the view/throwing rocks at trees

the gist of the lyrics:

Your gun went off.
Well you shot off your mouth and look where it got you.
My mouth runs on too.

Shouts from both sides,
"Well we've got the land but they've got the view!"
Well now here's the clue.

Life it rents us.
And yeah I hope it put plenty on you.
Well I hope mine did too.

As life gets longer, awful feels softer.
Well it feels pretty soft to me.
And if it takes shit to make bliss,
then I feel pretty blissfully.

We are fixed right where we stand.

For every invention made how much time did we save?
We're not much farther than we were in the cave.

If life's not beautiful without the pain,
well I'd just rather never ever even see beauty again.
Well as life gets longer, awful feels softer.
And it feels pretty soft to me.

For every good deed done there is a crime committed.
We are fixed.
For every step ahead we could have just been seated.
We are fixed.

We are fixed.
We are fixed.
We are fixed right where we stand.


I was listening to this song while I was on a walk and some of the lyrics really struck me. It relates to a post that I have been brewing up in my mind for an awful long while and so this was the straw on the camel's back to get me to start writing it. I know a while back I wrote that the only thing keeping yourself from being what you want to be is yourself and if you want to you could easily bridge that gap. Also, that happiness is attainable if you so choose, you just need to tweak your definition of it. In my opinion, these are all true, but it is not like happiness is a point you reach and then stay there forever after. It is not something you can hold onto for very long or ever fully comprehend. And, to be honest, would happiness be all that it is worked up to be if you could so easily bask in it at your leisure once you reached that level? No, it would be taken for granted. People would still be searching for that next high, that bliss that is another step above where they already are. So then, if these last few statements are true, happiness is for the most part unattainable, save for momentary glimpses. The closest we can get to happiness is striving for it. To always be working towards it, changing yourself, inventing new contraptions to reach it. As long as we are constantly toiling and yearning, we are getting closer, and in a sense, already there. I know I have contradicted myself several times, but something as complex as happiness, I'm sure, folds onto itself repeatedly so that any mere mortals words of reason can only claw at the surface. Here is an excerpt from an essay I wrote about utopia for my science fiction class that is applicable:

"...Furthermore, it may not be possible for a true Utopia to exist. Not only does everyone have a different definition of Utopia, but living within an actual perfect, peaceful, constant world might even be considered Dystopian by some. It is not a state that can be reached and maintained by reforming some laws or rearranging our genes; even after these changes, a constant struggle would still be necessary. Attempting to reach Utopia is similar to Shevek's example of throwing a rock at a tree because “[i]t doesn't matter how far it's gone, there's always a place, only it's a time really, that's halfway between the last place it was and the tree” (29). As Shevek exclaims when on Urras: “[t]he means are the end” (296), and therefore, the closest we can actually get to Utopia is striving for it."