I'll never find happiness, or satisfaction, or fulfillment, or whatever it is that we spend our lives striving for. I'll never find warmth and security and love. Because none of these ideas exists. It can't be found. To be real, to be effectuated they require commitment to a degree that I'm incapable of. What makes people happy? Goals? Progress? Commonality of the human condition? Mutual tenderness, understanding, struggle?

People are never happy. Happiness is fleeting. Throughout our endeavors we catch glimpses of happiness and tidbits of reward, but never an absolute. Maybe there isn't an absolute. Maybe happiness is graded. Some people are consistently happier than others, which may seem true but I don't think is right. Happiness requires change. Anything, to be recognizable, requires change; it must be relative to something else otherwise it's not definable. To be happy requires recognition of happiness. The intensity of this recognition increases with the amount of unhappiness that one has experienced. No one can be consistently happy because he has nothing against which to gauge and cannot accurately recognize and appreciate his happiness. One can be happy only if he has been unhappy.

Therefore happiness does not exist in any permanently attainable form. It teases us with its warm light only to fade and slip through our fingers at the slightest grasp. It shouldn't be this way. Maybe though the static state that I live in, even though it's not happy, isn't unhappy. Maybe it's not unhappy at all. Maybe it's even a little bit happy--the sun is shining; the sky is blue; I'm not being audited.

But is a little bit happy enough? No. I'd rather sleep away my life than to live. The fulfillment of the simple pleasures isn't enough. I want something more. I yearn for the ecstacy of an ideal, an absolute, a perfection, which I know can never be attained because of the nature of the human condition.

Isn't this knowledge alone, that I can never achieve what I desperately yearn for, enough to make me despondent? It should, but I think years of this knowledge have made me callous. The shortcomings of my existence, my inability, and everyone else's, to achieve anything truly worthwhile only contributes to my melancholy. And I think to myself, why should I live for my unhappiness, forever tormented by the ideal of happiness that hides behind the mirror? And I answer to myself, because I don't care enough to end it. Maybe the idealist in me won't die. Maybe I still believe that someday I'll find the door into the mirror, to the unattainable.

I think having a kindred spirit struggling against the same storm that I am would be enough. Companionship and unity and connection would be enough. I could be content then, I tell myself, probably lying. But could I ever find a  kindred spirit? Would I be strong enough to ever elicit the true nature of my compatriot? Would I be strong enough to maintain my struggle against the storm? When would despair, and frustration, and futility break my soul with their incessant murmurings? I don't think I will ever attain any satisfying state, but I continue to exist nonetheless, resigned to the disheartening truth that reality bars my path, binds me forever to the state that I experience presently.