“Shower on him every blessing, drown him in a sea of happiness, give him economic prosperity such that he should have nothing else to do but sleep, eat cakes, and busy himself with the continuation of the species, and even then, out of sheer ingratitude, sheer spite, man would play you some nasty trick”. Dostoevsky

I have a grand theory. The pursuit of happiness is bullshit. It always was. Human beings don’t give a rat’s ass about being happy. What we are after is feeling; and the valence of it matters much less than the intensity.

Case in point, number 1: The World.

Political pundits rationalize the rise of populism (a term I dislike as it denigrates democracy, but will employ for lack of a better term) as a knee-jerk reaction to economic pressures and a rapidly changing social fabric. While there may be some truth in that, I think it explains half of it, at best. In so many ways, we have it better than any century before us. The real gap is between what we have and what we expected.

Our problem is that we cannot suffer moderation and uncertainty. What we’re seeing at is the result of infotainment. The more polarizing and black and white the media we consume the less nuanced a view of reality we have. Decades of shunning grey zones and context in favour of new entertainment and simple and easy sound-bite-driven argumants yhas shrunk our attention spans to the point where goldfish have superior powers of concentration.

The world is more thrilling when it’s like a sports competition between warring nations and wrongheaded factions. It’s easier to see the other side as evil or stupid than simply a neighbor with slightly different values. It’s always more exciting to believe that our guy or gal has all the answers about everything than to see a set of rivals that have a different set of flaws and qualities.

A narcissistic megalomaniac holds the job title we call ‘leader of the free world’ (and I’m not saying that I agree or disagree with some or all of his moves, I’m just saying that his motives and interests are far from yours and we are fools if we think that is the case)¹ and many countries are off-balance because that’s what makes it interesting. We like to think it’s because voters agree with the populists, but when was the last time voters took the time to analyze their positions, values, and the long term impacts of their positions? When was the last time candidates spelled those out for us? The news, fake or not, offered us pro-wrestling-like entertainment and we gobbled it up.

The less we tolerate the tepid waters in the middle where truth generally lies, the more we demand action-packed drama rather than deliberate and thoughtful dialogue the more volatile a world we will have. Whether our allegiances make this a horror show or a thrilling western, we have exactly what we deserve, exactly what we wanted – entertaining but not smart.

Case-in-point, number two: Our lives.

How much of our strife comes from our own doing: sabotage, defensiveness, resistance to change, or grandiosity? Could it be that we indulge in this because it makes our personal psychodrama all the more interesting? How many problems do you really have? I mean real problems – hunger, isolation, serious illness, loss of loved ones – not the garden variety worries that we face habitually, are you dealing with right now? For some the answer is several, for most of us it is none. Yet, we dwell on problems.

Notice that asked what we want most and people gravitate towards a jackpot and what we want least and we think of major illness. Measure the happiness of a lottery winner a year or so later and their back to where they were when they were buying tickets and praying. After a depression, the person who becomes paraplegic finds their way back to the baseline they were at when they could move all their limbs. It’s as if we have a worry quota and no matter our situation we will find problems to occupy the anxiety circuits of our brains.

Line up the world’s population in a police lineup and position yourself according to wealth, appearance, health, social connection, education, and morality (these are the basic dimensions we strive to be superior to others along) and indicate where you are. Chances are that you are lucky as hell to be where you are on so many of these dimensions, if not all of them. If we had a balance sheet that had our blessings on one side and our problems on the other, would the problem side really be that significant? I’m not saying they’re not there or unimportant. Problems motivate us to fix things. How many do we fix, versus just stew over?

Perhaps they seem overwhelming because we never glance at the black ink in the other column. Even when we are young and struggling for an economic base and a position in society, we have our youth. We have less, but we have that elusive aspect of happiness called hope. Ask any person thirty or forty years older if they’d trade their worldly goods for more youth and they will likely reply in the affirmative.

Occasionally, life gives us good reason to worry; much of the time it is much ado about nothing. Do you even recall what you were so worried about on this date a year ago? Five years ago? If you do, did the monster turn out to be as terrifying as you imagined it to be? When a friend or acquaintance riffs on their problems you empathize, as you should, but, admit for the garden variety problems, we don’t fret about them. We may even find a half dozen simple solutions come to mind to help sort them out. we know we’re just hearing the buss of their anxiety circuits. And it’s a healthy to have their story drown out or draw out our own.

The Netflix series you call ‘your life’ is so much more interesting when we harbour resentment towards our spouse for a minor slip-up or some imperfection and provoke a fight rather than simply hugging them and being grateful that they grace our lives. Better when we focus on kids flaws rather than blessing to have them. Enthralling to one-up others on possessions beauty and character than to simply be. Run an inventory of your thoughts, what’s the monologue either ruminating about problem and fantasizing about its resolution.

We know that were biologically wired to worry about potential problems, that’s why your ancestors lived long enough to be able to make you. and how easy it is to run that story of woe in the cassette tape over and over again in our minds, the tracks run deep after all this time. It’s a quick and easy way to feel alive – pain is very real and a readily reliable source of affirmation that we’re still here, still part of the game. We love to focus on how broken and traumatized we are, how we’ve been wronged and dealt a bad deal rather than so incredibly lucky to be alive. Admit that happily ever after is nice, but it makes for a lousy plot. I’m fine and I’ll be fine are stories that don’t liberate the neurochemicals we’re addicted to in our brains.

In any good story or in any song, it’s struggle and ups and downs that have us on the edge of our seats all the way through; happy, calm, and resolution, if it comes, all comes at the end – and so it is in life, we leave room to breathe to the very last episode, to our last breaths.   

“The trick is in what one emphasizes.We either make ourselves miserable, or we make ourselves happy. The amount of work is the same.”  Carlos Castaneda

K. Wilkins is the author of:

Stoic Virtues Journal: Your Guide to Becoming the Person You Aspire to Be

Rules for Living Journal: Life Advice Based On the Words and Wisdom of Jordan B. Peterson

1.      In fact, what I find most alarming is the track record of the person in question. Not the real tally of wins and losses, the fact that scoreboard in his head sees everything as a victory (or him being a victim). No mistakes, no errors, no capacity to fathom that he could be wrong. Beautiful story, if it were not a fairy tale. It’s a great formula for finding people living in a story and desperate for a hero to lead them to the promised land (or back to a great place). It’s a lousy formula from finding the truth. The real world (which is rocks and trees and animals and plants and natural forces is not a story), is best understood via the scientific method. With the scientific method we have theories, and hypothesis (sub-theories: hunches that are not yet proven right and thus become working theories), and we start it off with the null hypothesis (the assumption that we are likely to be wrong).