It
is apparent to even casual observers that many people are desirous of
being happy. They make no secrets about it, and they offer no excuses
for the longing. Either by implication, or in so many words, they are
admitting that they are not happy. They feel the need for it so
strongly that they are willing to make other people unhappy in their
attempt to get happy. They buy books that claim to describe pathways
to happiness; legions of other people write such books. The books,
I'm afraid, rarely make their readers happy, although writing the
books often makes the authors prosperous. Many people conflate
prosperity with happiness, but it doesn't always work that way.
This
obsession with happiness makes me wonder: do the seekers believe that
the rest of us are happy? What do they believe? Do they think that
human beings are entitled to happiness? That happiness is the natural
condition of humans? Myself, I wonder if anybody is actually happy. I
mean, any non-mentally-disturbed person, anyway.
Most
of the people that I have ever observed have not seemed to be happy.
This has always been true, and I have spent my entire life in several
of the world's largest cities. My fellows, most of them, were just
trying to get through the day. If wearing a mask of cheerfulness made
getting through the day easier, well, they, we, wore one. We accepted
life as an acting job; the role was to appear satisfied. To appear
well adjusted to, and accepting of, the pile of offal that we all had
to wade through every day. This was, and remains, true for groups
that I know well, like family and friends. Under a thin veneer of
good will, most of them are bundles of negative energy waiting to
explode.
I
wouldn't say that there are no happy people in the world, but my
strong hunch is that their numbers are not great. I have seen, or
casually known, a few people who might actually be happy, but they
could just have been successful actors. Of the people that I have
known very well, one or two may have been close, but there have been
no clear winners. There must be happy people in the world. I realize
that. I also realize that my inability to even imagine their
happiness is part of my own unhappiness.
Another
interesting category is worth mentioning. There are people who have
achieved happiness through an almost miraculous act of determination.
Through some kind of internal process they discover that they have
the power to shape their own destinies. They do this in much the same
way that a child that is subject to terrible nightmares learns to
dream lucidly, thus ending the problem. They take control of their
emotions and they decide, in some self-hypnotic Triumph-of-the-Will
moment, to be happy. I had one such individual in my family. She was
a wonderful woman, beautiful, smart, and funny. She was a great wife
and a loving, nurturing mother. I have often said that having her in
the family was like having a Hollywood star at all of our holiday
parties. Her presentation was perfect. Her mask never cracked. You
could see a feint vibration run through her if you looked carefully.
You could notice the effort that was sometimes required. But mostly
you could only see that she genuinely enjoyed her family life, and
her children, every bite of food and every sip of a cocktail, every
cigarette, and even every moment of her time spent with a melancholy
nephew who appreciated the attention. I eventually understood the
process that she employed, and I have tried my best to apply it to my
own situation. Tried to manufacture my own happiness. My will,
unfortunately, is not as strong as hers was. This in spite of, or
because of, the fact that the circumstances of her childhood were
even more horrific than mine. She survived a childhood that left one
of her sisters a slightly crazy alcoholic bachelorette failed nun,
and the other sister, my mother, a vicious alcoholic with a
borderline-personality who devoted her life to making the people
around her miserable. My sainted aunt survived their shared misery of
a childhood and went on to be a blessing to her family and a beacon
of hope to me, proving that early suffering can be overcome by tools
that we all have at our disposal. Mostly, the power of our own wills.
There
was a time when I wanted to be happy. For that matter, there was a
time when I was, as we say in the law, “substantially” happy.
That was when my boys were young, and my ex-wife and I more or less
got along, and I was enjoying my role as husband, father, and friend
to many. Between working and being a dad, I had little time left to
worry. This relative happiness was a narrow window in time, and
looking back I am glad that I enjoyed it as much as I did.
Happiness
is overrated. That's my final judgment on the matter. Forget about
it. Happy is for fairy tales. For human existence, try to maintain a
state of calm alertness, a quiet awareness of your surroundings and
what you are doing. Like a samurai, or a good dog. Keep your mind
busy monitoring the mundane details of life. Just try to make
yourself useful. Try to make other people's day a little easier for
them to bear. If you have family close, try to make them happy.
You'll be proud of that behavior, and that feeling of self-worth will
calm you down. Try to comfort yourself, and definitely try to avoid
making yourself miserable with negative ideation. Learn to spot your
triggers and defuse them before they can do any damage. Try to focus
on the task at hand, whether it is laundry or washing the dishes, or
whatever. Enjoy your meals. Get enough sleep, and enjoy that as well.
Read for pleasure or education, and I mean thousands of words at a
time, not the short bursts that you get from social media or the
Internet. Read something meaningful, whether it's about something
important or just a good story. Watch a good movie. Take care of
yourself.
Stop
worrying about happiness. If you can do that, you might approach the
condition that you were aspiring to in the first place.
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