Are You Happy Yet?

There are an extraordinary number of books about happiness. There are lectures about happiness, podcasts about happiness, conferences about happiness, studies about happiness and people who appear to have made very successful careers explaining happiness to people who are presumably too unhappy to figure it out themselves. This should perhaps tell us something.

We are obsessed with being happy. Not occasionally happy. Not happy when something wonderful happens. We seem to believe we are supposed to establish happiness as a kind of permanent residence and that, if we make sufficiently intelligent choices and work hard enough on ourselves, we can remain there.

The minute you start asking yourself whether you are happy, you have created a problem that needs to be solved. Am I happy? Am I happy enough? Why am I not happier? What would make me happy? The question itself suggests there is an answer. More dangerously, it suggests there is something we could do, acquire, understand or change that would settle the matter. There is almost always something available.

This is partly why happiness has become such an excellent business. If happiness is something that can be achieved, there can be a method for achieving it. Someone can teach us. There can be books, courses, retreats, practices, habits and increasingly elaborate morning routines. There is always one more thing standing between you and the life you are supposed to be having. A belief you haven’t released. A pattern you haven’t broken. Some part of yourself you haven’t healed. You are almost there.

This is a remarkably convenient arrangement for the person selling the solution. If it doesn’t work, there is nothing wrong with the premise. You simply haven’t done enough work on yourself. You are resisting. You aren’t ready. You have limiting beliefs.

I am particularly suspicious of limiting beliefs. Certainly there are ways we think about ourselves that keep us stuck. There are choices we repeat, fears we indulge and things we refuse to see because seeing them would require us to do something difficult. But sometimes the limitation is not a belief.

Sometimes you didn’t get the job. Sometimes the relationship didn’t work. Sometimes someone gets sick. Sometimes money matters. Sometimes timing matters. Sometimes another person has free will and inconveniently uses it. You can believe in yourself with tremendous enthusiasm and the answer can still be no.

This is not pessimism. It is reality, which has developed a strangely poor reputation.

I am not against examining yourself. I would be in a very poor position to argue against it. I have been in therapy for more than twenty years. For most of that time, I went once a week. At one point, twice. At this point I don’t think there is anything particularly wrong with me that requires fixing. I still go. I consider it maintenance.

People go to the gym to maintain their bodies. They make regular appointments with dermatologists to have perfectly innocent-looking things inspected. I pay someone once a week to inspect my mind.

Perhaps it has become a habit. But I enjoy it. I like examining what I think, why I did something and whether I might do it differently now. After more than twenty years of therapy, I have also learned that there often isn’t a right or a wrong. There is perspective. There is where you are standing and the direction you happen to be looking.

Which, after all this therapy, is apparently still inward.

What I no longer believe is that because I am looking, there must always be something there to fix. There is a difference between examining yourself and assuming you are the problem.

Over the years, I have also worked with mentors and coaches, and seen astrologers, psychics and several healers. I was curious. I liked knowing what people thought. I liked the possibility that someone might tell me something about myself that I had somehow failed to notice.

The healers came about somewhat accidentally. I was in Bali for five days with my parents. I had not gone there in search of spiritual enlightenment. I wanted to explore the island. But somewhere in the course of doing that, I found myself going from temples and sightseeing to people who claimed to know things about the human condition that I did not.

Through a local I became friendly with on a tour, I unexpectedly got an appointment with the man Elizabeth Gilbert allegedly studied with in Eat, Pray, Love. I hadn’t been looking for him. My new friend happened to know him and got me a spot.

When I arrived, there was a line outside his door of mostly middle-aged divorced women from around the world. Many had read Eat, Pray, Love. Gilbert had come to Bali after her own marriage ended. Evidently, the book had given these women ideas. I understood. I had read the book too.

They had come from around the world. I had come from my hotel.

The guru himself was a very lovely man. Unfortunately, I found him considerably more compelling in Gilbert’s book than I did sitting across from him. Perhaps this was inevitable. Wisdom generally benefits from editing.

Somewhere else on the island, I ended up with a healer and fortune teller famous for his extraordinarily long fingernails. He told me my fortune, although nearly fifteen years later I cannot remember a single thing he predicted. I remember the fingernails perfectly.

