"Happiness is always a coincidence"
About this Quote
Happiness, Bergamin suggests, isn’t a prize you can engineer so much as a lucky collision you can only recognize after it happens. Calling it “always a coincidence” strips joy of the self-help fantasy that it’s waiting at the end of correct choices and optimized habits. Coincidence is what occurs when causality loosens its grip: two timelines briefly overlap, the world and the self unexpectedly line up, and for a moment you feel spared.
The line works because it’s both modest and quietly accusatory. Modest, because it refuses the grand metaphysics of “meaning” and settles for contingency: happiness arrives like weather. Accusatory, because it implies our culture’s obsession with managing emotion is a category error. If happiness is coincidence, then the project of “pursuing” it starts to look like chasing a reflection across water. The more you lunge, the more it breaks.
Bergamin wrote out of 20th-century Spain’s tremors: civil war, exile, ideological hardening, the brutal predictability of authoritarian life. Against that background, “coincidence” isn’t airy paradox; it’s survival logic. In a world where institutions claim total control - over speech, belief, even memory - happiness can’t be a program. It can only be a loophole.
There’s wit in the fatalism, too: coincidence has no moral. It doesn’t reward virtue or punish vice. That’s a relief and an insult. The relief is permission to stop blaming yourself for not being happy on schedule. The insult is realizing you can do almost everything right and still miss it.
The line works because it’s both modest and quietly accusatory. Modest, because it refuses the grand metaphysics of “meaning” and settles for contingency: happiness arrives like weather. Accusatory, because it implies our culture’s obsession with managing emotion is a category error. If happiness is coincidence, then the project of “pursuing” it starts to look like chasing a reflection across water. The more you lunge, the more it breaks.
Bergamin wrote out of 20th-century Spain’s tremors: civil war, exile, ideological hardening, the brutal predictability of authoritarian life. Against that background, “coincidence” isn’t airy paradox; it’s survival logic. In a world where institutions claim total control - over speech, belief, even memory - happiness can’t be a program. It can only be a loophole.
There’s wit in the fatalism, too: coincidence has no moral. It doesn’t reward virtue or punish vice. That’s a relief and an insult. The relief is permission to stop blaming yourself for not being happy on schedule. The insult is realizing you can do almost everything right and still miss it.
Quote Details
| Topic | Happiness |
|---|
More Quotes by Jose
Add to List
