Tag: Happiness

Am I happy? Or am I sad? Is this a dumb question? How do you know? (A Blog post)

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by Anton Martin Smith antonmartinsmithwrites@gmail.com or martinantonsmith@gmail.com

This is a strange situation. If you would back the clock to when I was between age 19 and 21 and for 18 months was unable to get out of bed in my student flat in Dunedin NZ – then the answer would be obvious. I was not happy – quite the reverse. If you asked me that question at age 32 with a poorly paid corporate job in Melbourne with a bunch of regular drunken escapisms/escapades attached – again I would say ‘no I was not definitely not happy’. You see in those two situations of my personal history, there was an element of ‘black and white to it all. When things are black and white it’s easier. But things are only ‘black and white’ from certain perspectives. This is why a common car thief or the socialist student that burns down a business can explain to someone with a straight face that they are helping society. Delusions/Ego stop us from seeing the black and white realities about ourselves.

So I can see that when I was younger I was not happy, from the perspective of many years later I can see the black and whiteness of it. But what about my happiness or sadness right now? Now I’m officially middle aged at age 47 soon 48, the answer is still at this very second as I write not truly obvious to me.

There is a ‘grey area’ to it. Of course, I have talked in the past on an intellectual level about whether the well known traditional Philosophical question ‘should we aim to be happy’ – but I won’t dwell on that now other that to summarize that overall the position held is that it is a little foolish to want to be ‘happy all the time’ as an adult – as we struggle under the many life pressures the world puts upon our shoulders day to day, month to month, year to year.

The smartest position as a grown adult is (possibly) to exchange contentedness for happiness. I agree with that idea. It’s a more reasonable position. Even with this newer definition of happiness – I still see that I wasn’t ‘content’ at those age 19-21 or at age 32 prior self-examples. That’s because they were genuinely unquestionably full of obviously bad things.

With this in mind – at 47 soon 48, I guess I am at least ‘arguably content’ most of the time. For example there are quite a few times when I really do feel ‘happy’ (which I’ll now redefine as moderate to high elation) and even more with the lower definition of ‘contentedness’. I won’t bother to define contentedness – I think it’s roughly self explainitory (but go to a dictionary if needed!).

Ok so nowadays I’m quite often content. Lets say that now. I’ll add some more life data points:

I am not rich – I live a hand to mouth, self employed, low income, low cost life. I act as a part time caregiver to a family member. I have access to a cheap lodgings, though that may change in the medium term. My job is physical – carpentry and gardener work. When I need more money, I have to find more work. This has mostly been working in terms of ‘survival money’ – I eat ok, go for a coffee a few times a week, a takeaway meal a two or three times. I do not make enough for middleclass holidays, like I was able to at age 32 working in corporate offices. I live in a small town of 6000, picturesque, quiet with little urban trappings such as events, nightlife, dating culture etc. I have a cat, and another that visits and lives on my roof.

More data points: I have for the last 5 years written lot of creative stuff (on this website/blog). I am single, which now looks like ‘life long bachelor’ status. I have not gone out with anyone since I was in Australia a decade ago. I put this down to the fact I never actually meet anyone a little like me these days. The few regular male friends I have I’ve known since I was 13 or even younger. I don’t really have any female friends, like I had in urban Australia. So that’s the generic raw life-data on me.

You see I had some on the face of it some plusses in Australia (socially, more money etc) but it did not translate to happiness/elation or general contentedness. I do miss the conversations here and their & the female energy friendships – yes I do. BUT you see those things were ruined because at age 32 I had not had the years to have worked on myself as much as I have now some 16 years later aged 47 soon 48. And I think this is the difference – I needed to put the self reflection and mirror looking and question asking work in before I could ever have the chance to be content, let alone to have a shot at ‘regular happiness/elation feelings’. So I guess I have answered my quandry in a very simple manner. I am at the least mildly content because I have benefitted from ‘working on myself’ for perhaps now for fifteen years straight.

I guess I have to now think about the regret that this kind of improvement to contentedness brings. Their is a sadness when looking back to all the chaos that being discontented brings. The pressure of relationships. The broken relationships. When with one discontented person or two discontented persons ‘go out with each other’, there is a natural tendency towards disaster, war, hurt feelings, grudges. And the sad thing is that when you have done work on yourself, you know that when looking back to your raw troubled unworked self – you know you simply got back ‘what you were putting out onto the universe’. This is not to be all ‘woo woo’ – it’s just really about congruence and vibration. Troubled people with unresolved or repressed issues will resonate in environments that have the same dynamic. Be they Jobs Lovers, Wives, Husbands or Friends.

The good thing about self-work is you can see the past for what it was, accept it. Forgive. Ultimately you accept it as the learning experience you had to have to become the person you are now – at least ‘somewhat content’ – and with more potential for becoming more content in the future. As I write these words I can’t help but think it’s all a bit too glib, to much out of the pages of some ‘self help’ shelf in a non descript early 2000s bookshop. Even so I think it is true. With my advancing age the self-work is now paying off. Yes glib but true – ‘time can heal many wounds’. I’ve realized that just to be ‘half decent’ actually also takes work. If you do zero work on yourself you will be not be very nice – that’s the default. Yes there are probaly people who are great from birth to death (because of great parents? A great town?) – but that would be the exception that proves the rule.

We live in a world that is far too throwaway, stressful, competitive. And more so in bigger and bigger urban environments like the one I was in in Australia when I was 32 (Melbourne). I think those big cities if you are just flowing along the ‘social corporate urban river’ the toxicity can become like the goldfish bowl is to the goldfish bowl. I think when I was in that environment it was too easy to ignore how extremely important self-work, healing work is. For example in big cities relationships can be disposable – because there’s always a new sucker just around the corner.

I guess I could be wrong – perhaps I am more unhappy than I think I am – but perhaps that unhappiness is just like an artists car – it breaks down because the artist owner refuses to do the basics of maintenance – check the oil, tires, lights, clean the McDonalds wrappers out from the foot areas etc. I now know that that kind of ‘stock unhappiness’ in the car example to be a good example of how to cure these kinds of ‘peripheral unhappinesses in yourself’. Just like if the artist isn’t feeling well one day and puts oil in their car, checks their tires etc, a persons ‘temp unhappinesses’ can be worked away by things such as exercise, deep rest, good nutrition, avoiding having mean people as best friends etc.

Anyway I thought I would share these feelings on the journey to wellbeing & contentedness, with a few jolts of elation sneaking in just for good measure. I wrote this personal post as I think we should all support each other on this very common journey, and to do that we need to talk openly of our lives and struggles.

Because a lot of discontent (and so also the downstream effects of chaos) is not nearly as permanent as your prior 19 or 32 year old self thinks at the time. But you do need to focus and spend the time, & that won’t be easy. I should also specifically add that being creative seems to help a lot. I think we were all made to be creative. To not express it at all surely creates some kind of amorphous blob internal discontent or energetic ‘blockage’ of some sort. And remember creativity for health does not need to be ‘good’. Many years ago (when I was still very unhappy with a lot of work to do) I once shamefully told a lady that her art was ‘not good’ because of perceived technical reasons…oh how I missed the point.

For others on the well being journey – I hope my words help in some way, perhaps you have similar or different takes (feel free to share in the comments!).

Let us all heal as we peal the oranges of life, and may the many slips on life’s banana skins whisk us away to a beautiful beachside towel with a responsibly drank pina-colada and a great book (haha!). Rose-tinted but wise? Perhaps we may be so lucky for those we wronged long ago to one day see or hear that our older and wiser words are indeed genuine and forgive us. That would of course ne a cherry on the top – as our internal wellbeing is the main prize.

Anyway these were a few thoughts of my ideas on journeys to better places.

See ya on the next update post!

Anton Martin Smith

On the night of April 28 2026, NZ.

“Soulful Self Expression Or The Existential Ramblings Of A Lonely Kiwi Man? – Part 2” (A Blog Post).

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by Anton Martin Smith antonmartinsmithwrites@gmail.com

Part 2 (If you haven’t read Part, 1 click link below):

https://antonmartinsmith.com/2026/01/17/soulful-self-expression-or-the-existential-ramblings-of-a-lonely-kiwi-man-a-blog-post/ )

……….

