What if we injected everyone with Serotonin?

Being happy is described as the ultimate goal in life. We live life in the search of happiness as our end, thus many things that we do is with that prize in mind. What is often unrecognised is however, happiness is an emotion that is enticed with progress with growth and progress. Therefore the state of happiness would never be a goal in life but instead a correlating aspect of what we do and what we aspire to do.

As Grayling suggests “modern sense of contentment or satisfaction in its thin, modern sense of contentment or satisfaction, is not only a mistaken goal for life, but also a misleading one”. Happiness is often induced by the chemical, serotonin which is nicknamed as the happy chemical. Its ability to mediate satisfaction, happiness and optimism has often be used as a modern antidepressant drug with the purpose of increasing one’s levels of serotonin to decrease the states of depression in an individual. If happiness was the true prize in life, an easy method of achieving such a state could be to induce serotonin or a similar chemical in food and water as a means of creating happiness. Yet this method if proposed would be greatly frowned upon as such satisfaction and contentment would be seen as artificial, providing a false sense of happiness. This suggests that happiness itself is not by itself the goal of life, instead its value comes from the other things we do.

Therefore alone, happiness has no meaning without a basis of growth and improvement. It can be said that our ultimate source of happiness is through contribution, having our own value to society and adding to its future prospects. With that our happiness extents further than any chemical can induce. Therefore knowledge and progress are the primary while causing happiness as an side effect; with those being the goal, a state of satisfaction will be induced as a sign of the goals being achieved.

It is only when individuals stop striving and become stagnant, the feeling of happiness withdrawals itself. Many of which encounter hardships fall for this struggle where progression has become difficult thus happiness has seemingly abandoned them. What is not realised is that after such an obstacle, the happiness which follows may be infinite.

With serotonin being the happy chemical, a cheap way of inducing happiness would be to activate its receptors and indulge the brain in as much happiness as possible. The easiest way to do so is through the use of methamphetamines. After the first taste of the high and seemingly infinite amount of happiness induced within the few hours of the drug’s half-life, it becomes addictive. Although it in itself is not an easily affordable drug; compared to the difficulty and the struggles (not to mention the heartbreaking pitfalls) of striving for ambitions and attaining goals, it becomes a cheap purchase for happiness.

That soon becomes the trap of substituting the motivation for knowledge and progress for its easier to obtain alternatives. “Why would one try so hard and have their dreams crushed by their own endeavours to simply have a taste of happiness”, when happiness can be found right here? That was the mindset methamphetamines tricks one into having, seducing one into being its slave, cheating on the goals and ambitions they once had. Paradise was promised to be found in a land of euphoria and ecstasy.

But what would the value of struggle be without difficulty along the way? What value would it have if it was easy? If whatever the dream was, was so easy to attain, then everyone would be doing it. That was then the wakeup call. Happiness did not lie in the stimulate of serotonin as if it did, the whole population would simply subdue to its use and live happily ever after. Methamphetamine offered a paradise, but a paradise of falsity that cloaked the true desires for improvement and growth. Methamphetamine was no longer the saviour but the deceiver, the reaper of life’s more important values.

To those who are still under the influence, it appears as an act by a madman to abandon paradise for the embodiment of hell; reality. However, it is only in experiencing the struggle in life that happiness holds its true values. As happiness is a passive emotion induced by the progression and achievement of goals, these are the true states of satisfaction and contentment that cannot be substituted.

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