xxxHolic: How to achieve Happiness

Besides movies, cartoon is my second love, especially Japanese Anime. They good thing about Japanese Anime is sometime they target more mature audience, so with deeper thoughts and more complicated life matters (not just kiddy stuff and happily every after).

xxxHolic caught my attention not so long ago with its attractive artwork and special kind of storyline and plot. Perhaps it is one episode that caught my attention, especially.


I want Happiness? Do I want Sadness? Can there be Happiness without Sadness? I think these are pretty common and logical questions, yet mind boggling.

Let say there is Yin and Yang, so we need both Happiness and Sadness to balance it out (so one cannot exist without the others). If there is no Villain, there shall not be Hero.

What is if it’s a Debt System. If you have too much Happiness, you must pay up with the equal amount of Sadness. Is like people need to work very hard to go through a lot of hardship, before they can enjoy later in life. What if you win a Lottery? Since you still owe the System, perhaps you will be required to pay your debt in the later stage?

Why I am not Happy? Perhaps I had not contributed enough hardship to match up with the level of Happiness which I expected? We know there is not Free Lunch in this world, and we know day dreaming without do any actual work would not get us anywhere. We know lottery winner usually end up with a very miserable life.

So in order to achieve happiness, we need to work hard for it (or suffer for it, so to speak). Remembering nothing is free, so we have to pay for what we want with something. If I want 100K per year, I would need to worker longer and smarter than those who earn 50K per year. If I want to be the next Google or Facebook, they I have to be better or pay a higher price than they did before.

The price to pay is our action, the happiness we hope for is just a dream without action.