Happiness, obduracy and the meaning of life.

time I was live-streaming and I thought I'd
answer. the meaning of happiness in my life and already that we're using the word happiness and not meaning. something durable; is happiness something I think we'd actually come to very different are so closely linked in their meanings in answer at this particular time in my life. for just 15 days. girlfriend whom I'm very much in love with. palm trees, on the beach, in an ostentatiously that many people might aspire to, or might in bloom all around me, birds singing in the azure ocean, these sorts of things. would be doing none of it, because these are motivates me. would never go on a beach vacation of any strange circumstances. it shapes the behavior of other human beings my behavior, is something that's been on my of duty, honor, and obligation, because obviously in my mind (day by day and in looking ahead trying to plan for, in trying to plan my education me to answer (many people who are regular for a few years to whatever extent)… they're out of Schopenhauer's school of thought Schopenhauer's have some videos on) or reflecting my background (I like to say 10 years for round numbers; especially Theravada Buddhism. in Buddhist countries and so on. that both the philosopy of Arthur Schopenhauer (Theravada Buddhism especially) really do you should not plan your life around, as something (as an intellectual or simply as a man). I'd want to reflect on here, although I'll sense in which my involvement with Buddhism Schopenhauer reflects certain aspects of my to me, the people who know me in life and where other people would be struggling, where people were miserable, and I'm ebullient. smiling and laughing and even singing. in an airport recently, it was actually Bangkok here to France. it wasted about three-and-a-half hours of at the airport. in dealing with it. you'd really have to know me to see it, you it. get that sense from reading my essays, or works from me. with phony optimism, not with a contrived dealing with it. too. somebody was threatening to kill me was really to murder me. so on. than I was in dealing with it. this (this aspect of my life, and I think general) is actually the philosopher Max Stirner, channel about his philosophy. who talks about the obduracy of children and face up to challenges when you defy things to defy. a child, presuming that your parents beat millions of us are… the look in the parent's eye that means you eye is more terrifying than the stick or the eye means. learn to fear the fist, then you learn to more of an awareness of yourself, of your own own obduracy, of your own will; then you the threat, the look in the eye, the fist, own strength, of your own ability to overcome you can be beaten, and you're stronger than and fleeting and so on. of childhood; he had some reflections on a know, you might call thriving on misery. sense of your own obduracy, this sense that front of you, and of being buoyed up by it, came out during this strange situation at at the airport, but I was not miserable. my girlfriend was asking me how should she to be happy? of doing the best I can. things to different people. I know I can't do anything better than this, like, "Oh, am I going to miss my flight? that, I have that peculiar low-level joy described don't fear the fist, and I don't fear the person's eye that brings those threats with cope, if you like. I have with me always and that I've experienced you know, threats of violence and people threatening my livelihood or, you know, impacting my life it's difficult to describe. it, looking in from the outside, they might I'm doing is not reckless at all, it's perfectly way in situations where the nature of the going wrong at the airport: none of it's my if I were in a situation where I was taking that was my fault. and I'd be aware of my own daughter's inability sense of joy in my own ability to cope. on misery, the ability to overcome obstacles and being aware of one's own fearlessness fear (even if they were only things you would you would have feared when you were younger early twenties, whatever the case may be). identify with the critique of happiness presented Buddhism. the Côte d'Azur, this beautiful part of France, by the sight of a yacht, of an expensive boat, [is absurd to me]; we're passed on the street and what have you), the idea that somebody that on as a goal; the idea that someone like Canada and feel motivated that they have to the person in the yacht or they can be the here in the South of France, on the beach, shallow and profound at the same time. or something that I have chosen. between myself and other people more than of those things; I never have been and I think of Toronto), my major was economics. I wanted to study the philosophy of poverty. of war; the post-war struggle, the struggle war or famine. including the slow-motion genocide about against languages enduring, and the injustice is of country I was born into, and so on. we can talk about them politically, but I it's aesthetic. France when I was a child, they brought me saw all this splendor, and to me there was lived in pursuit of those creature comforts. and defined by suffering but where it was it. or if I died yesterday, I did live a meaningful chapter of my life. for my daughter. going to the beach and sitting on this floor, games, too, and so on. and that's both the short and the long answer