Western society and happiness (serious stuff)

[Memento]

I haven't read all the replies yet nor do I have time for a big reply atm, find I found some great answers Also, you guys have changed my mind about creativity. It was an idea that I had, and admittedly, creativity doesn't necessarily enforces happiness. But in the end this topic is mainly meant to make you guys think the subject through and I'm glad to see some discussion here!


I will reply to this post from MangaD just because I need to clearify what I meant.

Beside ignoring the fact that we often can't do what we want to do, we are continuously being corrected by parents and teachers. While sometimes correction can be good, it very often isn't. Very often, things that actually aren't wrong, are being corrected, and therefore it kills people's creativity.

I disagree with this severely. Children are too ignorant and naive to know what is best for themselves. "I want to be an astronaut", "I want to be a princess". Parents and teachers know better. What children want changes all the time as they acquire new knowledge. Correction is not bad, on the contrary, it is necessary. I also don't see how this is linked to creativity, and how creativity is linked to happiness. Children are often happy (depends) because they are unaware of the negativity in the world and ignore the meaning of their life. Adults are often unhappy for a variety of reasons: sense of purpose, loneliness, negativity, work, health, etc.

I completely agree that children need a lot of guidance and I'm not saying corrections are wrong in general. Children need to be corrected and they need rules, and they don't even need to understand why they have to follow the rules until a certain age. They just have to be guided into the right direction and when the time comes, they start thinking for themselves and make their own considerate choices (hopefully). But correcting isn't always the way to go.

It goes wrong when parents correct the wrong things, simply because it doesn't fit into their way of thinking. For example: if a kid wants to play a game he himself invented, but is told to go play football like the other kids do because the other thing is 'weird'. This is a rather 'big' example, but it's happening all the time and I believe parents often don't take the right things into consideration when raising a child. It's like when a child is like 0-5 years old, everybody loves it when he finds out new stuff by being creative. After some time, kids start using their creativity in a more adult way, they start thinking things through, which leads to both good a bad things. The bad things need correction (for example, basically all kids will try to manipulate their parents, which requires creative thinking as well). And the good things they use their creativity for, should be encouraged. So instead of just telling a kid to stop drawing, give the kid some structure so he can do both drawing and the things that the parents want them to do. Or when a kids comes to a conclusion by thinking in a certain way, try to really understand how he's thinking, before correcting it, because it may not be a thinking error but a creative way to look at things. If it's still total bogus in the end, it then needs some correction of course