Reflecting on the "Pursuit of Happiness"

Living in the United States, 4 July represents the birthday of America and associates patriotic feeling with notions of liberty, freedom, and the like; the catchphrase from the Constitution - "life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness" - sums the essence of American values. Peculiar, though, the happiness thing - America is the only country that explicitly states this pursuit in its constitution. Why is happiness an inherent right? What sort of happiness is protected? How can happiness be protected when one person's conception of happiness almost always overlaps and conflicts with many other people's conception of happiness?
Inevitably, Americans must be unhappy so that happiness can be pursued (pursuing happiness means desiring happiness, which suggests that happiness is something that has not yet been attained); ultimately, it is our own personal happiness that really matters, damn the rest. So we are protected by our American values to be ourselves at whatever cost and to blame others for keeping us from this constitutional dream. It would seem that the US has evolved more into itself than any of its citizens would care to realize.
I will not argue it, only resign myself to the devilish conclusion that results from pondering the constitution on America's birthday. And I will apathetically pursue my own happiness at some fireworks celebration later this evening, with a cocktail in my hand and a pretty girl at my side. American dream...

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A Little Bit of Proust

Somehow I started to read Proust. The blame goes to Alain de Botton , a writer whose witticisms deconstruct modern thinking and make intellectualism seem but a trifle and a whim. He wrote a book in 1997 called "How Proust Can Change Your Life" which distills the enigmatic French novelist into a self-help dispenser of pithy ideas. How clever I found Mr. de Botton to be when I dipped my toe into the vagaries of Proust; I picked up volume one of "In Search of Lost Time" and instantly fell into the deep end. What author dares to run sentences onward into the stratosphere that sometimes seemingly mellows behind the stars of a bright night, but never so much as an introspective person that wretches for the meaning of a simple thought, sometimes stumbling, but always emerging strongly as that same night in starry sky, almost an homage back to Van Gogh, whose rich paintings greatly represented the mood of a generation - and generations often afford a few mis-steps in l...

Try Something New: 750 Words

If there is anything universally redeeming about writing, it is the ability to delve into the inner thoughts of one's own psyche and come back with perspective on feelings, motivations, and desires. In this way, journaling as the specific form of writing that provides this redemption can be a worthwhile pursuit. One might suppose that the internet world would offer various tools to make journaling simple, easy, and relatively painless, but that has not always been the case - until now. I came across this from Lifehacker, who was promoting the site back in March: 750words. The site is run by a former Amazon product manager who has an interest in journaling for the creative process and data visualization. Mash those things together, and you have an interesting site that is built around the premise that creative juices get flowing by consistently writing 3 pages worth of stuff on a daily basis, which translates to roughly 750 words. Logging in by using your Google or Facebook use...

Netscape, We Hardly Knew Ye...

In 1995, I started using email. In my first college days, my friend Virge anointed me with a playful email handle - toddity. She never told me that your email address was somewhat permanent, and I spent the rest of my university days with an username that amused most who got a message from good, old Eudora. At that time, I used Netscape as my web browser. Fast forward almost 15 years. I moved on first to Internet Explorer (Microsoft had a monopolistic hand in it), and then to Firefox from which I am penning this blog entry. Somewhere along the way, Netscape was acquired by AOL and sent down the river on a slow obsolescence. Until next week, when Netscape will end up on the scrap heap with Prodigy, Compuserve, and Excite@Home. How much the internet has changed. I can wax poetically on blogs and social networks, but I can also remember messageboards, usenets, IM, forums, web 1.0, HTML, and the world wide web when www. was a foreign concept. The concept is still the same - connec...

Journal : OpenRoadWorks

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