What is youth? A dream.
What is love? The content of the dream.– Søren Kierkegaard
This week we’re talking about a Danish movie that I recently came across on Amazon Prime, called Another Round (or DRUK in Danish), which happens to be the winner of Best International Feature Film at the Academy Awards (the Oscars), 2021.
The storyline is pretty simple – four friends, all high school teachers, test a theory that they will improve their lives by maintaining a constant alcohol level in their blood.
What makes it a great watch is the superb acting by one of my most admired actors, Mads Mikkelsen (you may remember him as Dr. Hannibal Lecter from the TV series Hannibal), as well as the other three Danish actors.
Although alcohol is at the center of the film, the film itself is not about alcohol consumption. It’s about the subject of life.
I don’t want to give away any spoilers, but to me, the subtext was four people experimenting with their lives to find the happiness that they’ve been seeking for a long time. By the end, it leaves a powerful impact on you.
Happiness – what a tricky thing!
There’s such a fine line between happiness and pleasure that even the best of us fall prey to the lure of pleasure disguised as happiness and in no time turn over to the dark side.
There is one common theme that I’ve found in the adults of our generation and the previous one – we’re all constantly trying to find happiness.
The only difference is that our previous generation sought happiness for the future, while the current generation strives to have it in the present moment.
In 2019, when I’d quit my job to take a break and explore my interests, I had plenty of time to ponder upon the concept of what truly brings us happiness.
I realized that the one true thing at the root of our happiness is: being the most authentic version of ourselves.
I wrote a post on this a while back: Happiness is in becoming a child again.
In this post, I discuss a hypothesis that becoming just like we were as a seven-year-old kid makes us the most authentic version of ourselves.
In what I concluded after my thought experiments, our most original versions are demonstrated during that tender age of 7 to 10 before puberty, when the mind is still exploring and is unafraid of or unadulterated by expectations, judgments, or perception management.
There is some scientific credibility to it.
Carl Jung, in his theory of personality types, writes that there are four stages of life. During the youth stage (which lasts from just after puberty to middle life at thirty-five to forty), there is a desire to cling to the earlier stage of childhood, which, ironically, is also the key difficulty in creating chaos in personal life and professional pursuits.
He writes: “Something in us wishes to remain a child, to be unconscious or, at most, conscious only of the ego, to reject everything strange, or else subject it to our will, to do nothing, or else indulge our own craving for pleasure or power.”
There is a natural tendency to satisfy that urge of becoming a child once again. Once that urge is satisfied, a slow change of traits occurs in an individual – a sign of growing up psychologically to become an adult.
This is also why the things that bring us happiness during our youth are very different from those that bring us happiness after the age of forty.
The best thing we can do is acknowledge this fact instead of turning away from it.
Plus, becoming a child again (in principle) isn’t that difficult as you might think.
As I mention in the post, one way of connecting back to your childhood is by recalling and engaging in the same tasks you did as a kid, making you happy.
It could be something as simple as drawing, or playing video games, or anything for that matter.
The key idea is to replicate the stimulus that creates the same response in the brain as what it did when you were a kid.
Happiness is a pretty broad subject, and this is only one aspect of it – albeit an important one.
Nevertheless, it may be fun to try experimenting with your life as well (probably with something other than alcohol) to see if there is any significant change?
What do you think?