Then there was another healer who examined me and concluded that there was really only one part of me requiring attention: my mind. I worried too much. Otherwise, apparently, I was fine. I had gone to Bali expecting beaches, temples and five days with my parents. I came home having been told, among other things, that I worried too much. This was not exactly news.

For years, I also went to see Frank Andrews, a psychic in my neighborhood who had been a friend of Andy Warhol’s. Warhol painted him, and Frank later became known for having predicted his death. My mother first went to Frank nearly thirty-five years ago and continued to see him from time to time. Eventually, so did I. Many, many times.

I liked Frank. I liked sitting across from someone who claimed to know something about what might happen next. I don’t remember exactly what I was hoping to hear each time. Probably some reassurance that everything would work out, or at least that whatever was worrying me at the moment would eventually stop worrying me. The future is much easier to contemplate when someone tells you they have already seen it.

Perhaps that was part of what I was looking for in all of these places. Not necessarily happiness itself, but some reassurance that I was going to find my way to it.

There is a certain comfort in believing everything can be found inside us, or predicted for us, because it makes life seem potentially controllable. Work hard enough, heal enough, understand yourself enough, know enough about what is coming next and perhaps you can protect yourself from disappointment.

Unfortunately, no amount of self-knowledge gives us jurisdiction over everything that happens next. Neither does therapy. Neither do psychics. Neither, as far as I can tell, does Bali. Some things are not up to you.

This doesn’t mean we should stop examining ourselves. We should be ruthless about the things that are ours: our choices, our patterns, what we tolerate, what we avoid, what we know and pretend not to know. But there should eventually be an end to our jurisdiction.

Not every rejection reveals something about your worth. Not every disappointment is evidence of an unhealed wound. Not every terrible thing that happens to you originated somewhere inside you. Sometimes you did your part. The rest belonged to somebody else.

Perhaps this need for control also explains why we have such difficulty accepting happiness for what it is. We seem perfectly capable of understanding that unpleasant feelings are temporary. When someone is grieving, angry, frightened, frustrated or simply having a terrible time, we remind them that it will pass. This too shall pass. Give it time. You won’t always feel this way. Things will get better.

We have considerably less enthusiasm for reminding people that the good feelings will pass too.

There are greeting cards wishing us a lifetime of happiness. Wedding toasts promise it. Birthday cards wish for another year filled with it. Fairy tales end happily ever after. We speak about happiness as though, once properly acquired, it should come with some sort of lifetime warranty. Then, when it disappears for a while, we are alarmed.

What happened? What’s wrong? Why don’t I feel the way I used to? Is it my relationship? My work? My life? Me?

Nobody seems to say: perhaps nothing happened. Perhaps happiness did exactly what every other feeling does.

It passed.

We find this comforting when we are suffering and almost offensive when we are happy.

Perhaps we need to reconsider what happiness is in the first place. We have made it the preferred condition of being alive, when perhaps it is simply one of the conditions of being alive. There is happiness and suffering, pleasure and disappointment, excitement and boredom, love and grief, and an enormous amount in between that is neither particularly good nor particularly bad.

Why should we expect happiness to occupy more of a life than everything else?

I would certainly prefer that it did. Given the choice, I would happily take eighty percent happiness, ten percent mild irritation and ten percent everything else. Unfortunately, I have not been asked to select a plan.

Maybe a life is fifty percent happiness and fifty percent suffering. I hope not. Maybe it is seventy-thirty. Maybe there are years when the proportions reverse themselves completely. There doesn’t seem to be a standard allocation. And yet we behave as though happiness is supposed to be the majority shareholder. If it isn’t, we start looking for what went wrong.

But perhaps nothing went wrong. Perhaps happiness is simply one of the many things a life contains.

This doesn’t mean I have developed some newfound enthusiasm for suffering. I would choose happiness over suffering every single time. I would like as much of it as possible. I would like it for the people I love. I would happily accept considerably more of it myself.

But expecting a lifetime of happiness? Don’t be silly. No one was offered that.

Most of the times I have been happiest, I wasn’t thinking about happiness at all. I was occupied with my life rather than evaluating how I felt about it. Usually I recognized it afterward.

Perhaps this is part of the problem with asking Are you happy? The question requires you to step outside your life and inspect it. Is this enough? Should I feel differently? Shouldn’t I be happier by now?

It is difficult to experience your life while simultaneously conducting its annual performance review.

