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What if humans aren't meant to be happy? What if our cosmic currency is worry and frustration? It's what generates the most energy to fuel the dark matter. Happiness seems too ephemeral a thing to place so much emphasis on; like orgasms. We spend inordinate amounts of time and energy chasing it, as if it is owed to us, only to feel dissatisfied and wanting more.

Or what if the idea of happiness merely serves as a means of control? How fucking Foucauldian! Happiness' pursuit keeps us distracted, frustrated and angry, feeling always like something is missing. Then, capitalists come to capitalize off of this sentiment and sell us things we don't really need so that  we might try to build our contentment upon Noguchi coffee tables, Eames chairs and Aston Martins. When we're preoccupied with how shitty we feel we turn toward the tried and true cure of consumption, thereby incurring more work to pay off our debts, which in turn, leaves us with less time, which makes us unhappy and forces us back into the comforting arms of consumption. Rinse, repeat.

So what we find is that most of our lives are spent wanting and working, worrying, chasing our tails as we wrinkle, grow old and then die. Maybe it is in our nature to fret. Maybe we're little electron rich cells in vast universe-sized battery, feeling brief outbursts of happiness as we discharge, before hardship and tragedy recharge us.

Or what if we worry so that we don't take things for granted, so that we ascribe the proper appreciation to every thing we do? The bad-news media sells us fear so that we can be grateful we aren't in abject poverty, dying alone and in pieces in some remote war-torn country in the third world.

The more light-hearted among us possess a different kind of richness, a happy bliss unclaimed by tragedy or fear. But perhaps they take their contentment for granted, for they do not know true atrocity and therefore have nothing against which to compare their happiness. It is said that to appreciate the sweet you need to know the sour.

Then we must worry. Worry about the world you've made for your children so that you can hold your later years nearer. So you can try and reclaim some of that time you lost in the frivolity of your youth by maintaining a heightened state of fear and foreboding now. Maybe that's why time moves so much faster as we get older; because we're living more fully, worrying about every potential catastrophe, each petty word, every inconsequential triviality, so that we might feel something before we die.

To get our money's worth.