Happiness is not denying oneself. It is not found in serving unknown gods, whose man-made systems of immorality demand self-sacrifice in order to achieve an esoteric reward. Happiness is loving yourself. Loving yourself enough to pursue your own hopes and dreams. It’s loving yourself enough to stop worrying about other people and working as hard as you can to achieve your greatest hopes and dreams. Do you want to build the first faster-than-light capable space ship? Then ignore the nay-sayers whose abject failure will be amplified by your success. Pursue your dreams, and when your parents, friends, and enemies tell you that you can’t, then laugh in their faces! Only when you love yourself despite their opinions can you ever truly be happy. Only when you accept your success and learn from your failures can you be happy. Stop apologizing for success in an attempt to not offend the failures. Stop beating yourself up over failure instead of realizing your humanity and using failure as a springboard for personal greatness. Question if your failure is even a failure at all. Religions and bizarre moral codes dominate our lives and seek to enslave us to false guilt. There is a scene in Ayn Rand’s Atlas Shrugged where a looter (a person who has failed because of incompetence and stupidity and thus hates the successful, because it reminds them of their own failure, and tries to steal from the successful on the basis of “need” which is in reality an excuse to try to hurt successful people) tells one of the successful characters that control is not achieved by individual liberty. It is achieved by making huge numbers of mutually exclusive rules that no one can possibly follow and then damning everyone who breaks even the tiniest point. You gain control by using the individuals own self-damnation to blackmail them into doing what you want. That is religion to the letter. The only person that is free of this type of control is the one who refuses to inflict the suffering of guilt upon themselves for things that are not wrong in the first place. With that in mind, don’t make mindlessly stupid choices either. Use your mind, your reason, and the facts to choose the correct path to follow. Don’t just jump into things without thinking. And when you make mistakes, use them to climb higher and higher on the ladder of personal success.
“I thought that the world was mine, and those jabbering incompetents were no threat to my strength. I could not understand why I kept losing every battle. I did not know that the force unleashed against me was my own. While I was busy conquering matter, I had surrendered the realm of my mind, of thought, of principle, of law, of values, of morality.” — Hank Rearden Atlas Shrugged
