viva la vida

It was right then that I started thinking about Thomas Jefferson on the Declaration of Independence and the part about our right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. And I remember thinking how did he know to put the pursuit part in there? That maybe happiness is something that we can only pursue and maybe we can actually never have it. No matter what. How did he know that?   ~Christopher Gardner in The Pursuit of Happyness

Common knowledge: the world is a fucked up place. The rich & famous will get to that point in their lives when they will envy the common man’s privacy & anonymity; whereas, three quarters of the world is drooling over money & fame. We will always be in a state of malcontent. How many more celebrities & daughters of tycoons & biz moguls, wasting their lives away–publicly–, do we have to endure? And why, as a common onlooker, do we feast on them & their private lives? All boils down to the phenomenon of malcontent, of boredom. A need branches out & become wants. Abundance is flaunted, thrift is not a way to live, not if you’re a celebrity. $20,000 plane rides, & dinners, & apparel. Don’t tell me you pay that price for quality & comfort; in fact, the price is tagged on superfluity. I believe the law of conspicuous consumption should be studied under Psychology, as it is studied by economists.

We are insatiable. We can only pursue happiness. Maybe we can’t HAVE it, because our nature denies us to claim it. Perhaps, at the end of it all, we don’t deserve to be happy.