The H word

I am, and always have been, deeply suspicious of people who aspire to be “happy.” This, to my mind, is like aspiring to be tall. If there’s an appropriate time in life for either goal, it ends at about age 15.

An even better analogy is that happiness, like weather, almost always occurs for understandable reasons. A cold front moves down from Canada, the wind picks up, and certain things happen. We might get the snow day or rainbow we wished for, but not because we wished for it.

As someone whose sturdy religious beliefs are undergirded by a secret sense of personal entitlement and deep superstition, I also think prolonged feelings of happiness are just asking for the Big Foot to squash me. I do have the odd out-of-nowhere flash of pure joy, but if it lasts more than a few minutes, I clear the mental decks and scramble back to safety.

I got some new insights into all this today when I read a wonderful post by Tim Kreider in “Happy Days: The Pursuit of What Matters in Troubled Times,” a New York Times blog. Here’s the best bit:

“I suspect there is something inherently misguided and self-defeating and hopeless about any deliberate campaign to achieve happiness. Perhaps the reason we so often experience happiness only in hindsight, and that chasing it is such a fool’s errand, is that happiness isn’t a goal in itself but is only an aftereffect. It’s the consequence of having lived in the way that we’re supposed to — by which I don’t mean ethically correctly so much as just consciously, fully engaged in the business of living.”

This, of course, is a more sophisticated view than mine, and one that I will henceforth repackage slightly and claim as my own. Having this so well sorted out in my mind makes me feel satisfied and smart. It makes me confident that my time reading the newspaper this morning was time well spent. Does it make me happy? Certainly not.