Pursuing Happiness
There was a farmer somewhere who lived in a fancy house with everything you can think of from glass door, swimming pool, and almost everything all by himself. He finally became the most successful farmer in the state after 20 years working his sweat off; failing and got back up again repeatedly for a bit less than an infinite times. You know what they say that “hardwork never fail to keep its promise”. The amount of space that he had was tremendous, I mean think about it. You have a property surrounded by a big chunk of land full of produces and empty lots that you can actually build whatever you want. If let’s say for once he wants to build an airport for fun, the span of land available would permit him to do so. Life was perfect. He would never need to do all the work to maintain the field because it was done by all these high-tech equipments with integrated AI that all he had to do was sit there and enjoy life to its fullest.
Then there was another farmer on the other side of the world, who lived in a decent house. Just enough for 5 people to live a life of breakfast, taking shower, bathroom businesses, dishwashing, laundry; you know basic daily necessities. Their three kids went to a school nearby in a school district with other farmer kids who lived just around the same area. Other farmers came by every once in a while and brought a pecan pie they made, or they invited neighbours to have dinner together.
They exchanged fresh produces anytime they ran out of, let’s say tomatoes but they want to make marinara. So they gave up some corn to a neighbor who had a whole lottta tomatoes, and that’s just how life is. Once a month they had a barbecue, celebrating life as a community; feasting, tell stories, sing, dance; and be thankful for what nature had provided for them.
Pursue YOUR Happiness
and there’s you. The person who willingly chose to read this instead of doing anything else. Which is great, I mean I am flattered that you get to this point means that the story was enjoyable. Anyhow, you’ve read the story of two farmers who lived life in their own unique way. One with his pursuit of excellence and lived life like nobody could ever dreamed of, and the other with his basic normal life that we could all relate to a certain degree. Now, I would like you to decide between the two, which one is happier?
If you choose the first one, couldnt agree more. Who wouldn’t want to live like a modern day Greek God.
What about the latter? You’re not wrong either. They both could have the same degree of happiness. There is absolutely no objection on that. But here’s the difference between the two. On one he kept his happiness to himself, while the other was shared.
It reminded me of a quote from the movie “Into the Wild” where this character; and it was a true story; traveled around all by himself into the wilderness with the purpose of finding true happiness. I can tell that he was happy from beginning to the end, but then at the end right before he actually died in Alaska he finally found the true meaning of happiness, that “Happiness is only ‘real’ when shared”. In that moment I was strucked like the moment I found out froot loops all had the same flavour. You can be happy all you want and then as a consequence your physical reaction will be to put a smile on your face, and then I realized that smiling is a social device and there’s no point of smiling when theres nobody to smile to. It’s that simple all along, that we are social creatures and will always be.
Mohammad Resyad Ghifari Mulyadi is a final year food science student in UPM from Jakarta Indonesia. Passionate about songwriting currently doing a project called Jacaterra, creative writing, and food writing for a food media called Gramus.