The Happiness We Chase
I was an immigrant. My parents moved me and my brother to Florida from Colombia when we were four years old. I remember hiding in the janitor closet of an office building in downtown Palm Beach colouring inside of tabloid magazines because they couldn’t afford a babysitter while they worked their low paying under the table job. Their goal in migrating us to America was, like most of the Latino immigrants in the United States, to chase the elusive American dream. My parents wanted to live a lifestyle they didn’t see possible in Colombia. They wanted us to grow up happy and mature into prosperous adults. The circumstances in Colombia at the time made it nearly impossible for them to raise their children the way they wanted. Amidst the violence of the 90’s drug wars of Colombia and a scarcity of job opportunity they decided to venture outside of their world into a foreign land full of the promise of prosperity.
My parents travelled to an unknown place they’ve seen only within the movie screens of Hollywood. They did it for themselves as much as for us. They knew that they had to do everything to reach the happiness they’ve nibbled on in their dreams. Their understanding of happiness came primarily from a socially conditioned idea of prestige within Colombian society. The concept of happiness and success were almost purely monetary for them along with the prestige it brings. Both my mother and father come from a middle to higher class family of Colombia and all the prestige of maintaining that status within this ‘caste structure’ is expensive.
Growing up in Colombia, their experience of misery came from what they saw every day in the streets. Kids begging for money, homeless drug addicts screaming nonsense at the world and all of the millions of people hustling at stop lights selling whatever they could get their hands on. In their eyes, these unfortunate people humbled every day by circumstance were not happy. Their definition of happiness came from their perceived experience of misery itself.
I can’t remember how I learned English because I was so young, I have a Canadian accent now because as appealing as the America dream was it wasn’t meant for us.
My teen years were spent in Canada where we became Canadians. Thanks to the sacrifice of my parents and their will to persevere through the tedious and laborious task of the American and Canadian immigration systems, I was now in a position to define happiness differently. Prestige matters in Canada and money brings one affluence here too but the difference I learned is that one can live without it. In Canada, I grew up experiencing happiness in many different ways but never truly experiencing the perceived misery of poverty my parents saw in the streets of Colombia. Growing up in Canada gave me a particular lens in how to see the world differently from my parents. I was now privileged enough to have the right to define happiness without the variable of money. My experiences allowed me to exclude the idea of the pursuit of happiness being in itself the pursuit of wealth. In Canada I now had the benefit of being able to be fully authentic to myself.
My own experience of misery in Canada came within the gloomy eyes of people dragging themselves to their 9–5 office jobs. I saw people happy only when Friday came around because they became free from the boxes they call cubicles. I saw people growing old and regretting their life choices because they settled and became complacent. I saw people who never truly understood what made them happy but were satisfied in how society told them they ought to live, pay taxes and die. I would ask people who had graduated before me if they were happy with their career choice and too many times I’d get the same somber response
“It pays the bills.”
I don’t believe a life of complacency where happiness is defined by the expectations of society following and them rigidly ignoring our own aptitudes to life will bring us the joy we crave after. Happiness is subjective. To understand what makes us laugh we ought to also understand what makes us cry.
I went backpacking through South East Asia for several months after graduating university to, as the cliché goes, find myself. I wanted to experience the world a different way, I wanted to experience the good things as much as the bad things, I wanted to understand myself in a way the confined books and lectures five years of university didn't and couldn't show me. Like my parents, I dove straight into my fears leaving behind the comfort of the familiar and the known into a plethora of uncertainty. Chasing the same happiness in different things, I didn’t care for the affluence of wealth. My experiences of life showed me that pursuing wealth could in itself be a miserable task. It showed me that pursuing wealth will not, as society tells us, invariably bring us happiness. I left Canada, craving to understand myself enough to know what purpose will be worth the inevitable pains of life.
I found that happiness comes from the way we perceive the world around us. Happiness is a complex mixture of emotions, experiences and our own perception on the good and the bad according to our socially conditioned selves. I left Canada in search of an escape. I wanted more than just to find myself because in the continuing process of understanding who I am, what I like and who I want to become in this world I found that I wanted the same thing my parents wanted when they left it all and moved to Canada, happiness.
