1982 and 1994).✓ Very adapted to technology. Virtual life is an extension of real life. Although they retain some privacy codes in relation to what they expose or not on the Internet (unlike the Centennials, who share everything).✓ They are multitasking.
✓ They do not leave their lives at work, they are not "workaholic" (perhaps they observed that their parents were, and they do it differently).✓ They are entrepreneurial and creative, they try to live from what they love to do. They are idealistic.
✓ Fans of entertainment technology: users of chat rooms in the 90's and now dating networks. They went through everything: SMS, CD player, MP3, MP4, DVD.
✓ They love to travel, know the world, and upload their photos onto the networks!
✓ According to studies, they last an average of two years at their work, unlike the X Generation and the "Baby Boomers" (more stable).
That is why companies go crazy building "loyalty" policies with them for job retention.
Curiously enough, I am much more identified with this Generation than with mine, for many reasons.
They (we), are much more concerned with the aforementioned mis-administration of planet Earth by our forefathers, and we believe that the socio-ecologic mortgage that they left us is untenable and we have to change it.
Enter the next Generation:
Generation Z or Centennials (born from 1995 to the present).✓ They are truly “digital natives” (since childhood they use the Internet).
✓ Self-taught (learning by tutorials), creative (quickly incorporating new knowledge and relate to it well) and over-informed (high propensity to consume information and entertainment).
✓ They visit social networks that their parents do not: an example is Snapchat. They share content from their private life, they aspire to be YouTubers. Social life is spent in high percentages in social networks.
✓ None of technology is foreign or alien to them.
✓ They spend a lot of their time “in front of screens”. Recent studies have found that they are spend in average, four times longer on their devices than recommended.
✓ Their success is measured in "shares" and "likes in social media."
✓ According to a study conducted by The Futures Company, they are more pragmatic than Millennials, they seek to innovate with “what's there”.
✓ Mostly they haven´t entered working life yet, but they worry about finding a calling akin to their interest and tastes, they want to know themselves and accepting their differences in an increasingly globalized world.
Due to our inability to act, it is up to them to clean up after all the previous generations who have done so much damage to the ecosystem by focusing only on making money.
Why is this important? Because doing the right thing makes us happy, even if we don´t earn much money, and making money does make us happy as well but not as much when it implies doing the wrong thing in the process (unless that person lacks empathy and ethics altogether).
My father who was born in 1932 (and died in 2004, was part of the the “silent Generation” born from 1925 to 1945 — so called because they were raised during a period of war and economic depression, and most of whom have already died or are very close to dying), was a good-willed, happy -go-lucky, intrinsically generous man, who was an excellent provider and who in the end, did not leave us an inheritance (to my brother and me), in fact, he made sure we didn´t get one.
He once told me that as a self-made man, he made all his money and it was up to us to make our own, and that he would do his best to spend it all before he died and he did. This is not a critique on his character, it´s just the way it was.
“It is not whats happens to you that matters, it is how you conceive it that does”. — Epictetus.
Myself at 51, I´m more focused on the pursuit of happiness than on the pursuit of material gain inasmuch as I can (another trait which I share with Millenials). And for that, I have turned to the experts to see how right or wrong I have been.
Sometimes these experts have been philosophers and great thinkers, and sometimes lesser known people, but still savant in the subject.
Since as far as we know, there is no afterlife and this life is our only one at least in the here and now in cartesian, geodesics and space-time coordinates (let´s concern ourselves with facts rather than beliefs on this one), which explains why I selected experts in philosophy who were not interested in the occult. I also decided not to include realism´s realists since that requires a whole other independent discussion.
First (not in chronological order), is Horace with his famous statement: “Quam minimum credula postero, carpe diem (et carpe noctem)”. Which loosely translates to “donnot trust in tomorrow, seize the day (and the night)”.
What I take from this is to seize the moment, the here and now, so why save that bottle of wine for later, or why procrastinate on that trip, or on that kiss, or on making love, or trying that food now rather than later? Because later may not come at all.
So it all boils down to doing what you like and liking what you do, sooner rather than later.
Second is Epicurus with his epicurial ataraxia, which seeks happiness through the natural pleasures of life without disturbances, in a way, hedonism stems from this, although with an ethical component and not how people generally refer to it.
Third is Diogenes, the founder of the cynicism branch of philosophy where the richest person is not he who has the most, but rather he who needs the least. Richness in spirit and experiencies, rather than in material gain.
Fourth is Aristotle for whom all humans evolve around three basic necessities: the animalistic, the vegetalistic and the rationalistic. That means that the pleasures (animalistic), the Maslowvian needs (the vegetalistic) and the thirst for knowledge (rationalistic) all play a role in how everyone leads their life.
Fifth is my all time hero, Socrates, who on trial for his life at 72, defied his jurors and rather than succumb to their verdict of reneging, recanting and recusing himself from teaching athenian students in the Agora (for which the penalty was death by poison), he told them that “death is not undignified, what is undignified is to live alien to one´s principles”. And with that he swallowed the poison.
