Dumb — The Path to Happiness
“I think I’m dumb… Or maybe just happy, think I’m just happy.” — Kurt Cobain
In the pursuit of happiness, we often lose our ability to feel it. There is a Buddha quote: “There is no way to Happiness, Happiness is the way.”
Kurt Cobain had so much going on inside, including his deep wish was to be “simple”, as he expressed in this interview. Kurt’s depths have often been spoken about, and in this interview he alludes to what could possibly make him happy — a simple life. He is right. But he also expresses how he’s “too sensitive” and “complicated” to live simply, be at peace, be happy.
He refers to this same elusive happiness in his song Dumb: “I think I’m dumb, or maybe just happy.” Whilst the song hints at finding happiness in substances, it also notes the consequences: “Then we’ll come down, and have a hangover.”
In Dumb, Kurt explores that fine line between being “dumb” and being happy, and even possibly confusing the two. In a way this resonates with the research done on being in ‘flow state’ — where we become fully immersed in an activity, losing track of time and oblivious of all other distractions. We essentially enter a ‘no-mind’ (dumb?) state. Being in this state, in the zone, makes you feel energised, where being and doing become one and we experience a connection with everything at once, bringing a deep sense of enjoyment — happiness!
Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, in his life’s work, concludes that being in flow is essentially the key to happiness. And what are his identified conditions to attain flow? Having 1) clear goals, 2) a balance between skills and task challenge and 3) getting immediate feedback on whether you’re attaining those goals.
If we get back to Kurt’s search for happiness through substances, we might see how some of these “flow conditions” might be met through getting drunk or high. There is 1) the unspoken goal to feel happy; 2) everything becomes slightly more challenging, requiring more focus; and then 3) of coarse the immediate feedback: “I feel good!”. Goal accomplished! And yes, time does disappear and we become oblivious to our surroundings. The only problem with this scenario is that the balance cannot be maintained. Eventually it takes more of whatever substance we are using to attain the same happiness ‘goal’. Which, as Buddha so rightly pointed out, should not be our goal in the first place.
A universal principle of our planet that we can’t get away from is that everything is striving for balance. So in this scenario, with an extreme up, “then we’ll come down…” With increased substances and more extreme ups, those downs becoming increasingly extreme until… how can we pick ourselves up again? You see the spiral?
Many of us are walking around “dumb”, or numb, confusing it for happiness. Deep inside, there is an awareness of not quite attaining this elusive goal of happiness, but if we keep ‘dumbing it down’, it can stay deep inside and we can keep wearing our mask: “I’m not like them, but I can pretend”.
I think when we realise this is what we’re doing — striving for something that we can only find by ‘being’ — we can stop looking for the ”way to happiness” and start being in the present moment of sober flow states where we experience pockets of time where ”happiness is the way” and allow those pockets to grow organically until “I think I’m just happy”.
