Up is Down, Black is White

If you play 5 notes on a piano each an octave higher than the last, a person who hears this scale would perceive it to be happy.  If you play 5 notes on a piano each an octave lower than the last, a person who hears this scale would perceive it to be sad.  The progression creates an emotive connection.  From this you could posit that in life things that go up are happy and things that go down are sad, except life is like a roller coaster, where quite literally the fall can be the enjoyment.  The best part of a roller coaster is the plunge and the speed that creates a rush and releases adrenaline, there is no rush when climbing slowly.

You could posit then that direction alone doesn't determine happiness but rather speed which creates exhilaration determines whether we have a positive or negative experience.  Again however, this doesn't hold true in practice, the faster you eat, the less enjoyment you get from the food you eat, the slower you eat the more you get to relax and enjoy the experience.

You soon come to the conclusion that direction, and speed, and all manner of measurements as a means to achieving happiness are not conclusive.  Sooner or later you have to conclude that happiness is relative, defined by where you are, where you were, and where you want to be - or whether you are moving towards the place you want to be.  "Up" in the physical sense only becomes an up side in the metaphorical sense if it is the direction you want to go, otherwise up can be down.  That argument is one that is paradoxical because of the limitation of language in expressing complex ideas that are easier to think about than they are to explain.

With such relativism playing such a pivotal role in our lives you soon begin to question why we deal in absolutes at all.  We define rich and poor in absolute terms, we define happy and sad too in absolutes.  The reality is happy and sad, rich and poor don't exist, what really exists are the relative comparisons of happier, sadder, richer, poorer, all in respect of the state we were in, or the state we want to be in.  This extends far beyond our emotions and our social standing but into the very perceptions of the world we have.  Hot and cold, black and white, sharp and soft, none of these absolutes actually exist when you begin to break down the language construct.  Something is blacker than something else, or whiter than something else, "black" and "white" in and of themselves don't exist - if you've ever tried to buy a "black" jumper and a "black" pair of trousers and compared them side by side the variation in colour tone is apparent, there is no definitive example that all others need to conform to in order to truly qualify as absolute.  Everything is relative.

There is an attempt at least as far as the colour black is concerned to actually find an absolute in practice.  The Vantablack project developed by Surrey NanoSystems is a research project that has created a material that is blacker than black, designed to absorb as much light as physically possible.  The extremity of this material can be demonstrated when you see 3D objects coated in it which completely lose their form and definition.  So little light escapes its surface that our brains don't know how to deal with what we see.  The brain interprets what it sees as a "hole" in our vision and is perplexed at it.  You can watch videos of this material in action, although there is a limit to how black something can be on your computer screen due to the way the hardware works, nevertheless the complete lack of light is somewhat unsettling and entrancing all at the same time.