Similarly, Mencius said “I dislike death, but there are things I dislike more than death, therefore, on occasion, I will not avoid danger”.
In my case, that translates to climbing big mountains, obviously there is always an element of risk involved, and one must be prepared for it, which reminds me of Edward Whymper´s famous quote: “Climb if you will, but remember that courage and strength are nought without prudence, and that a momentary negligence may destroy the happiness of a lifetime. Do nothing in haste; look well to each step; and from the beginning think what may be the end.”
Which also reminds me of the (as far as I know), anonymous quote: “I never felt more alive than when I was in danger”. I am happy when I am venturing on the mountains of the world.
Psychologists studying happiness have determined that for it to exist, life must be lived according to three basic principles: whatever you do, it must make sense to you, it must have a purpose and it must all come together congruently.
For instance, if you want to shed some body weight to climb a mountain (or run a marathon, triathlon, et al), it fulfills the first two principles, but if you don´t climb the mountain or run the marathon, then it lacked the congruent part, so you might as well gain back the pounds and do nothing because the purpose was not met. And similarly in other endeavours.
Also it is important to mention that since nobody will ever meet Kant´s Categorical Imperative of ethics (akin to Kohlberg´s sixth stage of his third level of post-conventional morality), there is no point in living in the inflexibility of Victor Hugo´s Javert, who was never happy, as he vied with himself to achieve the impossible Categorical Imperative of being perfectly and excellently ethical always where seeking compliance with the law (invented by flawed mankind in any case) rather than justice, is the imperative.
The problem is that when you set the bar impossibly high, you become inveterateley frustrated and miserable trying to attain it and that demoralizes and demotivates us. It must be high enough that it costs us to attain it, but not so high that we can never reach it.
Viktor Frankl had an interesting matrix in which being and having intersect in a cross:
Said matrix is self-explanatory, still, let´s go over it, just for the excercise.
Obviously, we all want to be in the Having and Being quadrant where both X and Y are positive and we have and we are. However, due to the human nature of greed and avarice (and the impactful difference between Maximizers and Satisficers), after a while of having, the more one has, the more one wants to have, and being takes a secondary role.
In the Not Having and Being quadrant where X is negative and Y positive, we can imagine being more spiritual rather than materialistic and superficial here.
In the Not Having and Not Being quadrant where both X and Y are negative, is quite challenging because this is where people feel anxiety, panic, depression and can even commit suicide, even though it may be more of a feeling than a reality since we always have and are something, we can´t be zero in both although we might feel it that way at some point.
Finally, in the Having and Not Being quadrant, people can feel emptiness in and with all their material gain with no sense of self-worth, except for what they have. In this quadrant, rich people overdose and also commit suicide.
So in what quadrant can you feel more happiness altogether? In the Being and Not Having quadrant because that is where ambition for the material things is diminished, and as Budda is credited with saying: “ All material attachments cause misery”.
So let´s be happy, hence the “for the hell of it” title, just be happy and do what makes you happy for the hell of it. We are all going to die and we will take nothing of material gain when we go, if anything, we will take all our experiences with us, not our money, and having a lot of money will not in any way, shape or form, guarantee us a long and healthy life, just look at Steve Jobs.
So that is why I identify myself more with Millenials than with GenXers in that trend of thought and sentiment about life, I really do think they are onto something there.
Futurist writer Alvin Toffler said that the literate person of the new millenium would differientiate himself from the illiterate by his ability to un-learn and re-learn. So for the rationalists, of which I am one of them, un-learning and re-learning makes us happy (for many neurophysiological reasons).
And there is a happiness equation (which has to be taken as philosophically symbolic rather than as an exact mathematical model or algorithm). It comes courtesy of Denis Prager and it goes like this:
H = 1/U. Where H = Happiness and U = Unhappiness.
And M = E — R. Where E = Expectations and R = Reality.
For it to work, assume that H = 1, where 1 = 100% happiness or total happiness.
What this means is that since U is inversely proportional to H, if U tends to zero or is zero, H tends to infinity (because how many times does zero fit into 1? An infinity of times given by the symbol ∞).
Similarly, if U tends to 1 or is 1, then H = U and instead of being happy, one will be unhappy.
Thus, the difference between E and R must be small, since the larger it is, the bigger U will be. And we want U to be a small fraction of 1 or tend to zero.
That way, if we don´t expect, whatever comes will be met with joy (which is loosely what the Budda teaches us). This is not settling nor is it mediocrity, it is just not being exigent of others because that can lead to indignation when the exigencies are not met.
Which is why there are lawsuits when people don´t meet contractual or marital expectations et al. In some cases there is also violence and vendettas and retribution, and we can safely assume that those involved are not happy.
That reminds me of a chinese proverb: “Before setting out on revenge, you first dig two graves”. Which doesn´t sound like happiness for anyone involved.
So if we decide that we came to be happy, let us not distract ourselves from that.
And let´s live a little, just for the hell of it, carpe diem!!
Footnotes: