The right to happiness

"Happiness consists more in small conveniences of pleasures that occur every day, than in great pieces of good fortune that happen but seldom to a man in the course of his life."

     -Benjamin Franklin

We can appreciate the truth in this quote every day of our lives. Whether it is that sweet first taste of morning coffee, getting a cab when you need one or finding something that randomly makes you smile, it is those moments that represent true happiness. Even though we experience them, we often let go of them too soon and fail to understand what we are going through and how precious those moments are. Too often, we are blinded by an idea of an abstract and more quantitative concept of what we define as 'happiness'. 

Our emotional education has unleashed a cyclical pendulum pattern which we now suffer. We are brought up with an idea of happiness which seems so extravagantly attractive that it fails to represent reality. When myths and legends reflecting ideal values and traits 'evolved' into Disney movies where the ideal turned into the surreal, we created our own worst enemy when it comes to happiness. We created the possibility of perfection and, more importantly, we publicly announced it was easily accessible. 

Thus, we have had generation after generation of girls dreaming about being princesses just waiting to be rescued by Prince Charming (slightly male chauvinist if you ask me, but I'm sure it reflected the ideal values of another generation) and boys who believed girls were just waiting for them (by boys I refer to that stage right past the 'girls are icky and I like to put bubblegum in their hair' phase). That was one end of the pendulum, an end which we often reminisce in and hold dear to us. 

Now, though, we see more and more people shifting to the opposite extreme: a complete lack of faith in the possibility of love and a reduction of emotion to pure misery. Whether it is in the new fashion statements that promote depressive behaviors, or simply in the feminist reaction to the stereotypical model of a 'perfect' relation, we go from 'Prince charming rescues helpless princess' to 'Princess does not believe in love, slays the dragon herself, takes the head home to hang on her wall and locks her doors preventing any man from ever entering her home or her heart'. Of course the roles for men and women here are flexible and this is only an opinion but, I truly think we can see the effects of extreme idealism.

So because of the point we are at right now, we are becoming aware that the abstract and romantically enhanced vision of complete happiness at every level is, if not impossible, a one-in-a-million possibility. So, here we come back to the effectiveness of our sentimental education. If there is only a sliver of a chance that we will be completely happy, do we ever have the right of throwing the dice for another person? Do we have the right to diminish their chances?

Furthermore, when we already have, and see that because we are guilty of making them miserable we should not ask for more, and yet the other person complies and suffers...are we truly working towards happiness? Does the end in this case justify the means?