PURITAN SAYING
Happiness comes from action and cannot be achieved in a static state.
MIKE TOMASEK (a Facebook poster)
Jackson Pollock catches a lot of flak for the artwork he created. The criticisms are along the lines of artwork that a kid could create. Those criticisms may be valid, but I think they miss the point of why Pollock painted the way he did. The element that gets overlooked is motion. Those splatters of paint across the canvas came at a moment when Pollock was trying to capture something. This would be the motion and by extension, the exuberance of the painter. We mock this in art but celebrate it in music. Pollock's frustration was in trying to capture a kinetic phenomenon in a static medium.
We experience this same frustration in our own lives. People try to find happiness in static things. It could be a possession or a person or a passive experience. Do you doubt this? How many times have you thought to yourself how nice it would be if you could just get all your shit together? The idea behind this is that happiness is some endpoint of an activity. The irony is that once the end is achieved the happiness vanishes.
I encounter this feeling often when I write. I put work into a blog post and pick the words I want to express the idea. It is actually quite thrilling to be in the process of creation. Then, there comes that point when the work has ended. It is sort of like when the mountain climber knows that he has reached the summit because he has nowhere else to climb. The work is done. In that brief moment, there is a feeling of satisfaction. You have accomplished something. As good as it feels, this is not happiness.
Happiness is the process. Happiness is the action that leads to those satisfying ends. Once the end is achieved, the temptation is to rest on your laurels. This rest is stasis. Stasis is death. Overindulgence in this stasis is the undoing of your happiness.
Happiness requires constant motion. You must always be doing in order to remain happy. If you doubt this, look at the miserable people. What do they all have in common? They don't move. They are lazy. They are stuck. They don't change. If there is one certain antidote to depression, it is motion.
One of the ironies of happiness is that it often comes following some disaster. It could be the loss of a job or a divorce or what have you. The reason happiness often comes after these things is because they are motivators for people. People start moving, and this movement creates happiness. If it were up to me, I would have paint and brushes in every mental hospital and psych ward and prescribe painting as therapy. I would show some Pollock creations to help people get over their lack of talent. My own artistic creations are the product of filling time with activity when I run out of stuff to write. I don't consider myself an artist, yet I seem to have put together a sizable portfolio of work.
Society deems this endless activity as some sort of pathology. I think society is fucked up in this regard. Work is denigrated in favor of leisure. Retirement and vacation are held up as the good life. Buying things is preferable to doing things. You can see the stasis with its creeping death seeping into everything.
When I see one of those Corona ads in a magazine or on television, I recoil in revulsion at it. The message in the ad is that the good life is found in relaxation, sitting on the beach, and drinking beer. I have done all those things. That is not the good life. I know people who do those things as a lifestyle, and they are the most miserable people I know.
I think Nike ads better capture the true essence of the good life. Their ads always extol the virtues of activity and motion. Even when they feature an athlete at rest, the rest is the pleasurable reward of labor accomplished in the gym, the track, the road, the trail, and the field.
Happiness is essentially the flow that you experience when you are engaged in meaningful activity. Flow stops when you stop moving, creating, working, etc. Pathology is when we attempt to find happiness in what should be the means of accomplishment instead of the ends. This would be gluttony, materialism, laziness, addiction, etc. Materialism is a fine example as people go out and buy status objects. I find that I prefer objects of high utility. Rest is another example. Many people want to be on their ass as a permanent state of being. I usually want to be on my ass just long enough to recover physically from a day of work. I often lose sleep because I wake up in the middle of the night and cannot resist the temptation to go write something. Four hours later, it is time to go to work, and I am a zombie. This is when that gallon of coffee comes in handy.
A truly happy life is one of constant motion. The only consistently negative emotion in a happy person's life is frustration. This happens when you spend too much time on one project to the neglect of another project that is often vital. This would be blowing off the gym to finish cleaning the house. Better life management helps with this, and I find minimalism to be an effective strategy in this regard. This would be Aristotle's dictum of moderation in all things.
Happiness is a life in motion. Unfortunately, Jackson Pollock couldn't figure this out. He died in 1956 after getting shitfaced drunk and crashing his car. I like to compare Pollock to Picasso who did know something about happiness as Picasso spent his entire life even into his 90s producing thousands of artworks from paintings to ceramics to sculptures in various styles. Picasso was robust. Pollock was self-destructive. I think Pollock was only happy during those moments when he was spreading paint on canvas. The rest of his time was spent in drunken misery. Both men were successful and acclaimed in their times, but it was Picasso who moved on with his work. Pollock stagnated and went into a downward spiral. The lesson in all of this is to never stop moving.
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