Well, back to our quest for happiness…

At the beginning, a teenager, I had no idea that I was involving myself into a kind of quest, the goal was not happiness either. Actually, happiness came as a surprise, a last twist at the end of the way, like a shinning door unexpectedly found in the secret corner of a vast, dark, desperate labyrinth.

Well, like many teenagers, I was simply looking for answers about the world, with no clue about how difficult and complex it would be. My father is a Jewish, my mother is a Christian, I have no memory of any of them ever practicing religion or talking about it at home. Their beliefs are very blurry, and I couldn’t expect finding any answer around the dinner table. My Christian education coming from my grandmother and my school was exhaustive, but weakly impregnated, considering that obviously my parents did not care much.

So, unsatisfying biblical stories, no hope to learn more at home, I naturally turned myself towards litterature, arts, and very soon i was diving into the cold tumultuous waters of philosophy. Philosophy, precisely metaphysics and art philosophy (which I still think today are intimately connected), have been one of the great passion of my youth. I was gifted, motivated, eager to explore every corner of this field.

To spare you the details, let’s skip a few years. I did seven years of Philosophy studies in a French University. On the side, I have tried myself in many forms of arts. Poems, short stories, novels, movie scripts, directing short movies, drawing, painting… all with a constant absolute dedication and equal total lack of professional success. Looking back, it is clear that the work was of quite poor quality, clear also that I had (and still don’t have) strictly no talent for selling myself or my work.

This lack of success was not a problem by itself, I had a big ego, a generous father, and also this artistic practice was closely related to my continuous philosophical quest: the practice was at the same time feeding and questioning the theory, and vice versa. Maybe artistic success would have been a shortcut to some kind of happiness, maybe not. The deep black sadness I was carrying around was coming from something else…

The cold truth I was discovering along my philosophical journey was the main cause of my despair. I have been through many philosophers, many religious thinkers, many poets, many artists and many scientific books. Here is not the place to complete my unfinished PhD, and the best way to summarize what was occurring to me as the final Truth when I was in my twenties, is the too famous Nietzsche’s quote: “the sky is empty”.

From the most famous and destructive nihilist philosopher, to happiness, the way is not as long as it seems, but paved with many sharp rocks…