A nasty bit of silliness, masquerading as insight, is the idea that happiness is a right, or that it is a choice.
This idea is politically correct. If you are a writing material for a Superbowl ad, dialogue for a television show, or a speech for a political campaign, then you can invoke this without much fear of public backlash.
Not only is it politically correct for those who produce mass media, but this idea is popular with the people. It has grass roots support from practically every modern American citizen. An electrician, a hair stylist, a boutique clothing store owner, a gourmet restaurant chef, and a public park's groundskeeper can all be counted upon to have a version of this idea in their mental toolbox of wisdom. They will use this device, though sometimes indirectly, to make decisions on what to buy, who to retain for friendship, and what type of job to seek.
If the leaders of politics, industry, and entertainment believe this, and if the everyday poor and middle class citizens believe this, is there any guard against it?
The belief that happiness is something that can be summoned relatively quickly, assuming you have sufficient willpower, is a natural consequence of denying any objective morality, of denying that we have to make moral choices that have long-lasting consequences, and finally, of denying any objective value in a human being.
The primary sadness of this idea is that it is false. It is incompatible with human nature. If someone can manage to suppress their human nature for a stretch of time while they put this platitude into place, all they accomplish is setting the stage for a raucous confrontation with reality later in life. For some of us, the stress that comes from harboring untruths might begin to spread through the bloodstream within ten minutes of committing this intellectual sin during day to day living.
Yet, this sin has propagated itself throughout the American world for about fifty years.
It is not without its many variants and cousins. From the family of ideas of which it is descendant also comes the idea that the rat race does not exist. If one chooses, one is exempt from the rat race. Chasing status, awards, or even making the choice to have a career makes you a tool of the modern industrial machine.
If you are going to believe that you can elect happiness into your daily life on just a moment's notice, then you may as well believe that the way you have lazily not worked hard to gain ground in the competition with every single person around you, including your own spouse, is perfectly fine.
You're going to need help convincing yourself of this in the face of reality. Yes, the approved messages of our topmost voices agree with you, and yes the the beliefs of the people around you agree with you, but you are still going to need more help convincing yourself of this.
I do not hesitate to acknowledge that Sigmund Freud's description of the ego in this regard seems exactly accurate with my experience in life, both within myself and throughout my perception of others. There really are habitual rationalizations going on inside our individual minds.
All of this is ridiculous. Which of you slows your car to a stop in an intersection during a red light, sees an aging man standing on the divider in the middle of the street, holding a cardboard sign with writing in black marker that says "Out of work veteran Dad, please help. God bless," and thinks to yourself, "this fellow has every right to be as happy as I am." Or better yet, "there is no difference between that man and me. We are equally happy, provided we both woke up and chose to be."
For fun, imagine the trains of thought that our subject idea could give you license to take seriously. You could tell yourself that the reason you don't have to give this man a couple dollars is because he is already happy, and your money will not make him any happier.
Oh I see, you're going to tell me that a bare minimum level of basic wealth is required and, after attaining this minimum level of wealth, happiness is merely a choice. A sort of Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs is at work here. Even a poor American must be expected to have a job and a roof over his head before he can be given membership into the true American society of those who can be happy whenever they want if they just choose to be.
Here is my response. You are raising a young boy. When your son is in the sixth grade in public school, it is time to go to his parent-teacher conference. You are a white collar, moderately successful lawyer, having recently put a sizable down payment on a three-bedroom house in the suburbs. This coming weekend, you plan to host a dinner party with friends you have known since your undergraduate college days. This occupies your mind as you walk up the staircase leading to your son's school teacher's classroom. You see her. She is white, about five foot four, in her late thirties, very overweight judging by her huge hips, disproportionately flat-chested judging, again, by her huge hips. Her cheeks are thick and a second chin appears as she walks up to you to introduce herself. She shakes your hand.
This woman made herself a sack dinner and what's left of it sits in a yellow lunch cooler on her desk. As she greets you, her breath is overheating and unpleasant, and as it hits your nose, your eyes briefly dart off to the side. Her disposition is nice to the point of being strenuous.
Prior to coming to this meeting, you had dinner at the California Pizza Kitchen.
Are you going to think to yourself "this teacher is exactly no more impressive and no less impressive than me. I'm sure she is exactly as happy as I am. If for some reason she isn't, well that's just silly - she has every right to be if she'd just made the same choice that I made this morning!"
She meets the bare minimum level of wealth requirement, but no, she is not as happy as you. She isn't. Even if she had talked to the mirror for two hours that morning before coming into work, she would not have been able to create the happiness that you know of. Your level of work and accomplishment, and its accompanying happiness in life, is so far beyond her reach that to verbally discuss some of the things you do with your spare time and money would be inappropriate and rude of you.
It is unsettling to see so many of my fellow citizens verbally and to some extent, mentally, going on pretending that they are happy. Or worse, going on hoping that the happiness they dream of is even a destination that they are currently making progress towards.
When we pretend that we are happy about everything, we are flagrantly disprectful to those who have superior happiness. Their superior happiness comes by virtue of their being more valuable than us.
