“Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.” – Leo Tolstoy, “Anna Karenina”
Preface
This is a fragment about happiness, an idea that has been bludgeoned and beaten blue over the centuries such that an ancient philosopher might not recognize it in its disfigured state.
The happiness I speak of is more than pleasure. You might call it purpose or meaning, raison d'être, a sufficient why to counter the suffering of life. It is something more than a feeling. You might even experience this kind of happiness, however strangely, in the throes of a depression.
This fragment, more than others, is truly a fragment—an unfiltered account of my unfinished thoughts.
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Question: Do Humans Want to be Happy?
The prevailing thought today seems to be that everyone just wants to be happy, and that if you set aside the environmental disasters ravaging our earth and the illnesses attacking our mortal bodies, the primary cause of our collective unhappiness are disagreements about how to achieve this noble aim. If only we could agree on how to be happy…
I’m not so sure I agree.
When I review the litany of regrettable choices I have made in the past, often with clear-eyed awareness of the misery they will cause, it is self-evident that happiness is not what I naturally seek.
At the core of my soul, I want to be original, my own man, the captain of my ship, and if a happy life requires that I follow someone else’s instructions, I’d be liable to rip them up and write a new set of rules.
A strange but true confession: I would rather be unhappy on my own terms than happy on someone else’s.
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A Tangential Thread, Not Fully Untangled
If I were born in a brick-walled garden that someone else had built, full of sweet-smelling flowers and trees that someone else had planted, a paradise where everything was perfect and the sun neither set nor rose and a warm light shone perpetually around the unwound clock fixed at an eternal hour, and all would remain perfect forever just so long as I consented to its perfection, the first thing I would do is take a sledgehammer to the brick walls, an axe to the trees, and go off in search of a land where I could create something for myself. And if there was any fruit I was forbidden to eat, why, I would take as much as my arms could carry and walk out the gates with my chin held high, and pitch my tent somewhere far off to the east.
Eventually, on the cold dark nights to follow, I would likely regret what I had done and despise the ticking sound of the clocks that now spun, yearning for the eternal bliss I had so casually rejected and the peaceful companionship of the one who created the garden and the sweet-smelling flowers I had uprooted. And on the coldest darkest nights of all, when the fire burned down to its embers and the howling wind cut through to my bones, I would try to warm myself with the abortive thought: If I’ve made a terrible mistake, at least it’s my mistake; if I’m unhappy, at least my unhappiness is my own, but I doubt this would give me much comfort.
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A (Slightly) More Relevant Thread
Tolstoy’s classic, Anna Karenina, follows two parallel romances. One of the relationships begins as an illicit affair and leads both parties to despair; the other follows the traditional rules of courtship in 19th century Russia and ends in a happy marriage. Not surprisingly, it’s the tragic storyline, not the happy one, that captivates most readers.
Tolstoy was right.
Each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way, and there’s an allurement to this claim of ownership, this idea that people create their own misery. Why else do we keep up with the Kardashians? It’s their dysfunction, not their happiness, that interests us.
Happiness is a cliché—and clichés are boring. We would rather say something original, even if it’s a lie, than repeat the truth we have heard a hundred times.
At least, I would.
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Another prevailing thought about happiness—that it can be achieved by accepting and loving oneself. Be true to yourself, you are worthy of your own love, live your truth, etcetera etcetera. This is all good and well if we first accept that we did not make ourselves and that our self-worth is given rather than created, but more often these seem like obscure ways of proclaiming: “I am the master of my own destiny.”
Which, if happiness is the goal, is a rather bleak statement. The only thing I’ve ever mastered is my own misery.
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The desire to be “true to ourselves” is a recapitulation of the same lie that has caused all the world’s unhappiness and evil—the original sin. Even if you believe Eden is a fiction and religion the drug for people who have sworn off all other drugs, we all still face the same temptation to try to become gods ourselves and act “original” when all evidence points to the contrary.
Love is the antidote to this perverse desire.
For the ultimate act of love is to lay down one’s life for another and reject one’s own desires for something greater, a love that would willingly carry a cross and hang on a tree for the misdeeds of another. Which makes this idea of self-love an oxymoron, a distortion of true love, and a foolish aim.
Every cliché is not wise, but wisdom will always be cliché; every tradition is not true, but the truth will always be traditional. And love is the climax of truth, the one creed we must struggle to live by.
As Kierkegaard wrote: “No generation has learned from another how to love, no generation can begin other than at the beginning…and if someone, unlike the previous generation, is unwilling to stay with love but wants to go further, then that is simply idle and foolish talk.”1
Love is not an original act but learned through imitation; we must practice it day after day, step by step, along a path already cut for us; it affirms that we are not our own gods and that the salvation living in our soul is a gift from above, that our desires and passions are also gifts, not meant to be worshipped but used as tinder for still greater love, and that in the words attributed to St. Francis of Assisi, “It is by dying that one awakens to eternal life.”
“Fear and Trembling” by Søren Kierkegaard
Another banger!