Are We Obsessed with Happiness?

Something hasn't been sitting well lately. The older I get the more I feel like I need to have accomplished, and everything around me seems to reflect this puzzling message, when shouldn't we have figured out more as we age, not less? And as a result, be more content, joyful, even... gasp! Happy??

Apparently I'm not alone.



Thanks to this article from Alicia that reminds us it may just be unreasonable to expect to be blissfully happy 24/7 - or, just the latest unrealistic demand for women...

I spent the better part of my 20s and early 30s being told by Sylvia Ann Hewlett that my fertility was evaporating by the millisecond and by the Rules women that I'd better snag a husband before my aesthetic value decreased and my clock ticked out. Life without children is not worth living, childless women are told repeatedly, recently (to name but one example) in a Times of London story by a mother whose "heart aches for" her feminist friends who wound up childless, apparently because feminism taught them to eschew motherhood (a line of argument that is patently inaccurate, but whatever). "As they stare into a barren future," Eleanor Mills writes of her ambitious friends, "many singletons wish they'd put some of the focus and drive that has furnished them with sparkling careers, worn-out passports and glamorous social lives into the more mundane business of having a family." Many of her cohort, Mills reports, realize "often too late ... that no job will ever love you back" and, more menacingly, "that the graveyards are full of important executives." (Hear that? You’ll be lonely and dead, ladies.)


And this great triple film review from my #1 favorite A.O. Scott about Gen-X hitting the mid-life crisis, which certainly resonated... or maybe this is just how men deal with it.

When markedly similar characters and stories start popping up everywhere, it’s more than a trend. It’s what those of us raised on vintage postmodernism call a historical phenomenon. So an intertextual analysis of “Greenberg,” “Hot Tub Time Machine” and “The Ask” (for starters) yields a startling composite portrait of the Gen X male in midlife crisis. Earlier versions of the crisis were, by and large, reactions against social norms... At a certain point, Dad buys a sports car, or starts a rock band, or has an affair or walks out on Mom or quits the law firm to make goat cheese. When this kind of thing happens to Mom, it’s not a crisis but an awakening.

Anyway, as days go by I'm starting to think that it's naive to expect to be happy all the time, that a logical consequence of knowledge and awareness about the world is to feel a bit overwhelmed, and that we'd all do well to lay off the drugs and the self-help books and the booze and the pretending everything is perfect when we meet and just be regular, unambitious, emotional people. Wouldn't it be so much more authentic, and ahhh! So liberating?

Or in the words of Rebecca Traister:

You know what I think? It's all bullshit. Not just the trend stories and the self-help stuff, but the laser focus on happiness itself. I say this as someone who has grown steadily happier as I've aged, but I think I would have said it even more emphatically earlier in my life: I'm just not sure that "happiness" is supposed to be the stable human condition, and I think it's punishing that we're constantly being pushed to achieve it.