the happiness revolution

It wasn't until long, long after Freud that psychologists and neuroscientists started thinking that, perhaps, they should study functional, happy people as well as non-functional, miserable people. That it took them a hundred years to realize they should study the flip side of the coin is, in itself, indicative. It shows how we humans tend to fixate on the negative and dark, how we tend to remember insults more than compliments and hurtful events more than happy ones.

So far, studies of happiness have largely shown us that we are spectacularly bad at predicting what will make us happy in the future. (See, for example, Daniel Gilbert's Stumbling on Happiness.) They have also shown, though, that what happy and resilient people do, to put it simply, is shift their focus. They tell themselves a different story. And they are forgiving, of themselves and others.

For some time now, the progressive left in this country has hidden their happiness (or forsaken it entirely). When you know what's going on in the world, and are concerned at all with what is just and what is humane, with human potential, it's damn depressing. And most liberals I know are, to varying degrees, depressed and anxious. This depression and anxiety leads, unfortunately and all too often, to self-righteousness. We are angry, because we believe that no one cares about our suffering. And we suffer, for others, in the innocent and mistaken belief that our suffering indicates our level of care for others. On some level, we may even believe that our suffering eases the suffering of all the others we know are hungry, homeless, desperate, exploited.

This is a mistake. Our individual suffering helps no one, and hurts ourselves. Sometime after the 2004 election I realized that, in addition to the very real power The Administration had over my physical body, I had given them power over my mental well-being. I had given them my happiness--which they didn't want--and filled myself with rage. My anger hurt them not at all. It did not lead us to win the election, nor has it stopped their nepotistic, Keystone-Cops-Fascist, utterly incompetent behavior. I realized that all my anger, all that time, changed nothing. But it cost me greatly. I resolved that they would get not one more moment of my happiness. And for the most part, I've kept to that, in the face of considerable obstacles.

We can, and I hope we do, have a revolution in this country. But one thing we need to get back (listening to Led Zeppelin, or the Beatles, or the Doors, or Jimi Hendrix, or Dylan, makes this clear) is a joyful alternative to the mainstream ways of living. This is what the hippies had, and why they are still a cultural force even after everything they hoped for has been torn to pieces by 2 Nixon administrations, 2 Reagan administrations, and now 2 Bush Administrations. Even Clinton, for that matter, betrayed the ideals of the hippies. Why did they blow the doors open? Because they had a life that looked better, happier, more free than that of the society that surrounded them. We allowed that joy to be taken from us, and now we associate being a liberal with being angry, uptight, moralistic, judgemental: we think if we just tell enough people the truth the scales will fall from their eyes and they will say, "JESUS GOD, I can't believe I didn't know this before! You mean the ice caps are melting and polar bears are drowning and women and children are being used as sex slaves and our country has been bought and sold by corporations and we no longer have a Bill of Rights and Bush and Cheney have taken turns wiping their asses with the Constitution? To the barricades!"

It's not going to work that way. If we want peace, we have to make peace with ourselves. If we want change, we have to change ourselves. We can choose happiness. And wouldn't we, after all, prefer a movement full of happy, sensuous, present people than one full of angry and hostile people? Even if we make no difference, even if it's all too little, too late, we won't have spent our precious and irreplaceable time on being angry with people who really, frankly, couldn't care less if we were angry at them all the time.

Our suffering helps no one. Our happiness might. And even if it doesn't, well, you'll be happy anyway.