What all humans share in common is an inborn drive to survive.
We are content when we meet the basic needs of food and shelter.
However, for reasons unique to humans, basic survival is not sufficient to carry the day.
We also act in our self-interest.
We realize that the best way to advance our self-interest is to create goals.
Upon accomplishing a goal, we experience a higher order of contentment. We achieve the sensation of happiness.
However, happiness is temporary. We are not continuously happy, we have only temporary happiness.
After the glow of happiness wears off, boredom sets in. Boredom is the monster waiting down the hall after happiness is experienced.
One either stays bored or seeks to establish new goals. But happiness has the equivalent of a half-life, as one continues to achieve goals.
In rare cases, individuals transcend goal setting by experiencing beauty through the arts, or a mystical moment of spiritual enlightenment.
Lamentably, this ecstasy is not permanent. Where then does one go after this to realize a more lasting contentment?
Some call it asceticism. I choose to call it: detaching yourself from the sticky world. Or leaving your ego at the door.
For me, as I expand my thinking outward to include more and more phenomena in space and time, I realize I am less than a random smudge in the scope of immensity. Why spend time then worrying and fretting over things that do not matter?
If a mathematician were to count everything in the universe, and everything in other universes, I would be so small an entity that math would not be able to represent me. It would literally be as if I had never existed. If that is the case, why worry about anything? Chill out. That’s what I’m doing.