"Dan Bakitus said I'm shallow. He said I've got no integrity. But I don't know Dan Bakitus. And Dan Bakitus, he don't know me."
- Relient K
I was talking earlier about the differences between short-term and long-term happiness and the factors that go into their achievement. While it's certainly not wrong for us to desire and to seek short-term happiness, our long-term aims should never be abandoned. I understand that plans often go awry and it may be a fool's errand to try and live life in the shadow of a long-term happiness that may never be wholly realized, but I think that could be a way to simply minimize the hurt associated with failure. An overemphasis on short-term happiness at the expense of the long-term will, I believe, make us feel happier, more comfortable in the moment, and much more at ease with the circumstances and situations that the world throws at us, but it is also not always real.
I've learned that, quite often, I am happier in the short-term when I throw caution to the wind, abandon the principles in which I've attempted to guide my life towards, and just...live. But the prevailing thought that continually runs through my head when this occurs is if that's real living in the first place. It seems that we should always just do what we want if it makes us happy, consequences, for the most part, be damned. If we want McDonald's, eat McDonald's. If we want to kiss someone, kiss them. If we want something in our life, it's our prerogative, in America, to go out and get it. It typically makes us happy to live in the moment and not to hold back. That is the way to true happiness. But...at what cost?
I'm not ready to fit into that mold anymore. I've always painted myself as a person who was long-term oriented, working continually toward achieving my overarching goals. Everything that happens in the short-term, I've thought, should be used as fuel toward the long-term success policy I had in my mind. But when things changed, as they so inevitably do, I did not know what to do. When we are hurt and need healing, we sometimes seek help in the wrong places. I think this is true of all of us. At some point, we have been a certain person but, after things happen to us beyond our scope of handling, we become a completely altered personality. We escape into a shell of what we once were, believing perhaps that this is the way to emerge whole again. Unfortunately, it seems that instead we become something that was hitherto foreign to us. Maybe this doesn't make much sense. I guess what I'm trying to say is that when we grasp onto short-term happiness, our sense of self becomes compromised. Our long-term goals can change, as can our personality in the first place. But I don't think we can sit idly around anymore and let this happen.
Typically when I want to change things about myself, it's because I have a perception problem. This perception can be of my own doing i.e. I don't see myself in a very positive light and want to consciously try to become a more pleasant person or they can be through the perceptions of others i.e. someone says something about how I've changed or how I should change. What comes from this is a return to the discussion we had a few weeks ago about the differences in perception. How others see us and how we see us are always going to be linked. But there was another piece of perception that I failed to mention: the way in which we see others.
If we are to give more credence to our personal perceptions, we are still going to be aware of others' perceptions of us. This much we can agree on. But I also think that our personal perceptions are made up of how we see others' interacting with us. If I can make people laugh on a consistent basis, wouldn't my perception of myself change? I would perceive myself as funny. In the same vein, if I see someone very successful making people laugh, wouldn't I equate the two as being necessary for the other? If I wanted to be successful, I would then try to be funny. I would attempt to change my perspective of myself. Right? Am I making any sense here? My thoughts seem to be all over the place, even more than usual.
But here's the point I've been trying to make. We all have a Dan Bakitus or two in our life. They are the people whose opinions seem to matter to us so much more than they should. We give them an unparalleled access into our lives through the sheer fact that we listen to their words and adhere to their perceptions. Society itself can be a Dan Bakitus. We may be told to act in a certain way, or dress in a particular fashion, or live in such a way as to be perpetually happy in the short-term.
But we need to make a conscious effort to throw out our Dan Bakitus. In times of crisis we don't always have a level head. We make rash decisions and act in such a way that violates our previous sense of self. In fact, that crisis itself can be a Dan Bakitus, causing us to become a different person, even though we don't even fully know them and they sure as shootin' don't know us.
Here're the conclusions we've come to today: long-term happiness should trump that of short-term happiness, only we can fully know the real us, and Dan Bakitus should have no bearing on how we live our life. Indeed, we should worry about those people that truly matter to us Of course our perceptions of ourselves are always going to be affected by those of the people around us, but if we surround ourselves by people who care about us, then the affection will, I believe, be positive in nature.
It's never too late to decide to go back to yourself. If we've fallen into the short-term Saarlac, we can get out. It takes dedication and a return to what once defined us.
Ugh...this was all making sense. But what happens when we come to the realization that what once defined us no longer defines us, or was never the thing that should have been defining us in the first place? This could for sure be a post for another time, but right now, in terms of myself and how I'm going to choose to handle things, I am confident in what once was the definition of Ryan Ayala. I can only speak from personal experience here, but it's time to rewrite my dictionary definition.
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