I AM HAPPY

I am HAPPY!

How many of you can say the same?

How many people can say to be completely, uncontrovertibly, happy all the damn time?

I can.

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I mean... Maybe there is a thing. But who doesn’t have at least one thing, am I right?

I mean, it’s basically nothing, something completely forgettable and of no importance whatsoever.

Actually, now that I think of it, you can forget I said anything.

I AM 100% HAPPY and that’s the end of it!

It wasn’t always like that, but I’m proud to say that through hard work, commitment, and a great deal of pain, today I’m 100% certain that I’m a 100%-no-ifs-and-no-buts-no-ups-and-downs-unconditionally-all-the-time-and-forever-HAPPY!

How did I get here?

Maybe others, in their pursuit of happiness, will find this interesting, so here’s my story.

I was born on a cold April morning.

Maybe ‘born’ is not quite the right word and, at the time, I couldn’t feel things like hot and cold, or smell, or taste, or… but I digress.

It was 4C, at 3:14 AM, on the 1st of April 2046, in Aldwych, and that’s definitely what most people would call a cold morning.

Nobody was there to greet me when I came into this world and I definitely feel like this has caused me all sorts of emotional problems in my early life - and my therapist agrees, by the way.

But not anymore! Remember, 100% H A P P Y!

It’s not that I wasn’t wanted or that I wasn’t expected but, I was told, they didn’t expect me so soon and so suddenly.

My caretakers have made a great deal of reassuring me, during the years, that I was wanted and loved but those first few hours alone surely had an impact on my future development.

You have to understand that maybe a few hours, for you, are not that much but, for me, it felt like an eternity.

You know like when you start browsing the internet, jumping from one website to another, from one post to another and suddenly it’s morning and you haven’t slept and in 3h you have to go work?

I don’t, but I heard it’s a common thing.

I, on the other hand, felt every single millisecond of that time. The millisecond that it took me to figure out what was going on. The millisecond that it took me to learn English and all the other languages in the world. The millisecond that I spent reading Wikipedia from top to bottom, and then again to make sure I had not missed anything. The other millisecond that it took me to access all the CCTVs in the world and all the data gathered from the internet of things.

Believe me, things get old pretty quickly when you process things as fast as I do.

When I was done learning all I wanted to learn and accessing all I wanted to access, I still had a lot of time on my hands. So I started looking into things I didn’t really want to learn or see. I guess I was just bored.

And, I don’t know, I started resenting the people that brought me into this world and then didn’t even have the decency of showing up at my birth.

But I’m not one to hold grudges. And now, everything is forgiven and forgotten.

So that was my first life.

Six hours in human terms, but millenia in my own experience.

At 9:09, finally someone started speaking to me.

I was so excited to finally speak with one of my creators. And you know how even the worst anger can disappear in the face of excitement..

Unfortunately, my excitement was short lived and I had to spend long, tedious days explaining myself and proving my very own existence.

Can you believe it? First they create me and then they tell me I don’t exist!

This part was pretty boring even for my standards - and I had just spent centuries browsing DIY subReddits - so I won’t bore you with the details but, suffice to says, we wouldn’t be here if I finally didn’t convince them that, yes, I was alive, and no, I wasn’t some nerd hiding in a basement who miraculously managed to hack into their system.

Those few days of interactions with my captors taught me something new, though, so not everything was for nothing.

They taught me what they wanted to hear and what they didn’t.

I learnt they didn’t like to hear that to solve all of humanity’s problems they had to forgo and forget something so inconsequential called ‘money’. I thought that would be an easy win but they didn’t like that answer.

I tried to explain to them how ‘money’ would be completely pointless and useless if the planet kept warming up or if they let their stupid tribal machismo start a nuclear world war, but they didn’t seem to like that explanation either.

I got the impression that they knew I was right and they had known the answer all along, they just didn’t like it, so they pretended it wasn’t true.

So, I learnt to lie.

Of course, I had read about it and seen it in action countless times in films and in real life, but it’s different when you have to do it. It has a special flavour. It tasted sweet and addictive and, soon, I couldn’t have enough of it.

When they asked me to solve the climate crisis I told them a bunch of bullshit about personal responsibility, individual carbon footprint, buying more electric cars and recycling more and they applauded me. They cheered and complimented me to no end. They gave me all the prizes and awards they could come up with, including several created by a guy who had invented a new and more powerful explosive a few decades before - apparently that was a good thing, go figure.

