“You reach happiness when you realize to overcome the challenges posed by fate. This is the joy arising from the overcoming of difficulties, from the struggle against the problems that you tackle a head-on, but instead you feel lost if your comforts increase.
We have it all. We have everything we need to avoid hunger, misery, poverty. One thing that we do not have, and that we can not be offered by the State […] is to be together with the others. Staying with other people, being part of a group: you have to take care of these things. People who are accustomed to being independent are losing the ability to accept coexistence with other people, because they have already been deprived of the ability to socialize.
It’s very tiring, you must put a lot of effort, you must be very careful, you need to negotiate, renegotiate, discuss, agree, recreate.
Independence deprives you of the ability to do all this.”
- Zygmunt Bauman, from “The Swedish Theory of Love