on the road to happiness

Throughout the years it has become increasingly clear to me, both from real life experience and experiences imagined, as well as through talking to people and reading books and watching movies, that the only way to lasting pleasure is through addiction. Not love, not kids, not money, but addictions. I mean unless you're addicted to those things.

A simple experiment and I'm sure you will all agree: go get addicted to something.

A good place to start is with smoking. It may be difficult at first, but choke through the first few and start light, and then as your throat and lungs become accustomed to the searing, acrid smoke, it will quickly become life's greatest pleasure--the perfect pleasure, because a cigarette never satisfies. People don't want satisfaction because happiness is found in yearning--hence: addiction. You'll find that whatever it is you want is profoundly better in concept than it is in reality. If you've ever bought a car or moved somewhere cool or got something nice, anything at all, it is way better before you have it. Like when you're hungry, and you really want a cheeseburger, or pancakes, or pizza, the first couple bites are divine but then you just get sick of it.

Hunger is also an addiction, but one we can't live without.

Satisfaction breeds discontent which breeds dissatisfaction, which is the human body's way of maintaining itself, of staying happy, or as happy as it can get. Capitalism is just the product of a million addictions and wants, and that is why people who have everything they need in communist societies are not necessarily very happy. Cubans often move to Mexico, Mexico! can you imagine? Cuba has first-rate and free health care in even its most remote corners, and people don't often go hungry (and so their stomachs, satisfied, are discontented--ha), and they go to Mexico of all places where most people go hungry all the time and are assaulted by ads of American companies and yearning is in the air, you can't get away from it.

They are pretty happy people down there, I guess, in Mexico. There are lots of things to want.

Smoking cigarettes starts out kind of painful, but then it's nice, a never-ending and never-satisfying pleasure. It makes it so that, after a while, you ALWAYS want to smoke, or at least smoke very often, and so you are ALWAYS HAPPY. Because whenever you aren't smoking you would rather be, and then when you are finished smoking you can't wait until the wanting starts again so that you may temporarily, once again, and disatisfactorily satisfy the hunger for smoke.

The secret to happiness is dissatisfaction. A good way of ensuring endless dissatisfaction is to do things to an extreme. Take a thing your formerly found satisfying, like sex, and do it compulsively and without joy. Make it more of a necessity than an extra pleasure, so that it will feel abnormal if you do not do it, and doing it will make you feel temporarily ok but soon the gnawing hunger will begin again...only to be indulged once more. A thousand times more!

Yay for compulsion, yay for want.

I am on the road to happiness.