Happiness And Surprise Boobs

Good feelings are always fleeting. I can come home buzzing after a day of laughing at fart jokes or riding bikes around when it’s nice out, but ultimately I’ll wake up in the same neutral state as before. In fact, I can’t even imagine what something that would significantly improve my general, day-to-day well-being would even look like. Assuming I avoid things that would make me miserable (being president, Crohn’s disease, Cockroach breakfast, etc.), I think this will always be the case.

Aristotle (basically) wrote that happiness is less a state of being as the ineffable byproduct of right decision-making coupled with productive involvement in the things that give pleasure and provide stimulation. While I think this is as good of an account as any, it ultimately seems more like a way to avoid stagnating, which I guess is another way to avoid perpetually feeling miserable. With every goal met, new problems and anxieties arise, and everything seems to reset at a neutral zero-point. This is why whichever bright young scientist who cures cancer won’t hang up his or her lab coat after doing so. Instead, after a few hours of elation, they’ll probably start to doubt their actual contribution to the accomplishment, or worry about adding to the far more serious overpopulation problem. After a few days they’ll have to start a new project to avoid feeling like a phony. It’s a pretty depressing routine (if not a powerful agent in maintaining productivity); it takes a lot to feel just OK all the time.

Then, there was the time I saw surprise boobs. I was drinking beer on a rooftop one night with a couple friends, when we simultaneously and unassumingly caught a flashing glimpse of some girl’s boobs through an open window. Because I like boobs and this was the fulfillment of something I desperately wanted to happen when I was 12, I got a huge kick out of it. All things considered, it felt like a very pure form of happiness.

What makes surprise boobs so great is they happen unexpectedly and without a context. Seeing boobs during sexual experiences is also great, but there’s always a situation-changing outcome. You develop a bond with someone and make steps towards constructing some sort of relationship (or not), and every action or exchange has the potential to leave things in a different state than before. When desires, expectations, time, etc. factor in, this can begin to take a heavy emotional toll. This is true of non-boob related activities as well. I can spend all day working on some creative something-or-other, and implement every resource I can think of. When it’s over, it’s impossible for me to separate the finished product from all that I put into it. There’s always the question of, “Is this all that it could have been?” and the satisfaction I get from its completion generally doesn’t last for very long.

This isn’t the case for surprise boobs. It’s just something that happens, and then it’s over, and no one is really any better off. It’s a break from the daily struggle to feel good all the time. If you don’t like boobs, it’s probably similar to discovering what you thought was plain yogurt is actually fruit-on-the-bottom yogurt, or finding $10 in the grocery store. All these experiences feel so pure because they provide a mold-breaking good feeling without any real consequences. It’s really a relief. No matter what happens, cheer up, because you might see something like surprise boobs and you’ll forget about your problems for a second.

You should follow Thought Catalog on Twitter here.