When I look back at my own life, the evidence is annoyingly uncooperative. Some of my happiest memories belong to years I would never describe as happy. My mother was sick. My family was falling apart. There were hospitals, lawyers and problems I could not solve, despite my longstanding belief that sufficient persistence and an alarming number of emails can solve almost anything.

There was plenty to be miserable about, and I was hardly neglecting the opportunity. But I was happy too.

I laughed with my mother. I got dressed for dinner. I worked. I traveled. I saw my friends. I had wonderful meals and completely unremarkable afternoons that I would now pay an unreasonable amount of money to have back. None of this waited for the terrible parts to end.

For a long time, I thought these things contradicted one another. That a year in which my mother was dying could not also contain some of the happiest days of my life. That something ending could not still be wonderful while it was ending. That a terrible period could contain a very good afternoon.

I don’t think that anymore.

We prefer cleaner categories. The good years. The difficult years. The terrible year. The time everything changed. But a wonderful day can occur during the worst year of your life. A terrible phone call can arrive during an otherwise excellent Tuesday.

Which is why Are you happy? increasingly strikes me as an absurdly ambitious question. Happy with what? For how long? As of when? It asks us to take several decades of contradictory evidence and issue a ruling.

I can tell you whether I am happy right now. Anything beyond that feels unnecessarily ambitious.

And then there is the phrase You deserve to be happy.

But I don’t think anyone deserves happiness. I don’t think anyone deserves suffering either. That’s the point. Neither appears to be distributed on merit.

Wonderful things happen to terrible people with irritating frequency. Terrible things happen to wonderful people. People behave beautifully and lose. People behave terribly and prosper. Still, we talk as though decency, effort and sufficient suffering should eventually entitle us to something.

You’ve been through enough. Now you deserve to be happy.

I understand the impulse. I have felt it myself. But life doesn’t seem particularly concerned with what we’re due.

Happiness is not the prize for getting life right, any more than suffering is proof that you got it wrong. They are both things that happen while you are here, along with boredom, desire, pleasure, disappointment, love, fear, grief and a surprising amount of administrative work.

Which has also changed the way I hear Why is this happening to me? Why not me? Why shouldn’t something painful happen to me? Not because I deserved it. I was simply never promised otherwise.

We are equally determined to make suffering useful. It is no longer enough for something awful to happen. Eventually it must justify itself. You discovered your strength. You established boundaries. You became grateful. You finally understood what matters.

God forbid you simply had a terrible year. Apparently this is considered a waste.

We have turned suffering into a continuing education program. Every disappointment must offer credits. Every failed relationship requires a takeaway. Lose your job and the universe may be redirecting you.

I would occasionally like the universe to redirect someone else.

I understand why we do this. Meaning can make pain easier to carry. But pain itself is not particularly wise. It does not arrive with a curriculum. It has no investment in whether you emerge more evolved. It happened. Whatever comes afterward is our work.

I have learned things from terrible experiences. I understand myself better. I have changed what I tolerate, what I worry about and what I am willing to lose. But I did that.

Suffering does not improve your character. What you do with suffering might. And being capable of surviving something does not mean you needed the opportunity to prove it. We have confused surviving something with benefiting from it. They are not the same thing.

Perhaps our pursuit of happiness and our insistence on extracting wisdom from suffering come from the same peculiar expectation: that a good life should feel good. When it doesn’t, we immediately begin troubleshooting.

We search for the lesson, the solution, the thing in ourselves that still needs work. Surely there is some combination of insight and effort that will eventually get us there.

Happy, finally.

Except there is no finally.

There is no emotional state waiting at the end of a sufficiently well-managed life. There is only the life itself, containing things we desperately want to keep and things we cannot wait to be rid of, often at exactly the same time.

Happiness does not have to last to count. Suffering does not have to teach you something to end. A period of unhappiness does not necessarily mean your life needs to be dismantled and rebuilt. And being happy today is not a promise about tomorrow.

I do have some advice about happiness, although fortunately it is very short. When it comes, enjoy it.

Do not assume you deserved it. Do not assume you caused it. And, most importantly, do not expect it to stay.

Happiness is a feeling, not a lifetime appointment. Its departure does not mean something has gone wrong. It means you are alive and another feeling has arrived.

So when you are happy, notice it.

And when you’re not, don’t be so surprised.