ABBA, or the Joy of Life
"I want to make my life truly fruitful."
Everyone surely wishes for this. To achieve it, one must understand the driving forces that move them from the core with as much resolution as possible.
In my case, what has attracted and moved me the most since I was a child is music. Specifically, it is ABBA, which a friend introduced me to when I was in my first year of junior high school. This is because ABBA's music embodied the "joy of life" that drives me.
ABBA's music embodies the joy of life—that is, all the joys and sorrows one feels in various situations in life. At the same time, it expresses an attitude toward life of cherishing and fully savoring all those joys and sorrows. ABBA's music itself is the joy of life, and I believe its expression is a proposal to every listener to live life by fully savoring it.
In ABBA's worldview, the expressed joy of life and the act of expressing it—that is, fully savoring it—are inextricably linked. One feels the joy of life. As one tries to fully savor it, expression is inevitably born. Through that expression, the joy intensifies, creating a desire to savor it again, which leads to further expression. As a result, the joy increases even more, and the desire to express it grows further; there is a dynamic feedback loop there.
ABBA's music is the "joy of life, inextricably linked to and two sides of the same coin as the desire for expression" that I constantly seek, and it is a declaration of an attitude to live life by fully savoring it.
However, to be honest, I cannot always maintain this attitude. For example, I have a desire for approval, wanting to be praised and recognized. I also have a desire for money. I feel anxious or frustrated by such impure? motives. When I notice myself like that, I get bogged down, wondering if this is okay.
At such times, I listen to ABBA.
My hesitation vanishes, and the "joy of life" I had inadvertently forgotten rises up. The feeling that it is fine to cherish and fully savor all joys and sorrows returns. That is fine. I believe that is what life is.
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About this essay
Author's intent
I believe this is true for all children, but they are driven by the joy of living itself. I was the same. Remembering that, I decided to write about the "joy of life."
Which pleasure-inducing substance—dopamine, serotonin, oxytocin, etc.—is responsible for the driving force of the joy of life that moves us? Does it include the desire for approval? What is its relationship with the desire for success? I thought about various points as issues, but since there was a character limit, I omitted all of those things. I focused on properly expressing the "ABBA worldview," which I believe embodies the joy of life. That was what I wanted to convey most.
Background to completion
This work is the first draft.
A few days after I started reading the assigned book "Raising Resolution," I woke up early one morning, completely unrelated to the book's content, with the question, "What kind of emotion is driving me?" As usual, while in bed, I jotted down what I was thinking at that moment in the memo app on my iPhone.
At that time, that memo was just a memo. But about the next day, I realized, "Isn't this memo a thought about my driving forces with increased resolution? If so, could this become this essay?" So, I added a section about "raising resolution" to the beginning of the memo. In this way, the backbone of the essay was almost completed.
Based on that memo, I spent about two days completing it.