On Happiness

Some assorted reflections

Photo by Scott Rodgerson on Unsplash

Many years ago, I had a girlfriend who wanted to surprise me. Like, as much as possible; all the time. She would buy me gifts, come over to my place unexpected at random hours with delicious homemade cakes or huge quantities of ice cream, travel to the cities she knew I had to go to for work and show up at my hotel, write the most beautiful letters longhand and send them to me via physical mail, stamp and all. For a number of non-obvious reasons, it didn’t last very long. Nothing to do with my tendency to not reciprocate, or me getting tired of being surprised (although, in all frankness, it did help). It didn’t last very long simply because things, broadly speaking, don’t last. Especially love things. Especially for me. But, while it lasted, seeing me (pleasantly) surprised was apparently a source of happiness for her. And she would manufacture her happiness by creating surprises and delivering them to me. She was the architect of her own happiness.

On a podcast, someone said that happiness is very much something that we choose. That, despite tragedies, setbacks, and very difficult situations, we can assemble a story for ourselves, believe it, and choose to be happy. So I asked GPT “how do we choose to be happy?”. It gave me a list of fifteen things to do. Like Embrace Laughter and Humor, Practice Self-Compassion, and Seek Professional Support. You’re missing the point, I responded. I didn’t ask for a list of activities that may stimulate or summon or conjure up happiness. I’d like to know how to choose to be happy. I apologize for any misunderstanding, it replied. And gave me another list of things. This time fourteen. Of which, number two was Decide to Prioritize Happiness. I gave up.

This notion of deliberate happiness made me think. I like the idea that we choose to be happy. That happiness isn’t something that comes along only under certain conditions, but a latent state that we can switch on, activate, if we’re so inclined. I like the idea that we can create happiness, that it’s a conscious decision. I decide to be happy, regardless of what’s happening around me. Yes, I like this idea a lot.

Now, when I decide to discuss an idea, a thought, with someone, I’d like that someone, ideally, to 1) listen to (and be patient with) my rants, 2) be a simplifier, not a complexifier, 3) feel free to dwell on the most obvious and stupidest considerations, and 4) be brutally honest and shamelessly provocative, if need be. So I discussed this deliberate happiness theory with my friend Patrick the other night (more on why I picked him later), and he argued -- rather unsurprisingly -- that this isn’t something anyone can do. As much as he, like me, finds the theory fascinating, external factors, situations, and the people around us invariably play a role; we can't simply mute them. It’d be challenging for a soldier in combat, surrounded by blood, death, and destruction, to reach for that switch and decide to be happy. It's certainly a matter of personal predisposition, he said, and maybe genetics count here. But it’s also a matter of broader context, of milieu. At the end of the day, he concluded, if being happy were as easy as toggling an option on our control panel, who wouldn’t be? Happiness would be a normal, common, default, unnoticeable state for every member of humanity. As with all things abundant and easy to obtain, its value would be close to zero. And I’m not sure who would want to pursue it, at that point. 

Human nature being what it is, we’re attracted to scarcity and difficulty. If something’s too easy or there’s too much of it, we give it no value. It’s an overly simplified thought but, like all simplified thoughts, it plants the seeds for something more complex and articulated. What if we had to keep happiness scarce, to maintain its full value? What if we had to go through periods of misery and pain and uncertainty and preoccupation, to fully appreciate their opposite? And what if we end up going through life without even noticing that, in fact, we are happy? 

Of course, these are questions that have no broadly acceptable answer. For me (and many others, I guess), life has been a cyclical alternation of heavy and light, rain and sunshine, dark and bright. I couldn’t create happiness in down cycles because I’d think of what I could have done better to avoid (or mitigate) them when things were good, and I couldn’t create happiness in up cycles because I’d think that, soon enough, they’d change course and turn negative again. Not long ago, I heard someone say that depression is really regret about things in the past and anxiety is really fear of things in the future. But we can't touch the past and we can't touch the future, which is why focusing on them is so frustrating. What we can do is live in the present moment. Trite, banal, oversold? Also, true.

