Marie-Antoinette

so if you are asked the question "what is the percentage of people you think are happier than you" what would you say?


i thought of the poor, of the homeless, of the orphans, of the oppressed.

and i put 20%.

but that doesn't mean anything.
if you're poor it doesn't mean you're wretched.
i've seen blind legless people happy.
i've seen people with all material and emotional comforts writhing with misery.

in scandinavia, where quality of life is exceptional and equal, suicide rates are high.

and one thing occurred to me:
if your thoughts and lives are not occuppied with real things be they life-problems or plain work, you're bound to reflect on the futility of life until you go mad and drown in your own misery. that's why so many artists/poets/writers/musicians kill themselves after producing works of genius. they simmer their thoughts and feelings to reproduce them in some form of human genius, but cannot live with themselves after glimpsing, tasting and understanding this eternity of futility. so they decide to take arms against a sea of trouble, and to end it all. now if they were too busy trying to survive, they would not think of self-death, no?

so, maybe M, who i will call Marie-Antoinette for now, was right. why do we want to spread equality, enrich the poor, house the homeless, if not to spread happiness?
but is it a given that we would spread happiness that way?
aren't we being somewhat presumptuous about the whole thing?

i'm not talking abt prevention of death, for that's a given, i'm talking abt changing people's lives, presumably for the better. but is it really?

funny, comparing socialism to imperialism/colonialism, but if you look at it that way, there's a bit of a resemblance.
i probably have multiple fallacies in my argument, but i would like to hear your points of view on the matter of happiness and why we want to "right" the world, and not just let it be, a jungle.