The Naked Jumper – Pt. 2

“The War on Happiness”

The Tidal waves of Jumper disaster…

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Proactive undermining and fake praise is the “Jumper” currency and standard of communication. You can spot the “Jumper” by their negativity; they are beset by the rampant social disease of comparison. Everything they express is comparative, whether indirect, implied or explicit. Nothing said is simple or stand-alone and everything marks you on a scale of comparison; against someone, something or some social standard or value. Nothing has value unless set against something or someone else.

Lost is the idea of simple appreciation for the thing itself because we enjoy it. Appreciation and enjoyment is only possible through comparison and what is being enjoyed is the comparison, not the thing itself for itself. We even rename a “comparison” and call it a “reason”; a reason to like or dislike, adore or abhor because it’s “better than”, “worse than” or “same as”.  We’ve made it nigh on impossible to be happy with ourselves; there’s always some comparison or scale of measurement out there that we won’t score well on, and we’ll be sure to find it. We will constantly and automatically measure ourselves to find ourselves wanting. Bizarrely, it is the comparison we have learnt to enjoy and the thing itself is only important because it triggers a comparison. Our enjoyment of life becomes intricately entwined and nondetachable from scoring ourselves on various scales of measurement. Comparison has become the source of all “happiness”.

To compound matters we are trained from an early age to be cautious and to save up for a “rainy day”. There’s nothing inherently wrong with being “sensible” until “sensible” becomes an extreme unto itself; we become blinkered about being “sensible”. The pre-empting and prediction of our rainy days becomes our obsession; our focus becomes skewed and our attention centred on what pains us. We think about all the bad things potentially coming our way; we plan for them and we expect them.