English speech

What is the first thing that comes to mind when we have to answer a very
fundamental question – ‘What do we want?’. And not in terms of short term
satisfactions… but our life-long aim. What gives us the power to get out of the
bed on a Monday morning, and go to work; slave away through tasks we would
rather not be doing at all, stay away from tempting break times, rubbing ourselves
down to the bone… what do we want from it? For many of us, the answer to that
would be something as simple as the question itself. We want to be happy.

Happiness is something that all of humanity has been obsessed with from the
beginning. But here is where the real question comes in… did we manage to get
it? Are we happier than we were before?…are we happier than our forefathers?
If we look at it from an external perspective, it does seem so… we have
technology that our ancestors could only have dreamt of; we have comforts and
pleasures that would have been exquisite luxuries in their time; the effort we have
to put in in our entire lives would be roughly equivalent to a single day’s work
for them… indeed, from the outside, it looks like we have all the happiness and
contentment we could ever wish for.

But going deeper, we see quite a different reality. Office goers break their backs
in cramped cubicles, day after day. Children lose all traits of childish fun, as they
are slowly crushed by ever-growing peer pressure and oppression at the hands of
the education system. Of course, people turn to drugs and alcohol! And no wonder
suicide rates are at an all-time high! And speaking of the ‘less than legal’… crime
rates have shot up so rapidly, that the only thing growing faster is our ever-
increasing, unsustainable population, on this (not – so – green – now) planet,
which we, in our greed-fueled frenzy, are destroying beyond repair. And the only
thing we are going to gain from it is even more stress to add to our pre-existing,
ungodly amounts of worries and tensions.

Now compare this to our predecessors. They lived in conditions we may not even
be able to imagine today, but they were content. They had liberties and simplicity
in their lives. The children may have played on the streets, but they didn’t carry
the burden of study. Education was a process to learn, and work was something
to enhance one’s character and skills. Money used to be secondary, and humans
were not nearly as negative as we are today.

So indeed, we have to ask ourselves “Are we really happier than our forefathers?”