(no subject)

[andrewducker]

We can't make everyone happy all of the time - their wants and needs are conflicting.

We could possibly make one other person happy all of the time if we made our life subservient to theirs.

But you can't live for another person, at least not for more than a short period of time - you hav to live to make yourself happy, or what's the point of living at all?

Which isn't to say that making other people happy can't be a part of your life, or even a large part. But how much is too much? And how selfish is too selfish?

There aren't hard and fast rules for these things - hell, there aren't hard and fast rules for life. People would like to think there were (hence the vast number of books which sell themselves to you by telling you that they contain the secret to happiness), but life doesn't have the hard edges that allow rules to work well. The best you can manage are heuristics - methods of arriving at a pretty good solution, most of the time, fairly quickly. And even they break down in particularly fuzzy situations.

Sometimes you're on you own, there are no rules to guide you, and every answer seems wrong, because every possible solution leads to someone getting hurt.

So what do you do? You do your best. And then you lose sleep wondering if you could have done it better.

Comments

[kpollock.livejournal.com]

Hanging round with a miserable bastard is no fun (for most folks) so you have to make yourself content. Note that I didn't say happy. Happy is fleeting, like sad should be.

As I said to Erin a while back - the way to have less misery is to have more calm, not more happiness.

Maybe it's easiest to concentrate on not causing yourself or anyone else misery?