Back to things ‘New Zealand’. Of course there is a new different form of isolation – of ‘small town New Zealand’, being over thirty, and being unmarried, single and over forty, over 50, over 60 etc. Yes, I admit the ‘peacefulness of New Zealand’ is written into the fabric of this place. I don’t deny that. It’s an amazing thing in itself. But the added social isolation is a construction of the people who came here and the people still here now. The social isolation situation is constructed actively that have been here (i.e. After an arduous three month journey landed and dis-embarked off that boat out of Britain & then settled).

The ‘isolation culture’ has been managed and reproduced to the next generation since NZ became a colonial outpost circa Eighteen-Thirty. My current favourite theory as to why isolation is so entrenched here is that we never got over the wild chaotic pioneering beginnings of things. When there was too much hard work ahead of us to build literally everthing; almost no ‘civilizing’ females here only en-roughened violent and bad tempered men; Law and order was patchy to non existent at best. In those conditions in colonial NZ, it was wise to not trust anyone, given anyone you randomly met was probably some rogue drunk and violent male, most probably a cast-off from eighteenth-century Dickensian London, quite ready to rob, beat or maybe even kill you. The entrenched isolation is perhaps proof it’s all too early in ‘cultural-time’ to expect otherwise.

The theory is surely half right – how could it not be? after all – ‘facts are facts’ as they say. Sadly, I also think we as New Zealanders don’t know ourselves well enough to be able to fight the unnecessary ongoing culture of isolating patterns of behavior. It’s almost as if after saying ‘no we are not British we are now New Zealanders’ we have embraced a void – we have something we are not (British) don’t have something we are. Of course anyone with brains knows it is folly to pretend we ex colonials are not still ethno-culturally British/European – even though the white liberals love to pretend they can.

But I believe agency exists, at least in part (this is a big topic in Philosophy). In NZ People allow themselves to be too reticent, too co-dependent with their spouses, too suspicious of ‘others’, never backing themselves to get out of their rut, always worried what people will think of them of they dare put their head above the pulpit. That is why despite the ever-piling-up evidence (e.g. poor mental health) to the contrary, we still pretend ‘everything is ok’ and that we are just people who like to “chill out”. I believe ‘Chilling out’ to much has killed more people than all the guns, at least in terms of a very real ‘mental death’ – for just look around – you can be ‘walking dead’ with ‘the lights on with no one home, long before physical death.

I can only hope this self-deception in NZ can end one day (and also everywhere else). I mean if what I say is not true, then why is our social society and economy so full of cavernous fractures? For a people who are happily ‘chilling out’ there seem to be hell of a lot of mental meltdowns, early deaths, murders, assaults, poverty, homelessness, depression etc.

I am like any adult. Sometimes I wonder whether I am ‘really happy’ or ‘really sad’, or somewhere in between the extremes – just ‘sad’ or ‘sad-ish’ or ‘happy’ or ‘partially happy’ etc etc. But now with age and experience I realise that’s a ‘silly modern question’. No one asked that kind of question until about one hundred years ago. When the medico-psych industry realized if they could male everyone think they were sick because they weren’t ‘skip through the tulips happy’; when the advertisers realized it was better to make people think they were sad in order to sell the (faux) ‘materialistic’ solution – a new fridge, radio, house, table etc. A great scam – you could fleece everyone. So since we can agree ‘true happiness’ is a modern fraud then the real question is one of contentedness.

Under that theory we should be asking ourselves ‘are we content?’. To be reasonably content would mean we are conventionally ‘happy’. I guess I roughly have that to a degree nowadays. But I also have a nagging feeling that I’m supposed to actually be living some other life, in some other location, making people go ‘wow that’s cool what you just did – tell me more’. I wonder if thoughts like this are a ‘remnant hangover’ from the NZ brand of socio-cultural ‘bad-programming’ I’ve been subjected to over my lifespan as a resident New Zealander (?).

Perhaps it is Edward Bernays’s fault. If you don’t know – Edward Bernays was marketing genius of around one hundred years ago. Bernays was the pioneering propaganda guru who realized you have to manufacture wants in peoples minds, not just wait for them to tell you they want something – and if you do that trick you can’t get ridiculously wealthy and influential. With Bernays era it is the programming of ‘you must be unhappy so buy this flash car you can’t afford’. That crap has immersed us thanks to modern tech where media is blaring at you everywhere, and it’s now in our pockets.

