I woke up in the middle of the night thinking about some things in life I was happy about, but soon started to question if I should be happy about these things or not. And then I fully realized that everything in life, is totally arbitrary.
Of course, this is not to say that bad things aren’t bad, but in truth, if we look at them objectively, and not with our own biased opinion – we might see that really the definition of it being bad, was one that we made up. Even if everyone in the world might agree with our conclusion, it just means that we all think the same, not that it is actually bad.
Now this thought is a little troublesome, since if we extend it we can come to the conclusion that there is no such thing as truly bad or good. What about a horrid event like the holocaust? That would clearly fit into the bad camp in anyone’s moral book. However, it seems clear that there were people at the time, that didn’t seem to have much of a problem with it – otherwise it wouldn’t have happened.
I think that this is an important point, since to some extent, it helps us understand that in order for something to be bad or good, it has to be dictated by a “higher authority”, aka God. Without this, things just are, what they are. Of course, in this case, society gets to define what is good or bad, but as we well know, what is popular in one society (think Pederasty in ancient Greek society) will put you in jail for a long time in another society.
So let’s bring this back around to us. By moving our model of things that happen as good or bad, and just reflecting on the fact that they just are, we can better remain in a happy state of mind, since those things that we might think are bad, no longer have the same defining power over us.