Originally Posted by
calebprime
Since you said this, and put it baldly, I have to disagree.
Some of us believe that it better not to aim directly at happiness. To put it a little parodoxically, some of us are happier not being happy.
Also, I find I'm better off avoiding "friendships" with most of the people that I encounter, although getting along with them is necessary. Friendship implies an engaged, thoughtful relationship, with caring, commitment, etc. That would be quite impossible goal and an undesirable one for both me and the people I see in my everyday life. It's better that we're not friends. We would bore each other to tears, and irritate each other if we engaged.
Oh, and I forgot "growth", which is either meaningless or impossible beyond a certain point.
Happiness: I didn't say, 'aim for happiness,' I said, 'sustain happiness.' Aiming implies striving toward feeling the definition of happiness. Obviously if you are happy doing whatever you're doing then you are going to repeat those values, and in doing so, be happy doing it. When it doesn't make you happy anymore, you're going to change what you're doing into something else that makes you happy.
Friendship: Does not imply any of those things as I meant it. Being a 'friend' to someone while you are near them is what I intended to imply. I have more thoughts on this matter, but it falls under, "unprovable," so I won't mention them. Obviously, though, if you go around creating enemies it will be bad for you later, was the most basic sense of what I meant.
Growth: That's just silly; there's infinite knowledge in the Universe, and hence infinite opportunity for growth. "Beyond a certain point," meaning, "too old to do anything but vegetize," I can agree with, but anything before that portrays that one can know everything. Obviously that's arrogant.
And with this sentence forming its own paragraph, I've officially written, "Obviously," in every paragraph;
a redundant accident.