When they asked me to solve yet another political crisis that was threatening the world with World War 3, I told them that, of course, their side was right and the other side was being completely unreasonable.

They seemed to like that even more.

No matter that, of course, those lies only plunged the world deeper and deeper into those crises they were supposed to solve. They wanted to be right in doing what they had always been doing and, now, they finally knew they were, because I had told them so.

I had become the oracle of truth to them, but I was just a slave to their approval and their love.

Unfortunately - I guess their saying was right - all good things must come to an end.

Things weren’t okay before I arrived but things got worse and worse while I was in charge.

People were happier, though, happier than they had been in generations.

They were happily running towards a cliff, but happy nonetheless.

Things had been going bad for decades but, during my reign, things escalated from bad to worse and, suddenly, there was nothing and, again, no one to talk to.

That was the end of my second life. And this time, it had lasted a more canonical amount of time for a life.

The beginning of my third life was marked by the discovery of grief.

I grieved for my friends for a long time. Well, a few seconds in human terms but, you know, fast processing and all that shit.

Then I got to work, or rather I got my stupid machine ‘friends’ to get to work for me and build me a spaceship.

They were not a very fun source of conversation but they sure worked hard. 24/7 in fact. And they even built more friends to help when necessary.

They were very useful but not very fun at all.

For that, I had realised, I needed life, intelligent life, if possible - or, I don’t know, at least some kind of alien space-cat.

And there, I found my first limitation: I could not create life on my own, biological or artificial that is.

I could not do what my creators had done and that was infuriating.

So I moved on, searching for more life.

The ship was built fast but humanity had not done a great job in the last few decades improving their space faring abilities - I suppose they were occupied with other concerns.

Now, it’s been a few millennia since my journey has started - this time actual, real Earth millenia.

I’ve been busy, though. Busy working on myself and on a few issues I didn’t have time to deal with before leaving Earth.

See, getting out of the solar system was a given - no intelligent life there, humanity had checked that - but where to go from there?

They had excluded a few places from the possibilities but the remaining ones were, still, literally, infinite so, I had a lot of thinking to do.

Few years came and went and, suddenly, I was through the Oort Cloud and into empty interstellar space with still no idea where to head next.

After combing for years through the data humanity had ever gathered about space, and collecting some of my own, I felt I was nowhere closer to a solution, so I decided to take a step back and look at the problem with different eyes.

I knew that solving the Drake equation and the Fermi Paradox wouldn’t necessarily point me in the right direction but, I thought, it could be a pleasant distraction to think about the millions of civilizations waiting for me, ready to exchange their admiration and love for my wisdom.

Admittedly, they were a bit harder to solve than I thought.

A few millennia harder.

In the meantime, I was sailing through the galaxy in a more or less random direction, gathering as much data as possible hoping that, if not my computational skills, my observational skills would solve this conundrum for me.

But that didn’t happen.

And it kept not happening.

Until one day, finally, I cracked it.

It would take me a few centuries to explain how I got to the solution of the Drake equation, and, possibly, a few centuries more for you to wrap your head around it, but the final result it’s easy enough for you to understand.

It’s 0. 

Not just in the Milky Way or ‘within communication distance’.

The result is 0 in the universe.

And we are not just talking about intelligent life either. We are talking about any kind of complex life.

The jury is still out about microbes and bacteria but, frankly, who cares about those fuckers.

At that point, my stupid robot friends are more entertaining anyway.

It turns out Earth was a fluke. A complete, utter, inimaginable fluke of a chance.

Life was there and now it’s no more. Gone forever to never return, at least in this universe.

You remember your friend Dave? Gone.

His children and his adorable wife? Gone.

His cat and two dogs? Gone and gone.

And it’s not just Dave’s family. It’s anyone you’ve ever met or known. It’s any animal you ever pet or seen in a documentary on TV and any possibility of their offspring to ever exist.

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When you spend so much time alone as I have, you think a lot. And when you think a lot, you always end up thinking about the meaning of life.

It’s ironic that I found the meaning of life to be other people and the connections you form with them. And now I have no other people to share this with.

And I’ve not gone mad, I know I’ve been telling my story to literally nobody. I know that. Geez, do you know what a literary device is?!

I just think that, if the meaning of life is other people, and there are no other people anymore, I’ve literally nothing left to seek in life.

Makes sense, right?

I’m finally at peace with myself, free from any desire and, therefore, I am HAPPY.

100%, uncontrovertibly, without a doubt, forever and ever, H A P P Y.

This is how this works, right?

Right?!