How to Be Happy: Lesson #1
It’s a phrase that has dogged us since July 4, 1776: “the pursuit of Happiness.” It appears in the Preamble of the United States Declaration of Independence in one of the most famous sentences in history:
We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men [and women] are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator [if they so believe in one] with certain inalienable Rights [IRs], that among these are Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness.”
The fact that the phrase comes at the end of the sentence and that the authors capped “Happiness” suggests they felt particularly strongly about this IR. So, the founders seem to be encouraging everyone to go forth and be happy, or, to quote MW, to go forth and “have the feeling arising from consciousness of well-being.” But the idea that we should be happy goes back much farther than 1776, back to ancient Greece in fact, where Aristotle let slip that “Happiness is the meaning and purpose of life, the whole aim and end of human existence.”
Well, okay, but unfortunately our founding fathers and Ari neglected to drop hints about how we achieve happiness. Fortunately, there are others who can fill that gap, others such as the good folks at The Pursuit of Happiness website, who tell us about the Science of Happiness (also called Positive Psychology).
But I will leave the POH folks for Lesson #2. In Lesson #1, I want to focus (and thank) another happadvocate [champion of POH], Moya Sarner. Her instruction for us, appearing in The Guardian, is this: “The age of envy: how to be happy when everyone else’s life looks perfect.” She begins her piece with this confession:
One night about five years ago, just before bed, I saw a tweet from a friend announcing how delighted he was to have been shortlisted for a journalism award. I felt my stomach lurch and my head spin, my teeth clench and my chest tighten. I did not sleep until the morning.
The subtitle to Sarner’s story tells you where she is going with this: “Social media has created a world in which everyone seems ecstatic — apart from us. Is there any way for people to curb their resentment?” Ah…stay off social media? Too simple, I guess. To be fair, Sarner is really talking about envy that goes beyond Facebook and Instagram. She notes that our happadvocate Aristotle knew something about this as well when he wrote how we have always felt “pain at the sight of another’s good fortune, stirred by ‘those who have what we ought to have.’” Social media just makes that realization worse and more frequent. After a long discussion of the topic, Moya lists some of the ways we can diffuse our havnotvy [ire sparked by being among those going without]. One is to convince yourself that you don’t need the things — physical or emotional or financial — that other people are crowing about. Another is to start posting more yourself and do your own crowing to drown out the din of all that joy-not-yours. The last one is to ask and answer this question: “What would be good enough?” Not surprisingly, Sarner hasn’t come up with an answer yet. Perhaps our founding fathers knew of the impossibility of this task. After all, they only guaranteed our right to pursue happiness, not to actually have it.
Unlike Sarner, I do have an answer for you. Here’s how to stop somediative [relative to social media] envy dead in its tracks. Say someone writes something like “Our kitty Jinx is the most fabulous kitty in the whole world” as Jinx demonstrates how he can play piano while balancing a catnip banana on his nose. Here’s what you do. First, give your own talentless cats a withering glare, which they will ignore. Second, look at the post again, shake your head sadly, and say “Fake news.” Works every time.
(Published originally on RatBlurt™, November 29, 2018.)
