Not Everyone Deserves to be Happy.

Do you know what the most ancient piece of storytelling is? 

It is a poem from ancient Mesopotamia called the ‘Epic of Gilgamesh’

It tells the story of a king, who despite being a demigod, struggled his entire life to find meaning in his existence. And when his end came, he realized it was nothing but an endless march towards a tomorrow that never actually showed up.

Now more than ever, equal rights, equal opportunities, mental well-being, and fulfillment in one’s personal and professional life are crucial to the livelihood of humans.

And while an otherwise beautiful thing, it is also a joyful way of journeying on a path towards something grim.

The premise of today’s discussion: Not everyone deserves to be happy. 

This may seem like a blasphemous thing to say, wishing evil for your fellow man, but deep down, we all know this argument has some merit.

Look at something very banal: Everyone in this world leads different lives, we do, feel and experience things differently; we accomplish different things in life. This necessity of the world for us to do different things makes the standard rule of fulfillment pointless.

Humans find joy and fulfillment in doing different things, but if everyone started doing what makes them happy, we’d be left with a society that would crumble and fall apart faster than Amber Heard’s arguments in court.

We are lazy by nature, and if left to our own devices, most of us would spend our days in bed, sleeping, eating, and watching shows on Netflix. If we as a society had the freedom to do that, the entire framework of our existence would fall apart in a few days. Considering we live in a world where people drink detergent and set their own hair on fire, we are already playing fast and loose with the whole concept. 

The more we drive our need for being happy, the easier it becomes for us to fail. 

Throughout history, the greatest leaps in humankind’s evolution occurred due to pain, sorrow, and discomfort in the way things were. Through the ages, we’ve solved problems and created bigger ones for ourselves. Because that’s where we strive.

Imagine a world without wars. Everyone is happy and lives in peace. You are satiated with what you have; you don’t have materialistic desires. Do you have a reason to wake up from bed every day? If there’s no desire left to be satiated, if there’s no problem to be solved, we stagnate.

And that stagnation forces us into oblivion.

Consider the janitor who works the graveyard shift at your dad’s office. Is she happy with the way her life turned out? Chances are, she didn’t plan out her life to include mopping floors for minimum wage at 50 years old.

But that too is a crucial job. If the janitor doesn’t take out the trash and clean the floors, the office becomes dirty and clogged with garbage. That leads to a hindrance in the corporate blue collars running around trying to satisfy their boss.

Their boss gets worried about not having enough money to buy his mistress jewelry this weekend. We are all scared to death of being fulfilled.

The janitor, in this case, needs to carry on with her unfulfilling lifestyle and work so that it didn’t cause a chain reaction of problems. But does she not deserve to be happy?

“Deserve” is such a strong word. Very close to “entitled.” As if to say somebody or something must be the reason for your happiness; that someone must deliver it to you when you cannot find it yourself. But if that is the case, you are basically a problem someone else is solving. And another person will do the same for them.

We always hunger for more, to achieve better things, and we find the crippling need for newer problems comforting. It is what gives us the motivation to get out of bed every morning and work so society doesn’t burn down to ashes.

So what it comes down to is one simple question:

Even if we deserve to be happy, do we really want to be?