Tuesday, January 8, 2013

Happiness is a Four Letter Word

Recently I did some thinking, and I came to the conclusion that I am not happy.

I thought long and hard about it, mulling this post over for about a week; cutting this, adding that, starting completely from scratch. I usually just write something and, if it doesn't need any sources, just let it go after the first or second read-through, but this time I couldn't shake the feeling that all previous iterations sounded... whiny. Mostly because I kept asking myself- what have I to be unhappy about?

I have a job that doesn't pay me a lot, but it pays me enough. Though my friends are by and large very far away from me, I still have friends that care. The same goes for my family, who raised me in an upper-middle class section of a safe town. I have my health, my youth, an advanced education, and through an undeserved confluence of favorable genetic lottery winnings, I am a white male in America.

What do I have to be unhappy about?

Not only do I have these boons, but I work with people who have nothing. No family, no real friends, no job or posessions of their own. They're so debilitated by their mental illnesses, which is often an unholy coctail of something like borderline personality disorder, antisocial personality disorder, bipolar disorder, various flavors of hallucinations or delusions AND borderline intellectual functioning... that a hospital is the only place that they can function. It's a red-letter week when they get an extra bag of popcorn on Friday because they went 7 days without attacking anyone.

I would look at my own lack of happiness, and then I would look at the circumstances of my patients, and I would say to my reflection in the mirror, "You think YOU have problems? You have NOTHING of the sort. You know what problems are. Your issues are jokes. Man up and move on."

But I wasn't any happier.

At this point, I have to distinguish something- Most days, I wasn't happy... but most days, I was content. Or at least, content enough. As long as I made sure to do things I enjoy, things that make me feel like I'm growing, then I could accept where I was. My situation wasn't ideal, so I had to have that sensation of forward momentum to stay sane.

But even in staying sane, I wasn't happy.

However, believe it or not, this is not about my own feelings. I'm using myself as an example, but I'm not writing this to delve into what kept me from being happy. I'm writing this because in my endless re-writes of this post, I started thinking about the nature of happiness, contentedment, and unhappiness. Because as I thought, I came to realize- I might not be happy, but I'm typically not actively unhappy, either. I'm mostly just... "meh".

So then I wondered, are other people like this? Other folks in my field, in other but similarly low-pay fields? How about richer folks, people who actually qualify as "middle class"? Or how about that fabled "1%"? Does money have anything to do with it? You always hear money doesn't buy happiness (though Daniel Tosh would tell you, it does buy a waverunner, and have you ever seen an unhappy person on a waverunner?)

So I'm not usually running around gushing about how ecstatic I am, but neither am I playing a solo game of pity me. And I guess that's ok- certainly better than if I was actively bemoaning my fate- but I felt like something was amiss. Wasn't I supposed to be happy? That's what I keep hearing. "Follow your dreams! If you love your work you'll never work a day in your life!" I see these commercials for antidepressants, but the message is not "restore a chemical balance to your dopaminergic pathways", it's "take this pill to BE HAPPY". That sinks in after the millionth or so ad for Zoloft.

Then I started thinking, what if this whole happiness push is just a marketing campaign?

And THEN I started thinking- what if I don't actually have to be happy at all?
(At least, not most of the time).

I realize that's a strange position to take, but consider it. Aside from the lucky few who have jobs that fulfil them on every level (and fuck you if one of you is reading this), how often do you wake up thinking, "Oh boy, time to go to work again"? Put another way, imagine you had to rank how happy your day was, overall, each day for a month. You do this on a scale from 1-10, 1 being "terrible", 5 being "neither overly happy or unhappy", and 10 being "exceedingly happy". What do you think your average score would come out to be?

I'd bet good money that you'd likely wall between 4 and 6. I'd give you a 68.2% chance of landing there, as a matter of fact- and I'd give you a 95.4% chance of falling between 3 and 7. Those numbers aren't just values I plucked out of thin air; they're the % of the population that'll fall within 1-2 standard deviations of the mean in a normal bell curve. Does that sound like statistical jubberish to you? Look it up. (If a Psych guy can get it, you can to; have no fear).

The point is, I'd be willing to bet that for most people, most days are unremarkable. Thats kind of what makes them most days. And that's all well and good- I try to take any day that doesn't actively suck donkey balls as a victory- but I started wondering, if most days are mostly "meh" for folks in the grand scheme of things, why do we appear to be so hyper-focused on getting happiness like it's some XBox of Life achievement? "YES, I totally got Rank 3 Happiness! I am AMAZING!"

Because, even someone with a novice's experience with modern video games knows what comes next.

"...Fuckall, now I need to earn Rank 4 Happiness."

So as I sat there, typing out the conclusion of my little monologue, I thought to myself- maybe that random idea that popped into my head was right. Maybe the trick isn't to be happy each and every day. Maybe it isn't even to be happy most days. Maybe the trick is to cross one set of fingers that you'll be happy on some days, and cross the other set that you're unhappy less often than that.

No comments:

Post a Comment