The Inherent Investments Of Happiness

Life is a lot like busi­ness. There’s invest­ment in every­thing, and rela­tion­ships are no excep­tion. One has to spend mon­ey to make mon­ey, the way one has to give trust to get trust. There’s no guar­an­tee involved that says one willl get their invest­ment back. On top of this, one can choose how much or how lit­tle to invest. Just like every­thing else in life, the more one risks, the more one can lose, or the more one can gain.

And the world can be divid­ed in two accord­ing to this clas­si­fi­ca­tion: those who play con­ser­v­a­tive­ly, and those who play it all. Those who stay dis­tant, and those who throw them­selves into love.

If we’ve been hurt in the past, if we’ve lost all that we chose to give, it’s nat­ur­al for us to hold back in the future. But at some point we have to break out, and we can’t be scared to give as much as before. The key to liv­ing this way is under­stand­ing that our past invest­ments, rela­tion­ships, have no bear­ing on the ones we have now. It’s like the coin flip prob­lem taught in sec­ond-year sta­tis­tics, or, more appro­pri­ate­ly, the Gambler’s Fallacy: even after 10 suc­ces­sive occur­rances of a sin­gle out­come, the chance for the same out­come remains at fifty per­cent. We have to treat every tri­al, every case, every rela­tion­ship dif­fer­ent­ly.

Life, in rela­tion to peo­ple, is a series of invest­ments. We end up gain­ing from some, but not all. That’s what life is about. That’s what love is about. Nothing is worth it if you don’t put your­self out there. It’s impor­tant to fig­ure out which ones are worth­while, but not as impor­tant as fig­ur­ing out that the worth­while ones need to be giv­en a chance. We need to put at least a lit­tle bit of our trust into them, or noth­ing will hap­pen.

For what use is rec­og­niz­ing a good invest­ment, if we don’t treat it as such?

4 comments

  1. you have such beau­ti­ful pic­tures. what kind of cam­era do you use?

  2. Witty blog title and sub­ti­tle. I real­ly enjoyed that!

  3. I always car­ry a Canon S410 on me, but I’ll occa­sion­al­ly use a Canon Digital EOS Rebel if I can get my hands on one.

  4. i left malaysia to come to be with my fiance in texas..now when­ev­er i look at all the malaysian CNY blog­gings, i am like, “ARRGGHH” but hey, i’d call David a pret­ty good “invest­ment” :)

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