Western society and happiness (serious stuff)

[A-Man]

Interesting thread. I didn't read everybody's response yet, but here is what I think (hopefully, it doesn't repeat what somebody else has said).

I don't come from the west but from a bit to the right of that. But I have been studying in the west for a couple of years now. It was particularly intriguing to me at the beginning when I would see things like a grandma nagging at her grandchild. Although I could not fully understand what was being said, the facial expressions and the general set up of the scene is undeniably similar to what I would see back home. It's a a bit funny too because you don't expect to see this before you actually visit. Although the atmosphere is often quite different, there's more in common to how children are raised than one thinks there is.

It is indeed true that parents/society push their children towards a certain direction of what they perceive is happiness. I would say that's perfectly natural. They generally have more experience, and they might think they have - after years of trial and error - attained the knowledge to a fool-proof method (or at least, one that gets close to that) of success and happiness. Of course, they would want to save their children the effort by pointing them straight to what they should do.

What I have come to realise though is that happiness is very different for everyone. Some people are happy being rich, even if that means they're hated. Some people are happy being popular, even if that means they're poor. Some people are happy being free, even if that means they're lonely. The levels to which each of the good qualities would be enough differs from one person to person too.

Examples can be seen in this thread. mfc sees spending time to

solve artificial puzzles (video games) when they could be tackling actual scientific problems

to be bad. But there are people who do it for a living. They entertain people by posting their videos playing on a video sharing platform, and they make money from it. They also get pretty popular and are very happy.

Regarding creativity, as bad as it can get with parents forcing their ways on their children, I would still feel the same way if someone was to try to force "creativity" on me. The word itself is meaningless because many people have different ideas of what is creative. I don't think it has much to do with identity, but rather on the contrary: I would say it has to do with how people perceive you. Trying to be creative means to try to make people perceive you as such, which contradicts "being yourself".