Or as Karl Pilkington said without knowing any of that theoretical stuff at all – “everyone has a ‘worry hole’ that has to be filled” (I paraphrase). It aligns with the manufactured wants Bernays thesis. For it doesn’t matter how rich or poor you are – the ‘worry hole’ is there & must always be filled by things you cant ever get to. The Pilkington ‘worry hole’ is proof the Bernays system has truly worked on everyone. The fact you feel empty for no reason is proof the ‘Bernaysian’ brainwashing has worked and is still working on a deep psychological-societal level.

It has been proved that Multi-Millionaires and even Billionaires do worry a lot (a hell of a lot), despite their big material comforts. It is more than just ‘Bernaysian programming’ (the maxim of ‘one variable can’t ever explain everything’ is true). Over and above what has happened in the last couple of hundred years, we do seem hardwired to worry. The evolutionists say that it made far more sense to jump first and think later, least a sabre tooth tiger eat you while you were thinking whether to jump or not. This is also very true. The logic is good. Darwin and later (his promoter) Herbert Spenser had a good point there.

Anyway, thoughts of wellbeing are very interesting. Perhaps if my parents had not been divorced & I had grown up like ‘The Waltons’ (for those under 40 that was a cheesy 1950s falsely perfect American TV family) and not grown up in a recession ravaged small NZ town in the Nineteen-Nineties.

I’m just talking out loud here, being less intellectual for a moment. Wondering about your own ‘Wellbeing’ is a bit like getting into Ufology – no matter how many Alien/UFO podcasts you watch – you’ll never know more than you started, you will never know if ‘they walk among us’ or if Roswell was true, if their really are Aliens seeded through the Universe. Perhaps that’s why no one in the old days even thought too much of ‘Wellbeing, Self-Help & Happiness’. They just worked, got married, had kids and some were (born?) lucky enough to earn more than their neighbor who wore rags for clothes.

Anyway these are all nice philosophical musings. And perhaps I am just indulging in a educated-middleclass traditional hobby – doing what ‘the chattering classes’ do. I don’t really have the answer. I guess – practically speaking – it is best to worry about the day one day at a time. Someone born long ago with long hair and a robe said that a very long time ago in Roman held Israel. It’s hard to argue with the Christian maxim that each day has enough worries of it’s own.

On that measure, I had a good day today, and a good week. After all I did get a lot of real things done in the physical world (which is a bit of a hang out of mine these days). Maybe the best maxim really is ‘if in doubt don’t overthink more than what is in front of you’ – which is really just the Stoic (see Marcus Aurelius et al) version of the Christian maxim. Maybe if you do that maybe not much will go really bad.

The German Philosopher Schopenhauer (channeling the Stoics?) thought ‘happiness’ was stupid and contentedness was all you could have, and that came from the absence of bad outcomes, i.e. a negatively defined thing. He’s got a good point I think – though it is also worth mentioning that History has I think correctly adjudged the German Philosophers as being far to depressive.

I must say I feel much better now for writing this – for expressing myself as a unique individual. Not being a copy-cat. Writing helps. Why? Because have expressed myself as an individual. My soul likes it. And now that I travel down this fork in the road instead of the copy-cat other fork, I do get to do that a lot. That is a very real form of wealth. Maybe I’m secretly content. But will I allow myself to admit that? I am not so sure – it might not be a profitable use of my time & resources – according to a Bernaysian propagandist at least.

Perhaps these are all just the idle ramblings of a lonely kiwi middle aged man. And there’s nothing wrong with that. Where would we be without ramblings? I’ll take a side of ramblings with my main of lukewarm discontent any day of the week, all washed down with a mighty ice cold beer of course. Yes, for now we the plebs are still allowed beer. As the 80’s Batman of the DC comics would say at the end of the comic – this city is safe….but for how long…

‘Happy’ (content?) Saturday folks !

Anton M Smith

17 (& updated on the 18th) Jan 2026 (+ updated on Feb 10)