I am not a happy person, never have been. As a child, my favorite Winnie-the-Pooh character was Eeyore. For most of human history, I would have been considered normal. Happiness, in this life, on this earth, was a prize reserved for the gods and the fortunate few. Today, though, not only is happiness considered possible for anyone to attain, it is expected. Thus, I, and millions of others, suffer from the uniquely modern malady that historian Darrin McMahon calls "the unhappiness of not being happy." It is no fun at all.
~~~
Believe it or not, most people in the world say they are happy. Why does this come as a surprise? Two types of people, I think, are to blame: journalists and philosophers. The media report, as a rule, only bad news: wars, famine, the latest Hollywood couple's implosion. The philosophers, though, are the real culprits--the brooding white guys from Europe. They tended to wear all black, smoke too much, and had trouble getting dates. So they hung out, alone, in cafes, pondering the universe, and--surprise!--concluded it is an unhappy place. Worse of all was Freud. While not technically a brooding philosopher, Freud did much to shape our views on happiness. He once said: "The intention that Man should be happy is not in the plan of Creation." That is a remarkable statement, especially coming from a man whose ideas forged the foundation of our mental-health system. Imagine of some doctor in turn-of-the-century Vienna had declared: "The intention that Man should have a healthy body is not in the plan of Creation." We'd probably lock him up, or at least strip him of his medical license. We certainly wouldn't base our entire medical system on his ideas. Yet that is exactly what we did with Freud.
~~~
...is there something to be said for boredom? The British philosopher Bertrand Russell thought so. "A certain amount of boredom is...essential to a happy life," he wrote. Patience and boredom are closely related. Boredom, a certain kind of boredom, is really impatience. You don't like the way things are, they aren't interesting enough for you, so you decide--and boredom is a decision--that you are bored. Russell had something to say about this: "A generation that cannot endure boredom will be a generation of little men, of men unduly divorced from the slow process of nature, of men in whom every vital impulse slowly withers as though they were cut flowers in a vase."
~~~
...there must be a clear demarcation between paradise and ordinary life, separated by a netherworld that only a few fortunate souls can traverse. Paradise, in other words, is a selective club. Just like business class, which owes its pleasures, in no small way, to the presence of other travellers less fortunate than yourself, back there in coach gumming rubbery chicken and fishing in their pockets for exact change to anesthesize themselves with miniature bottles of vodka. You can't see these poor souls--that's what the curtain is for--but you know they are there, and that makes all the difference.
~~~
(With Karma in Bhutan)
"Karma, are you happy?"
"Looking back at my life, I find that the answer is yes. I have achieved happiness because I don't have unrealistic expectations."
This strikes me as an odd explanation. In America, high expectations are the engines that drive us, the gas in our tanks, the force behind our dreams and, by extension, our pursuit of happiness.
"My way of thinking is completely different," he says. "I have no such mountains to scale; basically, I find that living itself is a struggle, and if I'm satisfied, if I have just done that, lived well, in the evening I sigh and say, 'It was okay.'"
"Do you have bad days?"
"Yes, but it's important to put them in the perspective of insignificance. Even if you have achieved great things, it is a sort of theater playing in your mind. You think it so important, but actually you have not made such a difference to anyone's life."
"So you're saying, Karma, that both our greatest achievements and our greatest failures are equally insignificant?"
"Yes. We would like to think that we really made a difference. Okay, in the week's scale it may have been interesting. Take another forty years, I'm not so sure. Take three generations, and you will be forgotten without a trace."
"And you find this a source of comfort? I find it terribly depressing."
"No, as we say in Buddhism, there is nothing greater than compassion. If you have done something good, then in the moment you should feel satisfaction. I used to kill many flies and mosquitoes every day because they give me some fear of malaria, but sometimes I don't do that. I have a moment of pause and think, 'Well, he is not harming me, not directly threatening me. He is defenseless. Why am I crushing it?' So then I release it, and there is a moment--it is an insignificant act, I know--but there is a moment of genuine peace. I just let it go."
~~~
(Mopey Moldova)
Are there bigger lessons to be gleaned from Moldova's unhappiness, other than the obvious point that one should at all costs and under all circumstances avoid being Moldovan? Yes, I think there are. Lesson number one: "Not my problem" is not a philosophy. It's a mental illness. Right up there with pessimism. Other people's problems are our problems. If your neighbor is laid off, you may feel as though you've dodged the bullet, but you haven't. You just don't feel the pain yet. Or as Ruut Veenhoven told me: "The quality of a society is more important than your place in that society." In other words, beter to be a small fish in a clean pond than a big fish in a polluted lake.
Lesson number two: Poverty, relative poverty, is often an excuse for unhappiness. Yes, Moldovans are poor compared to other Europeans, but clearly it is their reaction to their economic problems, and not the problems alone, that explains their unhappiness.
The seeds of Moldovan unhappiness are planted in their culture. A culture that belittles the value of trust and friendship. A culture that rewards mean-spiritedness and deceit. A culture that carves out no space for unrequited kindness, no space for what St. Augustine called "the happiness of hope." Or as the ancient Indian text the Mahabharata says: "Hope is the sheet anchor of every man. When hope is destroyed, great grief follows, which is almost equal to death itself."
~~~
I've spent most of my life trying to think myself to happiness, and my failure to achieve that only proves, in my mind, that I am not a good enough thinker. It never occurred to me that the source of my unhappiness is not flawed thinking but thinking itself.
When you get down to it, there are basically three, and only three, ways to make yourself happier. You can increase the amount of positive affect (good feelings). You can decrease the amount of negative affect (bad feelings). Or you can change the subject. This third option is one we rarely consider or, if we do, dismiss it as a cop-out. Change the subject? That's avoidance, we protest, that's cowardly! No, we must wallow in our stuff, analyze it, taste it, swallow it, then spit it out, swallow it again, and talk about it, of course, always talk about it. I've always believed that the road to happiness is paved with words. Nouns, adjectives, verbs, if arranged in just the right constellation, would enable me to hopscotch to bliss. For Thais, this is an alien and quite silly approach to life. Thais don't trust words. They view them as tools of deception, not truth. The Thais have a different way, the way of mai pen rai. It means "never mind"...a real, just-drop-it-and-get-on-with-life "never mind."
~ Eric Weiner, "The Geography of Bliss - One Grump's Search for the Happiest Places in the World"
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