Being a Bad
Person Happy

Ok so like, I was thinking about three seperate things recently and came to realise they were all actually related. This is about them.

Thing One

The first philosopher we studied at uni was Epicurus. I wrote some 600 words about him for my first assignment but I still have more thoughts, so.

I'll try to explain Epicurus as unboringly as I can. Essentially, he wants to say that death is not a bad thing, that it's not worth fearing. Issue: If this is so, then we have no reason to avoid death. Why should we look before crossing the road? Why take our medication every morning? Why go to the doctor when we feel ill? Hey, why not just off ourselves now to avoid future suffering?

This is an issue. So maybe Epicurus takes a step back and says something like "death is not bad for us, but it's still less good than living, and so we can still have an interest in staying alive."

But if we have an interest in staying alive, do we not implicitly have a reason to fear death? Thus failing what he's trying to argue? Either way he takes his argument he seems fucked.

Thus, having destroyed Epicurus' position with considerate pwnage, I ended my assignment. If I'm philosophically honest though, my argument has a flaw. It relied on a false assumption; that if something is good for you, then you should fear missing out...

Thing Two

Let's take a detour to talk about Buddhism. Buddhism (along with a lot of philosophies, tbh) tells us to abandon our passions. Desire (Taṇhā), aversion (Dvesha) — these things cause us suffering. When we are attached to things, when we care about having something or avoiding something or being something, we put ourselves at the mercy of that thing, and will suffer when we inevitably fail. It is better to let go. Buddhism is the art of letting go.

But like, I don't know about you, but I want to care about things. Caring about things makes me human. It gives me reason to live. It lets me work on myself and become who I want to be. It feels like Buddhism would have me give up on my very dreams, and some stubborn part of me defiantly says, "no, fuck you, I want to care. I want to care and love and hate — even if it makes me suffer."

But like, I also wanna be happy? But I'm scared to be happy. I'm scared that the only way to be happy is to take the Buddhist way — to learn the art of letting go. But then I'd no longer be me. I'd be a boring uni student putting as little effort into life as possible...

Thing Tres

Would you rather be a good person unhappy or a bad person happy? I think about this question a lot. To me, it had meant "Would you rather be a positive influence on the people around you, but constantly hate yourself and wish you were better, or would you rather be horrible, mean, slobbish, and yet oblivious to how you affected the people around you?

I think it's natural to choose the former. I think many of us would like to imagine ourselves selfless. What's not natural is how it did not at first strike me that it's a false dichotomy. I genuinely believed that my only chance at being the person I wanted to be was through hating myself. And then, maybe, if I hated myself enough to finally become a good person, then I could choose to be happy. But only then. I had imagined that was the hard-fought path to paradise.

Synthesis (perhaps the dialectical method was right)

These three problems have the same solution. Recognising that you are "good enough", or that things are "not bad", does not exclude you from making yourself or your world better.

We'll start with Epicurus: Just because you don't fear death, it doesn't mean you can't still want to live. There's a middle ground, right? The objection in my essay arose from the false assumption that anything not good is bad. That anything worth avoiding is worth fearing. But sometimes things are just okay. There's nothing terrible about death. It's not worth agonising over.

My dilemma with Buddhism also comes from a false assumption; that caring necessarily results in unhappiness when things don't go your way. But it's possible to care about something and want that thing to be better while also recognising that you'll be okay even if you fail. You can be happy with things being just okay, and still want them to be better. This is a reconciled way of caring about things. Rather than following the art of letting go, we should develop the art of caring.

And the correct answer to the question is that you should want to be a bad person happy. Because being happy does not preclude you from self-improvement. You can be satisfied with how you are and still want to be better. That is the path to paradise.

I was telling a friend about this all and got reminded of that quote from Wreck-It-Ralph. I didn't quite remember it, but this friend seemed to know it by heart:

"I'm bad, and that's good. I will never be good, and that's not bad. There's no one I'd rather be than me."

It's a quote about self-love, I think. It's about trusting yourself, about forgiving yourself, about choosing to be happy even if you know you are a bad person. You can recognise you are worthy of love and still want to be better. But you can't hate yourself into being a good person.