Happy All the Time

The late Laurie Colwin once wrote a novel entitled Happy All the Time. It was a cute title for a book and for the age of excess (the 70’s) in which it was written. But it’s a lousy idea for living. Many metaphoric vessels crash on the shoals of happiness, which are like the Scylla and Charybdis of the Age of Sensation. For those of you who don’t know what the Age of Sensation is, it refers to materialism. Living in the Now is a nice spiritual premise that’s at the heart of the Buddhist view of life. It’s ironically also a premise that’s used to defend the unmitigated pursuit pleasure, to the extent that we equate happiness with pleasure. And there is an almost Darwinian selectivity involved with this pursuit. Those at the top of the food chain, who have the right mixture of looks and brains, are awarded disproportionate amounts of pleasure as compared to those unfortunates who have lost their brains and looks or never had either. To be the valedictorian of your class at the very best college and also be blessed with perfect skin and a nice chin is the opposite from being an impoverished leper. Class used to define some of these separations, but now inequity is dished out in a more democratic way, though the results are markedly the same. The happy who have everything don’t need anyone to talk to and the poor and miserable who live in a perennial state of loss aversion are virtual chatterboxes. There are of course a small category of winners who are perpetually miserable and of losers whose profound sense of oneness with the universe allows them to be exultant (despite the existential reality of their condition), but these tend to be the exceptions. If you are looking to have a good conversation about the meaning of life, you’re not going to find it with the winners in the sweepstakes of life. You have to seek out the black sheep in the human family. The last shall be first.