Happiness and the Asymptotic Relationship

I, for one, hate weekdays. I hate weekdays because I can't play any video games on weekdays. This restriction isn't even the result of parental pressure or decree, as such things typically are, neither is it because I don't actually have the time to play video games. In fact, this year I find myself with more time rather than less, even though I'm taking 6 AP/MSTC classes this year as opposed to the four I took last year.

No, the reason I can't play video games during weekdays is that I am entirely incapable of keeping time when I play video games, and before I know it the sun is rising again outside. This problem stems from the fact that when I play games like Deus Ex Human Revolution, games that allow a great amount of player choice and decision when it comes to how to tackle a level, I am driven by a compulsive need for perfection. Every point in a plan must be executed to perfection: no getting caught by guards, no falling from top of a building to the streets below, no falling to the streets below and getting caught by guards.

Let's try that again... but cleaner and quieter this time...

As one might imagine, perfectly executing a plan is very hard, if not close to impossible. There isn't just a possibility that something might go wrong, there is a certainty that something, anything, everything will go wrong. And when something does invariably go wrong, instead of trying to escape the sticky situation I've gotten myself into organically, I'm more inclined to turn back the clock by loading a saved file of my previous progress and redoing the entire segment until everything goes according to plan. Like this, the process of completing a single level can take about two hours. But I do it anyway, because I am driven by a compulsive need to execute everything perfectly, until i do, a small part of my mind nags me until I finally do get it right. The problem though is that that mistake still happened... I'm just pretending it didn't. It's easier to pull stuff like that when you can basically go back in time and erase your mistake like some digital demigod.

Quite recently, our AP English class was assigned to read "Gooseberries" by Anton Chekov. The story follows Ivan Ivanovich and his friend Burkin when they are caught by a storm and decide to stay at their friend Alehin's manor for the night. Ivan Ivanovich then tells the story of his brother Nikolai Ivanovitch, who decided after living a dreary life as a government employee to become a country gentleman with a big estate with gooseberry bushes on his property. Why gooseberries? Because... symbolism. Nikolai eventually gets his manor, though it's hardly his dream manor. A stream runs through it, through the water resembles coffee more than it does dihydrogen monoxide, and there are none of Nikolai's dream gooseberry bushes. It took him years of scrounging and hoarding every copeck and it even resulted in the emotional destruction of a rich widow Nikolai married but had no love for and possibly even her suicide to make this dream possible for Nikolai, and here he is with a farm that doesn't actually meet his vision of his dream manor. 

"But no matter!" Nikolai exclaims, "I'll plant gooseberry bushes myself!" And so he does, and later he invites Ivan Ivanovitch to see what he had built. Over dinner Nikolai has gooseberries from his own bushes brought to the table, and popping one in his mouth, declares how delicious they are.

The gooseberries are actually sour and unripe. And herein we come to the symbolism. When Nikolai declares how delicious these gooseberries are, when they are exactly the opposite, we come to a key observation by Chekov. Nikolai has to lie to himself that the berries are in fact delicious, for what was anything he had done worth if these berries were not what they had been in his perfect world? Just like it would have destroyed Gatsby's ideal world and fantasy to acknowledge the futility of his endeavor, it would have destroyed Nikolai's ideal world to acknowledge that in fact the gooseberries he so wanted to believe were delicious were, in reality, distasteful. The gooseberries symbolize Nikolai's efforts to hide the truth, to instead indulge in a lie that let him continue to believe that he lived in his ideal fantasy. The difference between me hiding my mistakes on a video game and Nikolai hiding away the truth from his own sight, though, is that I can erase my mistakes. Once I start up that saved game and start playing again that mistake practically never existed. It is vanished forever from the game's memory, and eventually it would pass from my memory as well. Nikolai can't erase reality though. He can't do away with the fact that his stream is an aesthetically unpleasing brown, or that the gooseberries he eats are sour. He would rather believe that the truth is congruous to his fantasy, that the gooseberries are sweet. 

Herein we come to happiness and the asymptotic relationship. Happiness is like a hyperbola, approaching what is called an asymptote. An asymptote is essentially a line that a graph of a function will come ever closer to but never touch. Like a hyperbola, we can come close to true happiness, but to do so necessitates forgetting about the ills in life. Approaching true happiness can only happen when we hide from our view the imperfections of the material world, choosing instead to focus on our ideal metaphysical reality.

The function f(x) = 1/x, where x equals the imperfections we are faced with or that we acknowledge, notice as x approaches 0 we come closer and closer to touching that asymptote (which in this case is the vertical axis), we come closer and closer to pure happiness. Can there ever be a situation in which we are entirely free of these imperfections?

Can we truly be entirely happy at any point in our lives? In an ideal world, in each and every one of every person's ideal worlds, every problem can be solved, and thus we can touch that asymptote of happiness. But the world we live in is far from an ideal world, and sometimes the gooseberries will be sour, and sometimes one will miss that crucial jump in a video game. Ultimately being happy requires us to push these things out of our sight, though that does little more than create a facade of perfection, and a fragile one at that.

At the end of "Gooseberries", Ivan Ivanovich's friend Alehin is disappointed with Ivan's story, feeling it had no bearing on his own life. Alehin is entirely indifferent to the idea that people around him suffer and that we, consciously or unconsciously, hide such truths from ourselves to remain contented. In doing so, Alehin himself engages in this process. Is he wrong in doing so? Perhaps not. While it is important to be vigilant in the struggle toward empathy, Alehin is simply doing what we as people do on almost a daily basis. We have to hide certain uncomfortable truths from ourselves or we would go mad over the weight they would have in our mind. For instance, we know people are starving in Africa, or being bombed to bits in Syria or even simply subsisting in a state of squalor right here in the United States of America. Yet our every waking thought is not toward such problems, we hide these truths from ourselves so we can at least maintain a facade of happiness. 

The world is a dark place, it can be a depressing place, and ultimately it can be necessary to ignore the imperfections in reality: the sour goose berries, the hapless guard in a game who looked in my direction at the wrong time, the problems of the world like war, starvation and disease. The necessity in doing this is a reminder, as always, that we chose the reality we live in, for better or for worse, and the gift of literature is to be able to see others as they see themselves, to quote John Green. By being able to communicate, by being able to synthesize all these worlds and grasp all these truths, we can understand, and thereby actually solve problems, instead of shoving them to the side.

The world may be a dark place, but by no means is it entirely hopeless. We may not be able to make x equal zero, but we can come pretty close. I think .00000000000000001 is a fair compromise. Until then though, I guess I will just have to wait till the weekend to play video games.