At some point, Patrick stopped short, turned to me, and asked But what is it? What’s happiness? I remember being asked a similar question about quality of life once, when it was all the rage, and being unable to respond. And I immediately realized that the holy grail of existence, the mother of all positive states, the ultimate target of endorphin generation, just like quality of life, is something we cannot define. Not only that, even if we could, it’d be a different definition for each of us. And if that’s the case, if happiness (or whatever you decide to call it) is really a highly personal state, then why is “how to be happy” the subject of so much nonstop thinking and writing and debating, as if it were all about finding some universally applicable magic formula?

I don’t know where my happiness toggle is, and I don’t even know whether I have one. But less than two weeks ago I turned fifty-eight, and I thought about happiness. Have I seen it? Can I recognize it? Can I say that I’m happy or is it all a never-ending march toward a certain imaginary hurdle, past which I can say I’m happy? And is that imaginary hurdle something that I unconsciously keep raising and that I will never reach, like a mirage? I didn’t find any answers. I don’t know what happiness looks like; I couldn’t put it into words. Any attempt would fall short. And I don’t know where that hurdle is, if any. What I do know is that whenever I tried to look far ahead into the future, and whenever I thought too much about the past, I didn't feel good. I could say that I was unhappy. And I thought: this is already a lot, right? If I could clearly identify what makes me unhappy, and avoid or eliminate it, then what’s left has to make me happy. By definition.      

I read a quote once by Alfred Hitchcock saying that happiness is a clear horizon, and nothing to worry about. I like these words, they resonate, give me calm. And they could very well be my own definition of happiness today, right now. If you ask me in six months, it may no longer be. Who knows. I know people who would never identify happiness with nothing to worry about. That girlfriend of mine had clearly a lot to worry about whenever she had to think of her next surprise for Yours Truly. And she felt good about that whole coming up with unexpected things, as hectic as it might appear from the outside.

Patrick is the only son of two parents who got seriously sick when he graduated from college, over a quarter-century ago. They were no longer self-sufficient, and in and out of hospitals for many years. He couldn’t afford a nurse, nor to put them in a special care facility. Or maybe he could, but decided not to. So he chose to give up pretty much everything to take care of them full-time. Then his dad passed, and his mom got two severe strokes that impaired her speech and most of her normal motion abilities. Thanks to Patrick’s infinite love and care and dedication, she recovered some tiny bit. But today, at ninety-two, she needs his help to do everything (eating, walking, going to the bathroom, washing, sleeping -- everything). He wakes at five every single morning and all he does is take care of her until he goes to bed at night. All he indulges in from time to time is to briefly go for a walk with a close friend (not very many, as social activities are equal to zero), or go to the gym (luckily, next door to his place) for an hour every week. Once a month I succeed in dragging him out for a quick pizza, a weakness of his. But when he’s out, he’s got a whole closed-circuit monitoring system that he operates from his phone to check on his mom in real-time, continuously. His alert level has to be the highest at all times; he cannot afford to lower his guard. In this whole situation, of course, he could never pursue a career (they live off Social Security allowances), or a hobby, or travel, or a serious relationship (despite being a bright, athletic, good looking man very much sought after by many representatives of the opposite sex). His life has to be flawlessly organized down to the minute, and he works at it like the CEO of a multinational company. Except there’s no vacation in Patrick’s life.      

Yet, Patrick is one of the happiest persons I know. Every day, he chooses to be happy. And every time I get to see and talk with him, I learn a lot. I learn about appreciating what we take for granted, about how enthusiastic one could be when simply going out and having a pizza with a friend for a hour. Or taking a walk for a hour. I learn about optimism and selflessness and dedication. I learn about putting one foot in front of the other, about the importance of focusing on putting one foot in front of the other. I learn about muting the noise, about taking the past and the future out of the picture. And I learn about happiness. And who better than him could I discuss happiness with?

Whatever we call happiness, it comes and goes. And being able to decide of having it always on would be awesome, but it sounds like a superpower. Maybe the key is simply focusing on putting one foot in front of the other, on putting the next pearl on the string, as Phil Stutz says. Maybe it’s all a noise-cancelling game that we get to play and hopefully get good at over time. Or maybe we should stop thinking and writing about happiness, and just be.  

  

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