bug-gin: If we do not assume that happiness is what we must defend, if we start questioning the...

bug-gin:

If we do not assume that happiness is what we must defend, if we start questioning the happiness we are defending, then we can ask other questions about life, about what we want from life, or what we want life to become. Possibilities have to be recognized as possibilities to become possible. This is why embracing possibility involves going back or even “feeling backward,” as Heather Love describes very well. Embracing possibility involves returning to the past, recognizing what one has, as well as what one has lost, what one has given,as well as what one has given up. To learn about possibility is to do genealogy, to wonder about the present by wondering about the how of its arrival. To learn about possibility thus involves a certain estrangement from the present. Other things can happen when the familiar recedes. This is why affect aliens can be creative:not only do we want the  wrong things, not only do we embrace possibilities that we have been asked to give up, but we create life worlds around these wants. When we are estranged from happiness, things happen.

Sara Ahmed,The Promise of Happiness