What if the best way to achieve happiness was to let us be 'unhappy' once and for all?

We live in the age of happiness... false.

, although we are not very clear about what makes us really happy, and

just as, according to what they say, happened to the bullfighter Luis Miguel Dominguín after enjoying a night of passion with the goddess Ava Gardner.

And, in this incessant search for happiness (?), what usually happens to us is that, unfortunately, we stop valuing everything we have in its proper measure,

, slaves to an unattainable, frustrating and very tiresome generated by the consumer society.

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Javier Salinas Gabiña reflects on this absurd schizophrenia to which we are condemned by the pressure to appear, have and show that we are always 'super good'.

This pursuit of happiness has turned into a nightmare.

Don't you think that this urgent need to be happy (and show it) is making us much unhappier than our parents and grandparents, who probably had more reasons not to be? Happiness has become just another consumer item.

In the consumer society, everything becomes like that.

People, in dating applications, also become an object to be consumed that the consumer selects from the finger that slides the screen.

Everything has to be consumed, bought for others to earn money.

The search for happiness must also be purchased based on acquiring people, objects, experiences. Curious as it may seem, this search for happiness generates tensions that fill us with misery.

You are right with what you say with previous generations, since,

the greater the number of wishes, the less happiness.

And nowadays all kinds of desires are projected on us;

they are generated in us by the consumer society.

Even the desire to be happy acquiring or improving something we have.

We already have happiness as standard.

It is not necessary to add more desires, rather to remove them. In your book you assure us that we are slaves to a system that does not allow us to be (moderately) happy... The system wants you to be moderately happy and moderately unhappy.

He doesn't want you to have no money, but he doesn't want you to have a lot either.

He always wants us lacking something to keep us anxious thinking that if we acquire something we will be fully.

But that race never ends, it is like the carrot that we never reach and that keeps us going by working tirelessly.

Wanting things is not bad,

the problem is when we cannot say: enough for me.

Happiness has no gradation, it is a state of being. How much is unhappiness and how much is dissatisfaction for not meeting too high expectations: having a good job, earning money, having a perfect family, being attractive...?

Isn't it impossible to have all these glasses full?

Do we have to believe those who show, especially on networks, that they have them? On networks, there always seem to be people who only live on the beach.

Who drives Maseratis or vacations in the Maldives incessantly.

It's a little weird, both for the people who do that, because it seems like they'll only be happy if they're validated by people they don't even know, and for those who look at other lives, who wish they could live other people's lives.

It seems that no one is happy with what he got.

It is worth remembering that there are other types of values ​​that are deeper than money, even if it is only to balance the balance a little.

Money is not bad, but it is not everything. They constantly invite us to 'look inside' to find ourselves.

Don't you think that part of our constant unhappiness is also part of spending our lives looking at our navel? Well, there are those who invite you to look at your navel and there are those who invite you to take a look inside yourself to see how that thing is called soul or whatever we want to call it.

They are different things.

In the world of spirituality, or in that of personal growth, there is everything, as in all fields.

I remember when Jesus throws the moneychangers out of the temple... With this book, it is true that I am criticizing that vision of wanting to be happy as if that were something to fight for.

Rather, what I propose is that you try being unhappy to see if it goes better for you.

And if it doesn't work, then maybe we can stop looking for what we all have: the ability to enjoy the beauty of life and the ability to bear its burdens. Live in the moment, life is streaks, take advantage of this being just... All these set phrases, do they help or sink our misery? Well, as you say, they are set phrases, not very subtle.

And every situation and every person is different.

The same key does not open all hearts or help to let out all sorrows.

These phrases are a bit of a 'low cost' solution, or like 'fast food' food, they may help you pass the hunger of the moment, but in the long run they will not help you.

I think that the important thing is not the phrases that others say to you,

but the phrases or the decisions that one makes for oneself: What am I going to do?

Am I going to hate or am I going to love?

Am I going to go first or give way? In your book you also talk about comparisons.

Why do we always think that the rest are happier than us and have everything? Because, by not relating to ourselves for fear of the problems or pain that we may find within us, we do nothing but look at others .

And, of course, their lives seem more real to us than ours, which seem like a kind of nightmare to us.

Before it was clear, with gossip magazines, that when you looked at them you agreed to look at the lives of others for a while, but you knew they had posed for it, you didn't consider it very real.

The difference is that now, looking at a social network and seeing the lives of others,

we forget that they are posing for us and we end up not distinguishing that from reality. What can we really do to escape from this system that, as you say, enslaves us? First, understand that this is how it is, that the system He has an agenda for us to be distracted.

It is a global version of the Roman "bread and circuses".

We have a little money and tons of circus.

What do we want to do?

continue like this?

Swallowing a world that keeps us in a state of anxiety and lack?

As we said before, it is not about looking at the navel, which is Ego and makes us unhappy, but about cultivating the Being, which makes us see that you and I are brothers.

that the system has an agenda so that we are distracted.

It is a global version of the Roman "bread and circuses".

We have a little money and tons of circus.

What do we want to do?

continue like this?

Swallowing a world that keeps us in a state of anxiety and lack?

As we said before, it is not about looking at the navel, which is Ego and makes us unhappy, but about cultivating the Being, which makes us see that you and I are brothers.

that the system has an agenda so that we are distracted.

It is a global version of the Roman "bread and circuses".

We have a little money and tons of circus.

What do we want to do?

continue like this?

Swallowing a world that keeps us in a state of anxiety and lack?

As we said before, it is not about looking at the navel, which is Ego and makes us unhappy, but about cultivating the Being, which makes us see that you and I are brothers.

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