(Not) Choosing Happiness
I'd been asking to myself "What will I get?", "Would this be beneficial?", "Will I feel happy if I do this?".
Apparently, that's exactly what you seek and ask if you don't want to be happy. For how rigorously we're often seeking happiness, and for how ancient the pursuit has been, we should've already gotten there. On the contrary, the faster you run toward it, the farther it seems to be. Life seems eternally unsatisfied.
The solution seems to be to accept it. That you won't be happy, and that you will not get anything out of life. Because everything that can be planned, predicted, is not happiness. But the state you'll be in when you're not worried, you may choose to call it happiness.
That's likely what it is famously said "surrender yourself". Because apparently, there isn't any other option. You are barred from choosing to be happy.
We're taught to be logical, to seek out the positive path ahead, to measure what we will get out of something and then move along that path. Turns out life works the other way around. It is when you stop bothering with consequences, away from what the popularly accepted model of life is, that you actually do become happy, for no reason.
If it has a reason, it is not happiness.
Freedom from the pursuit of happiness is happiness. It doesn't make sense, which is why logic doesn't help. But evidence can. Check your experience.
A post ago I mentioned fear. I said fear is what we are always afraid of and that it never arrives. And now we have happiness, which we're pursuing and therefore it never arrives.