Happiness is a mischief-maker for nations and persons. I’m sorry Jefferson used it in our founding document. He did not say we were entitled to happiness, only to its pursuit, but many Americans forget that. If they’re not happy, they must have been cheated – and somebody’s to blame. Hence, our culture of grievance. We’re angry as hell. About what? Who cares what – we’ve had it up to here – and won’t “take it” anymore!
Happiness once meant luck, happenstance (as in mishap). The meaning widened to include comeliness, strength, blessedness, prosperity, results of luck. A happy expression was felicitous, apt for its occasion. Gradually happiness came to equal contentment, satisfaction, joy. In the eighteenth century, proto-scientists started measuring happiness – in individuals and populations; the goal of government, some argued, was to make the governed happier. Freud and his followers sought a submerged source of unhappiness and attempted, for a fee, to rejigger it. More recently, pharmaceutical companies got into mood-adjustment big time: a pill for every pout!
Sages have been opining about happiness since civilization produced enough idleness to entertain the question. In survival mode we don’t fret happiness. Aristotle thought eudaimonia (good spirits) depended on living rationally – it worked for him; Aquinas taught virtue produced happiness; Marx figured the abolition of religion would do the trick; Susan B. Anthony the liberation of her sex; that genius misfit pianist Glenn Gould envisioned heaven in isolation; Dr. Johnson foresaw it in a tavern; Jane Austen and Gertrude Stein in more cash (“Whoever said money can’t buy happiness simply didn’t know where to go shopping,” said Stein). To each their own: as Ogden Nash put it, who put so much well, “Happiness is having a scratch for every itch.”
The mischief of happiness, many have noted, is its flirtatiousness, how it resists capture. “Happiness is a ball after which we run wherever it rolls, and we push it with our feet when it stops,” said Goethe. Sad Hawthorne made a similar point: “Happiness is a butterfly, which when pursued is always just beyond your grasp, but which, if you will sit down quietly, may alight upon you.”
I am often sad. Twice sadness kneecapped me. I hate it, it hurts, but it teaches too. It connects me to the fragility of our kind. The more I ponder life, the sadder – and gladder – I get. (“Happiness in intelligent people is the rarest thing I know,” said Hemingway.)
What makes happiness mischievous is expecting it. It is not a right but a gift, like love, grace, God. Seek it – by all means! – but not by seeking it, for like water or air, it cannot be seized. Happiness for me is forgetting myself by doing what I was born for. I was born, I imagine, to think, make, love. Not doing these turns me drab, gloomy, grim. I self-medicate with action in desirable directions – or sleep, if I can’t. “Right yourself by writing yourself,” you may have heard me prod. Pills and booze make things worse by dulling senses and squandering chance. “Sadness is not your fate, but your fault,” I chide myself. I work at shooing sadness – and sometimes succeed.
America’s current grumps strike me as moral laziness – and self-defeating. Get busy doing, hoping, you slugs! Don’t expect happiness, go get it! Marcus Aurelius (almost surely a depressive) offered like guidance: “The happiness of your life depends upon the quality of your thoughts: therefore, guard accordingly, and take care you entertain no notions unsuitable to virtue and reasonable nature.” Or Lincoln, more succinctly: “Most folks are as happy as they make up their minds to be.”