Happiness Quote by Rabindranath Tagore

Tagore slips a spiritual truth into a plainspoken grin: selfhood is heavy mostly because we insist on carrying it like a sacred object. "The burden of the self" isn’t just ego in the braggy sense; it’s the whole anxious apparatus of identity-making, the constant accounting of dignity, achievement, failure, reputation. In Tagore’s world, the self can become a cramped room, and modernity keeps adding furniture.

The pivot is "I laugh at myself". Not "I laugh", not "people laugh", but a deliberate act of self-relativizing. The line treats humor as a moral technology. Laughing at yourself punctures the fantasy that your inner drama is the axis of reality. It breaks the spell of self-importance without demanding self-hatred. That’s the quiet brilliance: the remedy isn’t punishment or austerity, but play.

There’s also a social subtext. A person who can laugh at themselves becomes harder to manipulate through shame and status. Pride and insecurity are the levers of conformity; self-amusement loosens the gears. For a poet navigating colonial-era Bengal, steeped in both Bengali devotional traditions and a global literary conversation, this reads like a soft rebellion against imported seriousness and local pieties alike.

The intent, then, is liberation by deflation. Tagore offers a way to keep the self, but stop worshipping it. The joke is not at your expense; it’s at the expense of the idea that you are too fragile to be human.