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.
