Either because the greeting conveys a wish, or because the ideal vision of life convinces us of this, humanity strives to be happy, like this with the verb substance – to be – and not the companion to be. Without being clear about what it consists of, confusing pleasure with joy, joy with magic, we all strive for a way of feeling that must have a certain profile that can be identified with that name.

From the moment we are born, we move within a network of relationships from which emotions and experiences will arise, and these basic and primordial ones depend on the case: what kind of family we have, one with attentive and well-to-do parents or in a multi-member home where women have children without a husband, adolescent girls are mothers due to abuse. From there, the joys are sustained as long as there is innocence, because the inequalities are soon revealed and the lack of response does not have to attribute the differences.

To them

The generalization almost always places us in petty-bourgeois mediocrity, as if most citizens have jobs, acceptable housing and well-adjusted social relations, all suitable for consuming stages of life: educating their children in private schools (believing that these institutions are better than public ones), obligatory celebrations , promotions at work, vacation trips. Programs that no one wants to miss. Activities that are marked in calendars and traditions, but nurtured according to budgets. So it’s worth asking yourself, do you need money to be happy?

My resounding answer is yes. It is necessary to have basic needs met, to draw the future, to realize dreams in order to be satisfied and satisfied with life. If all energies are focused on survival, there is no room for the extra efforts that would be needed to open other paths. Of course, there are people who have broken down obstacles and with luck and perseverance jumped the rope of poverty. But life does not arise with exceptions, but with an amorphous mass in the core of which defects are hidden.

Last afternoon with Octavio Paz

(…) humanity strives to be happy, so with the verb substance – to be – and not with the traveler to be.

But let us continue to support the ideal of a large middle class, one that doubles the size of those above and below it, as a sign of developed republics: within it are growing families who can get their own home, however modest it may be, educate professional children so that recent graduates get meaningful employment and can care about your health with family doctors. A day in front of the television and a working life end only with pensions. He will feel happiness when the descendants acquire titles, get suitable partners, and old age is a time of peaceful life, when contact with friends is encouraged and when health is tolerable. Those who created their own businesses passed them on to a new generation or were able to accept the different choices of those young people who do not fit the goals of their elders.

The happiness of a narrowed circle, of a short scope. Temporary emotion, sparks of well-being scattered throughout the body, caught by a rationality that identifies the nature of sensations and names them. Even though it impregnates them with longing because they are fleeting. Most of the time we come down to the simple good. And that’s enough. (OR)