Imagine this conversation :

A : What do you think of happy people
B : Stupid. They must be stupid. Only stupid people are happy.
A : Are you a stupid person?
B : No I am not.
A: And you don’t want to be a stupid person.
B : Of course not.
A : So you don’t want to be happy.
B : ….huh….

That’s what I will be talkoing about tonight. What would it mean to be happy? What do we think of happy people? Would we be comfortable with someone pointing at us and saying “now there’s a very happy person. ” And if not, why not?

Are we afraid that if people think we are happy, we will stop getting stuff?

But if you’re happy, why do you need more stuff?

Are we afraid of our own happiness because we know, deep down, that if we were happy we wouldn’t know what to do with ourselves any more.

The pursuit of happiness drives our lives. Nobody said anything about actually catching it. The pursuit of happiness in its various forms – wealth, status, sex, social superiority, spiritual enlightenment, and everything else we think will make us happy – has taken over the job of religion in terms of giving direction and purpose to our lives.

If that stopped – if we reached a point where we could say we had reached that mythical town called Happy and could declare ourselves to have enough – we would lose the whole foundation of our lives and would have no idea what to do with ourselves.

We’d be like wealthy retirees, slowly going crazy precisely because we have no purpose any more and there are only so many goddamned cruises you can take before you get sick of indulging yourself and want to do something useful with your time.

Okay, I might have taken that analogy a little too far.

My point is, on some level we know that to actually reach that town called Happy would rob our lives of all purpose and direction and that’s why so many of us end up either turning away at the last second or sabotaging our own engines along the way.

The paradox of it all is that if we truly recognized this in our culture and embraced our own basic hedonism, it would stop working. Believing that there really is a place called Happy gives people that all important focus in their lives that will get them through the day and make them feel like there is a point to their lives.

If we truly understood the futility of this seach for our Happy place, we would have to deal with one of the darkest and deepest secrets of modern society, which is that it does not give people everything they need. 

Human beings have many needs that cannot be met via spending money and that therefore modern consumer capitalism does not have a reason to serve.

If the fundamental problem is that you are lonely and wish you had more friends, there is no way to buy friends. None. You could pay people to pretend to be your friends, either overtly or implicitly. You can buy membership in someplace where you are more likely to meet someone whom you could befriend. You can even hang out with people you intensely dislike that you call friends.

But no amount of money in the world can actually get you a real friend. Friendship is a genuine emotional connection and those cannot be bought or sold.

People really don’t like it when I point this out to them. The fact that money can buy happiness is one of the most cherished beliefs in the modern world. Billions are spent daily on ways to try to meet these emotional needs via material means. Whether it’s compensating for a feeling of intellectual inferioirity by buying a book that makes you feel smart when you buy it or trying to fix you feeling of fading and uncertain masculinity by buying a truck because its commercials are so manly or even sending your kids off to an expensive boarding school and telling yourself it’s for their own good when the reality is that no amount of love for your children can overcome your dislike of sharing.

In our lands of plenty, millions suffer the symptoms of spiritual starvation every day. Loneliness, a feeling of emptiness, of life having no meaning and there being no point to anything, isolation,. feeling unhappy for “no reason”… it is a malady which can express itself in many different ways but the route cause is always the same :

Unmet emotional needs we do not even know we have. That’s how spirit-blind we are.

And so we have become a world of addicts. We self-medicate our communal depression with addictions from the obvious (drugs, alcohol) to the outre (sex with strangers, adrenaline junkies) to the downright dangerous (money hoarding, brutal male status seeking on the world stage).

Every one of us modern rats have our own version of the button we push to make the food pellet come out. We all use material means to treat our spiritual diseases instead of finding and treating the root causes of our malaise, which – remember – may very well things which money simply cannot buy.

Things which require things like personal change, risk taking, stepping outside your comfort zone, examining your life in detail, and a lot of other things which might work wonders but are definitely inconvenient.

Worse than that, they take work and sacrifice and risking feeling bad emotions and those are things we just don’t do any more. You know?

That sutff is hard.

And when we aren’t at work, we don’t want to do anything hard.

Especially if it’s something that’s not just hard but uncomfortable and takes a lot of focus and energy.

So if actually making it to that town called Happiness requires any drive, difficulty, discomfort, discipline, or dedication, well, I guess we will just stay unhappy.

It’s much easier to declare there to be something fundamentally wrong with the entire universe because happiness requires doing things we don’t want to do.

Guess it’s just not worth it.

Or at least, that is what we will tell ourselves.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.