If you’re happy and you know it, lucky you

If you're happy and you know it, lucky you

Amy Bogucki, Staff Reporter

Sometimes I wonder how much better off I would be if I really applied myself to things. Because people always tell me I’m not living up to my potential, but what is my potential, really?

Maybe this is as good as it gets. Laying in bed, using my laptop, typing “EXPLAIN FLUID DYNAMICS PHYSICS HELP PLEASE” into the search bar and then getting distracted and Googling who voiced Scar in the Lion King because I swear I’ve heard that voice somewhere else (spoiler alert: I haven’t.)

Why does it have to get better? Why do I have to grow out of liking applesauce and keeping my room just a little bit messy and wearing what is probably considered to normal people to be “too much” eyeliner? I mean, no, I’m not happy now, and yes, there are some definite things I want to change about myself, I just want to know why I have to change everything.

Life’s about being happy, right? Well, playing AC/DC at dangerous volumes makes me happy. Doing puzzles and watching TV and eating raw cookie dough makes me happy. This is going to make me sound like the quintessential lazy teen but I mean seriously, when did everything get so complicated?

Sometimes I wonder if I would be happier if I just pulled a Thoreau and got out of here. Maybe that’s where my potential lies. Building my own cabin and catching my own food and staying away from other people.

I’m just so profoundly burnt out on the whole “living” thing right now, which is probably due to my rampant negativity and existentialism. What’s the point of studying for your tests if you’re just going to die, and all that. People are crazy about telling you to live each day as if it were your last, but if I really knew I was going to die the next day, I would probably cry a lot, watch the series finales of anything I’m not caught up on, eat EVERYTHING, and tell a whole bunch of people how I really felt about them. I certainly wouldn’t be spending it doing homework, or cleaning my room, or anything, you know, responsible.

So where are we supposed to fit in the mundanities?

The average human life expectancy is about 70 years. For about 10 of those, you really have no autonomy or capability of making decisions. And for about 12 more (if you go to college, which you pretty much have to do these days) you’re in school. Now consider that you’re asleep for a third of your life, so that takes away 16 more years. Now you’ve still got 32 years left. And you’re probably going to spend almost all of those at a job that you may or may not like and that you have to decide upon when you have literally no real life experience.

That sucks.

And allegedly it’s all about doing the hard work so you can get to the good part later, but I’m really not all that into the good part, and I’m DEFINITELY not into the hard work.

I’m just really disillusioned to the whole concept of happiness. I don’t get it. It would be rad if someone could explain it to me.