imaginary happiness

Youtube recommended this video a while back, but I didn't watch the whole thing. I saw enough for this one concept to stick with me. The narrator says that we despair because we lack the imagination to see how things could be better. This strikes me as patently absurd, but I keep thinking about it. I know that even people living in trailer parks can find happiness in buying lottery tickets. Further, that sort of dopamine gaming may even ward off depression to some degree.

What is that but to imagine how things could be better? Instead of dwelling on how you probably won't win, think about how great it would be if you do! A therapist might advise being a little more realistic about what we're aiming for; tell some poor schlub that they can be anything they set their mind to, and sure, maybe they'll turn their life around. Or maybe they'd have better luck playing the lottery. How realistic are we being, really? I'm not sure the psychological mechanism being advocated is any different.

I also wonder what this says regarding how negativity is perceived by others. It concerns me that despair is being interpreted this way. It's like when they tell the agoraphobe to just go outside, or to have the good fortune to be forced outside, expecting them to be shocked into dramatic improvement upon learning for the first time that it's actually quite pleasant out and nothing terrible happens. That's not how it works, and that's not helpful.

I can certainly imagine it. I can imagine winning the lottery or finding a djinn to grant me wishes. My imagination does seem to fall short, when it comes to how I might earn a living, but for the most part, I can imagine things going all sorts of well. I'm just disinclined to believe any of it. I can imagine taking a much more emotionally stable position when things do go wrong, but that isn't what actually happens, either. I don't know this world in which anything goes well. Life goes wrong at every goddamn turn and then you die, as far as I can tell. 

So yeah, I'm compelled to just to hide. I don't have aspirations when surviving for the time being is really the best we can do. You certainly don't want to screw up the surviving bit, chasing rainbows. Some might call this a trauma response, and yeah, what a traumatic world this is. Happiness is the product of imagination, much the way suffering is the product of living in reality.

Maybe if I improve myself, life will go better. That seems rational enough. Going to CCV, taking MMA, meditating, it's all premised on this, what I thought was a pretty healthy intersection of reason, knowledge, experience, and imagination. Still waiting though, for anything in life to be any better than futility and catastrophe. I thought I was doing the very best of what I could possibly be doing, but this miserable bullshit this is still my life.

I can even imagine being happy with the way my life is, exactly as it is, but that's not how the neurochemistry works. It has more to do with basic human needs being met. It's like telling a starving person to imagine that they just had a great meal. Even if that causes a miraculous shift in ghrelin levels, you're still starving.