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Europe: A Failed Mouse Paradise
What happens if you meet everyone’s needs, give them all the creature comforts they could want while removing sources of conflict and strife?
They quit. They stop living. They lose all interest in having sex. The entire civilization ends up dying out. What is amazing is that while this is obviously true (and playing out in real time in Europe and Japan and elsewhere), it is also true in the animal kingdom, where a mouse-utopia ended up with every mouse dead.
Man does not live by bread alone, and neither do animals. When we live in a “perfect” stable world we stop having children, we become self-obsessed (the video speaks of the beautiful mice who just groomed themselves to look fabulous), and before we die out entirely, we engage in pointless strutting and random acts of violence.
We crave ambition, adversity and purpose. Where we lack these things, we, like mice, lose the will to live. Utopias are doomed because the foundational premise is wrong: man does not want to be happy.
The high birth rate may also be a result of the faith commitment of Orthodox Jews to have large families; it ensures a Jewish population wherever we may live.
Even in this country, Orthodox Jews are producing more children than their secular counterparts by a factor of more than 2X. Our Rabbi has nine children, and he has the smallest family of the Rabbis on his block! I heard some estimate that the Orthodox will outnumber the rest of Jews in New York within the next 20 years.
It isn’t that we don’t want to be happy. It’s that we can’t be happy.
Not in the sense most people mean by the word (never dissatisfied, immune from boredom, irritation and wanting what you can’t have) and not for long, uninterrupted periods of time (let alone “ever after”). We can—often with the help of some sort of religious practice or something that approximates this— can learn to be content, to seek ways of giving happiness to others, and to be grateful (preferably very) for what we have. When those things are combined, the result is pretty darned happy.
We actually need to be needed. I don’t know about the mice, but human beings are such intensely social creatures that being unnecessary is a death sentence. The elderly who dwell in cushy nursing homes (the equivalent of Mouse-topia, really) die sooner without some sense of being needed, even if it is only to water the geranium on the window sill. That isn’t to say they necessarily have a greater subjective sense of happiness at the same time, but on the other hand, it’s hard to be happy when you’re dead.
Rather than talking about being “happy” a lot, I talk about the importance for me with being “deeply satisfied” with life. Happiness can come out of that, but it’s not a steady state. But having deep satisfaction is wonderful, through tough times and great times.
Excellent remark, WC.
Not a coincidence. If life is nothing but a “brief candle,” why bother?
If life is phase one of eternity, or a candle lit by G-d, or an Olympic torch briefly held but already born by many others, or part of a sacred community of candles–we understand a point of the candle. We know why to bother.
Is the alien anything like the giant space goat that was going to the the Golgafrinchan home planet?
I haven’t had a good chocolate chip cookie since my mother died.
Or maybe like the god of the Exif?
Hey, this is my 10,000th comment on Ricochet!
Does that make you happy? Satisfied? Do you wish you could do it over to make it more consequential?
You can, you know. Maybe you already did.
The challenge of making well-crafted, relevant, elegant comments on Ricochet is enough to dispel ennui and defer suicidal despair. Despite mounting evidence of obvious failure in my profile.
Such a helpful site.
Where does that leave me?
Apparently, per the OP, trying and failing is essential to happiness, so you have satisfied at least one prerequisite.
Have you been counting all this time?!
I’m good, but not that good.
It’s on my notification page.
Yes. And the subtext was, “Good luck, boy.”