“Ignorance is bliss.� That’s what ‘they’ say. A lot of people disagree, or at least think the statement is too broad to be applicable across the board. Well, is it?
Lets discuss this guy I know. We’ll call him ‘Corey’ because it reminds me of ‘Corkie’ from ‘Life Goes On.’ Also, because his name is actually Corey. Anyway, Corey is a squat little fellow with a squeaky voice somewhere between Mickey Mouse and Donald Duck. He works in the mall, and comes around to the various stores each morning to see if they have any trays from the food court that he can collect and take back.
Now certainly Corey has been handed the short end of some stick or other. He’s not a terribly attractive young fellow, and it’s apparent that he was not put together correctly in the head. His job isn’t exciting or profitable or anything that would lead advancement or success as measured by today’s competitive standards. Yet for all that he seems remarkably happy. A lot happier than I feel. I don’t know whether to pity or envy the guy. Which kind of leads to the question: would you give up your good looks, intelligence, and ambitions for happiness? Isn’t happiness what everybody is after anyway?
Imagine, if you will, that you find the proverbial geniis lamp on, I don’t know, your sofa. You rub that sucka’ and out pops your standard Arabian stereotype on the end of a bluish cloud. Blah, blah, blah: wishes. Okay, so you consider your options. You could ask for immortality, but the problem there is that you’d probably get lonely with everyone else dying all the time and you would probably run out of things to entertain yourself with. Money is a very popular one, if you are all materialistic and all, but it’s just a means to the end of getting yourself secure, surrounded by lots of stuff you don’t really need, and friends who aren’t really your friends. In other words, what you are REALLY after is something to MAKE you happy. So you just ask to already BE happy. And bam, you are Corey. Of course at this point, you are happy, and don’t care about the stuff you gave up to become that way because you don’t have the wherewithal to regret your decision. The only one who loses out here is your hypothetical former self who wanted to look and live like a movie star and have a good looking significant other who is also a saint because you thought THAT is what happiness was.
In other words, would you rather endure the misery of self-awareness and a keen intellect fully focused on all the futilities of life and the tragedy of mortality, or give up everything you value in order to always, always feel good?

This entry was posted on Wednesday, December 7th, 2005 at 2:19 am and is filed under Comics. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.