Frustration

As an addendum to my previous post, despite my somewhat brooding, melancholy nature, one thing I know about myself that is very much so like presumably everyone else on the planet is that the one thing I ultimately want is to be happy. Not necessarily pleasured (although I'd have no arguments against that), but genuinely pleased with the state of things. The trouble is, this creates a bit of a conundrum, just as much for myself as I'm sure it does everyone else.

After all, is is really possible to be happy, or even content, when there are so many things that you could do for the world to make it a better place, even if those things may not necessarily make you happier? For example, one thing I'm quite sure I'll need to do to be happier is move to another country. There are simply too many structural issues with this country for it to begin to operate at a level or in a way that is satisfactory for me personally. But then I think I'm just being hypocritical, a quitter, or a "traitor" as it were, or some combination of those things. After all, by birth I am an American, and I can't say that this place is that much of a hole, and it's true that had I really wanted to, I could have left by now. But that just pulls on the guilty threads of my conscience.

Which brings me to the heart of the issue. What is the proper apportioning of time spent between absolving a guilty conscience through humanitarian or scholarly work and actually doing things that will make me happy? I'd like to think that someone would say to me, "what have you to feel guilty about"? After all, I didn't choose to be born into a society which, by virtue of its construction, would predispose me to consume more resources than I ultimately need, or one that would ultimately act in its own self-interest regardless of what effect it might have on the rest of the world. But nonetheless, even if I am not obligated to fix the wrongs prevalent in various aspects of American society (ones which doubtlessly have their correlates in other societies), shouldn't I do something to increase the general well-being of human kind?

Of course, as a utilitarian, I can easily defend myself by saying that simply increasing my own happiness without disproportionately decreasing the happiness of others is all I need to to increase the total utility of humanity, i.e. "be good". But how good a grasp can any one person have on the ways in which he/she effects the lives of all 7 billion of us? So the alternative to reducing the amount of negative utility an action produces is to simply produce an abundance of positive utility. And the natural, possibly most obvious, means with which to do this is to create more positive utility for oneself. But even that ultimately just returns to the question of whether or not positive utility for someone else has a consequentially-appropriate effect on your own utility. So the best way to go about that, then, is to find whichever course of action creates a large positive utility value for yourself and for others. Unless a person is a serial rapist, we usually tell them to follow their passions and begin a career in some field closely related to them, because according to a utilitarian philosophy operating within a capitalistic society, work done is good for everyone involved, and work about which you're passionate is even better by virtue of the fact that you're doing something you love, ergo producing even more utility.

So maybe this has just ended up as sort of a repeat of my earlier post, Oh, Nothing.... I don't know why I have so much trouble figuring what it is I'm passionate about. Truth be told, I think I'm concerned that what I'm passionate about may have no meaning to anyone who isn't predisposed to similar passions. I guess the worry is that I may not mean as much to the world as some others do. But I thought I had long accepted that as simply the way life is for most people. Hell, even those who ended up being important in one way or another managed it at least in part by chance. Among other qualities, Martin Luther King Jr. just so happened to have a natural talent for rhetoric, and Adolf Hitler was simply charismatic; there most certainly have been other egalitarians and Nazis throughout history. "The mark of an immature man is that he wants to die nobly for a cause. The mark of a mature man is that he wants to live humbly for one." Hm. I guess I just haven't found my cause. Or maybe I'm just not as mature as I thought.