It feels good to feel happy, and happiness is widely promoted. From the Declaration of Independence to the Dalai Lama, the pursuit of happiness seems to be offered as a worthy goal in life. It raises the question: why are so many people unhappy?
The continuous pursuit of happiness is, ironically, a source of widespread unhappiness. The disappointment and shame people feel about being unhappy, as if they have failed to be worthy, adds to an epidemic of depression. Nearly 70 million Americans identity themselves as depressed, and roughly 50 million take antidepressants. For a country that promotes happiness, we’re not doing too well.
America is materialist. The pursuit of stuff is what brings happiness for many. By elevating happiness as something to attain, happiness too becomes a thing to crave. Alcohol, sex, drugs and shopping occupy central roles in life, while boredom is avoided at all costs. Nearly fifty percent of Americans say they are lonely, and this is partly because they cannot tolerate time spent alone.
We are social animals, and separation from others is emotionally painful. At the same time, each of us is an individual, alone with our thoughts and feelings unless we care to share them, which many find difficult to do. Again, a sense of shame creates reluctance to admit to our thoughts and feelings, as if each of us must live up to some standard of worthiness; if we don’t, we turn to blame. We either blame ourselves or others for whatever dissatisfaction we feel, displacing the perfectly ordinary experience of emotional ups and downs with something pathological. By elevating happiness, we have subordinated sadness.
Sadness is a perfectly sane reaction to events in life, like loss of friends or loved ones, witnessing cruelty, the tragedy of natural disasters, etc.; life is heartbreaking. Sadness is healthy and normal, not pathological, but it gets a bad rap. To be happy all the time, conversely, is not normal. Talk about boring; eternal happiness is akin to death. It is only through experiencing the highs and lows of life that happiness can be identified.
As a material pursuit, happiness is exhausting the world’s living system. Our persistent consumption of stuff is decimating forests, driving species extinction, polluting oceans, exhausting groundwater, and filling America’s landfill dumps with nearly 300 million tons of garbage each year. At what price is happiness worth pursuing?
Don’t get me wrong. I’m not saying it’s bad to be happy. I wake up each day pleased to be alive. It’s just that achieving constant happiness is impossible. Instead, I suggest satisfaction, which includes the emotional acceptance of “enough.” Satisfaction respects limits and tempers expectation.
Part of growing up through infancy and toddlerhood is learning to accept delayed gratification, coming to terms with limits and expectations, but we seem to have abandoned that process. To the contrary, modern life now promises instant gratification – the fastest internet, the quickest food delivery, overnight weight loss drugs, 24-hour cell phone service, and so forth, all this in pursuit of happiness.
As a result, we’ve become an infantilized culture, expecting that all of our desires will immediately be satisfied and having tantrums when they are delayed. We’ve become big babies but hold on to your diaper; Mother Earth is about to teach us a big lesson.
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