We create delusion, and we spread this thick, black smoke of delusion through every street, house, and bedroom in our country, so that it smothers every heart that would otherwise like to go on beating like a human heart should. An human heart should yearn, long, lie awake restlessly, and have to fight off crippling melancholy instead of being sedated with nonsense. There is a potential link between our hearts and our minds, and taking the above idea seriously numbs this connection. It freezes it. It can severe it for years or a lifetime. Instead of this link between our conscious minds and our desires, which could lead to self-possession, what we get is the ego. We give our ego a tremendous amount of work to slave away on.
Every day we wake up and we are unhappy. Some of our unhappiness we may be responsible for, and some of it we may not be, but that is a separate matter - something to be considered at a later step.
Cornered, there is then talk of coming to terms with all this, of making peace with it, or learning to be content with it. This is more of the same request for reprieve. We shouldn't come to terms with it because there is no coming to terms with being unhappy. We shouldn't make peace with it because there is no peace to be had with unhappiness. We shouldn't be content because there is no contentment here. What we should do is admit it. And then mourn if we have to. Perhaps laugh a little through the tears once in awhile, but not too much, because that risks falling back into the trap that started all of this. Even if there is nothing we can do about it, we can at least spare our neighbor, who may still have a shot at happiness, the disrespect. Just because we can't have something doesn't mean we must deny its existence to everyone else.
And then we can go out and chase the reduced ration of happiness that we can still afford.
We go back to our statement about the rat race. The rat race is real, and if you pretend you are happy, you may as well also pretend that you don't have to compete in the rat race, when, in reality, you do have to compete in it. If you don't want your ego to fester and dedicate every cell in your body towards its rationalizations, resulting in an ever-increasing dependence on vicarious escapism due to you being parched at the throat for any recent well-earned personal joy, which culminates in a spiraling descent into bitterness for the remainder of your short life, then you must compete in the rat race.
There is another platitude that goes something like "learn to live within your means" and this is seldom heard in political campaigns, mass media, or everyday talk of the people. One of the reasons this is seldom heard is because, unlike the family of ideas we have been discussing, it is from the same ancestors of the idea that I am advocating here, which is that we are regularly unhappy and there is nothing we can do about it.
Living within your means, if you do the math, entails facing up to the consequences of the choices you have made in your life, some of which may have been extremely expensive to your past and yet yielded no benefit whatsoever to your present. Also, some of your present choices, though they may possibly bear fruit in the future, presently make you unhappy. They make you grouchy and irritated. They exhaust you.
Thanks in part to our wonderful technological advances, there is a voluminous body of writing these days, and to me, so much of it implicitly strives to give the reader an excuse to go on not taking responsibility for his or her own lack of happiness in life. A great first step to persuading the reader that they don't have to fight for their happiness is to quietly offer the suggestion that happiness is a right, or a choice. It so happens that the mere word choice - merely the word itself - is so overloaded and corrupted these past few decades, that many a listener is powerless to think critically about it.
If the aforementioned writing is not trying to do this, then there is a good chance that it instead tries to discredit third parties to the conversation who are legitimately taking action and having a morsel of success in their own pursuit of happiness in the rat race. It thus tries to arm the reader's ego with tools that it can use to tear down the valid happiness that the reader may see in other people's lives.
To those who would read this article of mine and conjecture that I am a member of this second group of popular writing, a mean person, a hater, or not a positive person, I ask how they would distinguish between this article and a shamelessly critical anonymous internet comment. The answer is that those commentators are hating on someone's work which may or may not be valuable, whereas I am hating on a treacherous principle that is used to excuse a person from attempting to produce value in the first place.
This growing body of writing accidentally ends up being a part of a sort of motherly hand, caressing the reader's cheek, leading the reader's lips to the iron nipple on its metallic breasts, where it can nurse the reader back into a slumber. The reader can gently doze off into pleasant dreams, awake the next day, and continue a life of inaction, a life of delusion without any accountability to himself: a childish life.
This symptom in today's writing is one of the reasons, though not the only one, that I am distrustful of most writing these days. For my own sanity, I try not to read or consume anything produced after the year 1960, including stuff produced today on Twitter or in the newspaper.
An exception to this rule includes material for my job, where I may be trying to solve a technical problem immediately, and the internet is indispensable in this case. Another exception is non-fiction history that I may be reading, though I have to read it critically for the reasons pervasive in this article. A final exception is material written by writers who admit that they are pursuing, and not merely claiming a right to, happiness, and who are not feigning exemption from the rat race. But such writers are rare, since writing such thoughts leads to being politically incorrect and unpopular.
I would suggest to you that you admit that you are unhappy, and identify whatever it is in your life that you are unhappy about. If you aren't sure where to start, a typical recommendation is just a threefold checklist that consists of, in no particular order, your romantic and sexual life, your career and wealth, and your physical health. This is not comprehensive, but it's a start. If one of these facets of your life isn't so impressive to you, then you can redirect your efforts to it.
These admissions should make it into your fundamental assumptions about life. They should strengthen the dialogue between your mind's educated consciousness and your heart's primitive desires. Also, they should make the people around you dislike you less.
This doesn't mean turning your life into a public spectacle, a caricature of depression, that makes everyone uncomfortable as they nervously laugh or blankly stare at your theatrics. As with everyone, even the happy, your behavior must remain calibrated and filtered. You have to keep your chin up while keeping much of your failure to yourself. Such is the frustrated life of being an unhappy person.
Admit that you are unhappy, lest we all plunge deeper into our current fall out of enlightenment and into savage madness.
