For use: August 19, 2001

 Future Shoes 
"One Big Happy"

by Michael Finley

Note: The following message preceded this essay to subscribers: 

Dear friends -- I've had a dickens of a time writing the past week. I don't know why, but nothing has come easy, and I have felt that I forgot everything I knew about writing. I knew what the ideas were, but I felt unable to make anyone care about them. So I decided to face the issue directly and write about that feeling. Maybe this will get me back on track. - Mike

I have been thinking about happiness, and it has got me down.

Happiness sounds like such a good thing. The birds singing. The band playing. The wind turning the pinwheel in a child's hand.

I personally want to be happy all the time. And I do wish for every happiness for you and yours (although perhaps not quite as great as my own). Happiness seems to make us better people, judging from the looks on our faces. But is there enough happiness in the universe to go around?

In this view happiness is a finite commodity, a pie of measurable dimensions, albeit golden flaky crust. Jack Horner can pull out a plum, and so can several others, but eventually, doesn't the pie start having to issue plum scrip, IOUs for the next happiness the factory is able to ship? Aren’t there too many of us wanting to be happy, expecting to be happy or else, for us all to arrive there together?

Admittedly, this is zero sum thinking, and there are other ways to consider the situation. I was raised, for instance, to believe in miracles, to understand that a basket of  bread and a string of fish can feed all Woodstock if the people but believe. And think how happy they must be, when every person is satisfied?

But I look around at America, in my down moments, and I don’t see a multitude of seekers willing to share a picnic basket. We're a cloud of ravenous locusts, only with less of a sense of teamwork, an Indianapolis 500 of gluttony and acquisition, swarming toward what we want and think we deserve, each one of us determined to get ours, where "ours" is the most we can possibly get.

A big fast car is a good metaphor for what we want -- ample room, high speed, indifferent gas mileage, status above ordinary people and separation from them, plus the ability to survive collisions with them.

When I read the Declaration of Independence, and come across "the pursuit of happiness," I think what a country this is, that virtually guarantees happiness in the founding document of the nation. And I think of the founding fathers speeding back to their respective colonial capitals afterward, one by one in Ford Explorers.

I think some people turn to crime because they feel that they have been guaranteed happiness on TV and in magazines, and when it doesn’t come to them in the natural course of things, they go out and grab it. They rob and stalk and cheat because they have been told they are entitled to the good things in life.

It is implied in every commercial. McDonalds doesn't sell hamburgers, it sells smiling families. Citicorp isn't after your wealth, it just wants you to nod in a secure, comfortable way. Kodak doesn’t document your vacation, it commemorates moments of peak happiness so you can refer back to them in occasional moments of doubt, and say, yes, that's the way life really is.

But, logically, these promises cant be kept. We can't all have ample space. There isn't enough elbow room for all our swinging elbows. Take a taxi ride through downtown Calcutta, and ponder the happiness guarantee.

I have a theory, and it is that The Establishment (that dark controlling power whose fault our intermittent moments of unhappiness is) knows there are not enough resources for us all to be happy, so it created celebrities. No, we can’t all have Nicole Kidman, but Tom Cruise could, for a time. (And when she started to make him unhappy, or vice versa, they traded up to higher happiness.)

Celebrities stand atop the pyramid of happiness, flashing capped smiles and enhanced body parts. They are stand-ins for the rest of us, and we curiously endorse this system, gobbling up all the news their press agents release to us, as if the lives portrayed, and the happiness attained, are somehow ours.

Midway down the pyramid are us Jack Horners, living lives of ersatz celebrity, driving big cars and mowing large lawns. Below us yawns Calcutta, where happiness comes not in this life but by purchasing it for the future with the misery of today.

Buddhists and Christians say that much of the cause of unhappiness is our very pursuit of it. That happiness devoid of virtue is fetishism, that happiness has no value unless other values are in place.

At key intervals in our children's lives, we have asked them what they think Rachel and I wish for them -- that they live happy lives, that they be successful in their endeavors, or that they be good Jons and Dans. When they were children they unfailingly answered "happiness," because so much evidence existed that that was what we hoped for them. We told them they were wrong.

When they approached age 10 or so, they saw our other face, which prized performance and achievement, and opted for success. And we told them that, again, they were wrong.

It wasn't until they hit 12 or 13 that they began to choose right. Maybe it was maturity, or maybe it was that there were no answers left. Without goodness in one's heart, happiness is thin and cheap, and success is neurotic. They get it now, and it is a sobering challenge to them, to develop on the inside instead of storing things up in bank accounts and on resumes.

It means they must grapple with death, and failure, and deepest suffering -- some gift to pass on to the people you love most!

And  yet, if we had not taught them this, what chance for true happiness did they have?

  Copyright (c) 2001 by Michael Finley

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