Tired of being Good? Choose Bad or Better or Both

Life has an uncanny way of painting your days with bright yellow out of nowhere and then suddenly washing it off with cold blue as well. But it is more contextual to say that people around you have that ability rather than life per se. Playing a worldly human being in this uncoordinated colour game is an enormous burden sometimes. You find yourself in whirlpools of murky emotions, tornadoes of pregnant egos and rifts of the heart and mind. This ability to experience and undergo complex and marvellous neuron activity is overwhelming to say the least. The pressure of being a human being really gets to you.

Being under the pump, I find the option of becoming animal like very tempting. No complex mental and emotional hassles. Survival is the only aim. No worries of tolerance, trust, expectations, moral high grounds, heart break, and all the strings attached with the over active amygdala and hypothalamus of the human brain.  Living only primal and basal instincts could be a relief. I clearly remember, as an offended teenager I often wanted to be a bird and fly away, I even thought of becoming a blade of grass or a chair who doesn’t feel a thing. Just exists. Simplistic and sorted. However, it never happened. And so here I am, two decades hence, and I still wish to be a straw of grass at times. Everybody wishes so at some moments.

Co-existence as emotionally and mentally stimulant species is tremendously challenging. Some days it totally exhausts you to be good. You know how it works, because we have intellect and a sense of right and wrong, we usually try to choose the higher response, also a response which pleases others, which does not exacerbate the chasms, which contains the situation from going bad to worse and so on. Then one day you don’t have the energy to exert or put in any effort for anybody’s sake. You are done being good. For that day you want others to please you, to take care of you and show with the slightest gesture that you matter. You almost revel in being bad, not exactly nasty, more like not giving a heck about what others think. You have spared them enough thought, benefit and chance. It might be important to put yourself first now. It’s satisfying to lash out, growl with invectives and then probably even slump down with tears. It is healthy to be bad sometimes.

But being bad is a temporary and only half a solution; it gratifies but doesn’t quieten the endless chatter in the mind. And becoming a bird or grass in not even an option. So the only way out would be to step up from being good or bad. You need to be better at your game, more stoic than saintly. Now being better is really about dealing with yourself rather than people in the most offensive and frustrating situations. Here, the higher response comes effortlessly and naturally to you, letting go of the ego doesn’t scrunch you, you can liberate yourself from others hurts, and most importantly you learn to block generating or radiating any negativity towards others even those who pricked your heart in any way. But like all skills, it needs practice. Immense meditative practice.

At the core, as good, bad or better individuals we just want to be happy, but that kind of happy which is not very fickle or overly dependent on external stimuli including people.  Having said that, the very popular and longest study on human happiness published by the Harvard Institute, unequivocally and unambiguously states that people with long and healthy relationships are undeniably happier irrespective of everything else. Period.

People make you happy is the most straightforward inference of it. And you do pretty well as mere humans when wrapped in care, nourished with love, enveloped in joy and drowned in laughter with them. However, when tossed with indifference, broken down with hurt, lost in emotional shambles, cast down with disapproval and fatigued with mental disquiet, you need to step up the game. 

We can’t be birds or grass, and I genuinely resent that, so the only bet to deal with our lovely chaos is shuttling between good, bad and better. It needs effort but I guess it’s worth the trouble. I live by one ideal that life is too short and unpredictable to spend with grudged relationships.  It is so difficult to be with people but it is not easy to be without them. What matters is to tell them that they matter when they do whether you choose to play good, bad or better.