An Assault on Happiness

Happiness. It’s the fetish of the modern age. I come here not to praise our increasing obsession with this mental state, but to bury it.

“Self sabotage is not pursuing happiness,” screams the headline of a financial market letter that found it’s way into my inbox a couple of weeks ago. In it, trading guru Van Tharp advocates a life dedicated to the pursuit of happiness as not simply the highest goal of our lives, but a near sure-fire way to get rich. In a related newswire story, the most popular course at Harvard is Positive Psychology, whose main goal is to “teach students how to be happy.”

“To make others less happy is a crime,” declares Roger Ebert in a recent Esquire interview that seems to have touched a cultural nerve, the venerated film reviewer and long-suffering medical patient filling the role of secular father and spiritual guide, at least through the next news cycle. Ebert continues: “I believe that if at the end of it all, according to our abilities, we have done something to make others a little happier and something to make ourselves a little happier, that is about the best we can do.”

Well, I’ve got news for you all. There are plenty of people on this planet who need to be made unhappy. Even our friends sometimes need to be told the truth, to be prodded, to be made aware that their life has heretofore been largely a waste of time.

I do not believe we are here to be happy. Not that happiness is a bad thing. It just should not be an end in itself. Trying to make it the main point of our time on this planet is a betrayal of our elevated monkey souls, whether you believe we were pulled up from the muck through an accident of biochemistry or by the hand of God. To be servile to the notion of our own happiness is psychically weak and a waste of our beautifully conflicted minds. Happiness may be a fine pursuit for all those intellectually flaccid folks who want nothing more than to sip pina coladas under a palm tree, but there is a reason I moved to Chicago. I don’t want to waste my life in pursuit of ease, physical, mental, or spiritual.

More than one friend has accused me of being needlessly contrarian, of disliking anything that is popular. But I say that popularity is a random thing, and I’m no more likely to dislike something popular than all the rest of the dross that falls by the wayside without ever being granted the imprimatur of widespread public acclaim. However, in deference to my audience, I’ll play the guilty pleasures game, the one where you are supposed to wax on about your bag of mass marketed joys, because for some reason people have to believe that you’re part of all the B.S. before they take you seriously. So here goes: Kelly Clarkson, Coldplay, the Fray, Abba, John Hughes movies, Marley and Me. Embarrassing enough for you? And I’ll back my bad taste up with a conceit. I like all of the above because of their innocence, their earnestness in describing the world. If I’m going to be enveloped by someone’s middle brow creation, I want it to speak from the heart.

Which brings me to another thing I hate: our culture’s lack of guilt and shame, perhaps reflected most painfully in the literati currently clogging up our coasts. My irritation at them and their “work” is almost constant. This month, I endured David Shields ramble about the “honesty” of lying, that the writer of the false memoir “simply cares too much.” In a similar vein, I’ve had to listen to a series of pop figures defend plagiarism, the outright theft of a more obscure writer’s prose. “Nothing is original,” declares Jim Jarmusch. “Steal from anywhere that fuels your imagination.” For Jarmusch, it doesn’t matter whether this is a book or a cloud. In essence, we are moving into a world where the cultural avant garde believes that if something makes them feel, then they are free to use it in their own work without attribution or compensation. Then I read an interview with Jonathan Safran Foer, who advocates in his high-handed way for a New Joylessness, essentially advocating happiness without pleasure, pontificating about how the sense of taste is “silly, gluttonous, and embarrassing.” All while sipping an $8 glass of juice and picking over some stir-fry.

Browsing through the contemporary literature section of a bookstore these days is like Chinese water torture. The America of the new millennium has bred a literary movement united by a puny cleverness, like a pack of primping poodles looking to show off their tricks, to please the universities, promising to be the well-heeled lap dogs they’ve been trained to be, as long as you’ll give them tenure, or at least put their books on the course list, because that’s the only way that anyone outside of their little cult will ever read them. If I could reign unhappiness on the lot of them, individually and collectively, I would.

Where are the passions of Whitman, the grand quests of Melville, the independence of Thoreau? The men of American letters these days can’t hold a candle to that wind. Where is the conflicted soul of Dostoevsky, the recognition that our lives are brilliant and joyous yet still torn asunder? It seems that what gets sold to us as “literature” these days is a faded remnant.

I’m not sure which was the chicken and which the egg, but our obsession with being happy seems to be woven into all of our watery thoughts. An entire society devoted to the pursuit of an internal state is bizarre, bordering on the pathological . It’s like a culture devoted to the pursuit of mawkishness, or whimsy. Rather than spreading happiness, I say (in descending order of importance) pursue truth, pursue decency, pursue fun. Pursue something greater than yourself, something you can analyze, or at least something active and real. Pursue anything but this Cartesian shell game being sold to you on the idiot box, whose goal is an internal state of mind (so much of the West’s difficulty in seeing the truth in life seems to be traced to the delusions perpetuated by French philosophers).

Part of the quest for truth is a quest to find our own individual and collective destinies, and sometimes this involves doing the hard thing, something that seemingly creates a lot of unhappiness, both for yourself and for others. To paraphrase a line from the Colbert Report (and I hope this trendy reference point helps placate those who believe that I am reflexively opposed to anything that is popular these days): I have a bumper sticker on my car that reads, “What has war ever solved? (other than ending Fascism and Slavery).”

So to the plugged in, to the turned on, to all those in pursuit of happiness as some kind of a grand quest, you can go fuck yourselves. It is a great consolation in this life that I don’t have to be like you.