Return on Investment

Today’s essay is about buying happiness.

I used to claim, of course, that this was impossible. At least, in my head, I claimed it. I haven’t made many public claims, though this will change. Here’s one to get going: You can buy happiness.

Generally, we tend to have about two mindsets. The first (what I call the “hamster wheel” mindset) is that happiness comes from rather large attained goals. For example, we decide that we want a succesful career, or children. When we attain these goals, it seems to reason, we will become happy. This operates under the assumption that the things we want are the things that will make us happy. Whether what we want is something regarded as selfish and shallow, such as meaningless sex with lots of attractive people, or something considered more positive and deep, such as raising a loving family or ending world hunger, it’s a common belief that if we want something, and then we get it, happiness will ensue.

The second mindset (what I call the “pussy-ass” mindset) is that happiness comes from small moments of peace, bliss, or contentment. This calls for a lot more unpredictability and, perhaps, some level of zen. According to this belief, it will be the days and minutes, perhaps seconds, in which you are surrounded by love, or complacently without problems, or simply in a state where, perhaps for no reason whatsoever save the weather or a well-timed drink, you feel alright – it will be these things that create real happiness.

Most people have some combination of both mindsets, in varying degrees, at different times. Both of these mindsets are wrong. Whether or not you attain the goals that you’ve held for any period of time, you are not going to be happy. Whether or not you experience moments of pleasure and peace, you are not going to be happy. The hope for future happiness through these paths is a horrible, and debilitating, fallacy.

Gaining a goal, you see, does not automatically fill your life with a sense of accomplishment and peace. Think back for a moment to the first big Christmas gift you wanted, the first car, or the first job. Maybe you got exactly what you wanted. Do you give a fuck now? Have you given a fuck in years? The toy eventually broke, or grew disgustingly cloying, and you broke it in spite. The car was a piece of shit, and you know it. You probably knew it then. The job, when you considered it in opportunity-cost terms (all the television or sleep you could have accomplished in its stead), in an hour-by-hour analysis, was complete bullshit. Both for the money, and the things you actually had to do. All of your shit sucked. Admit it. Your shit sucked. And yet, to some young kid today, the same goals seem like Holy Grail. Why? Because once we actually have something, we no longer want it. Not only that, but it never really mattered. It’s a process of acclamation, and every Big Next Thing we were in love with, once in hand, becomes the Big Old Thing we could care less about. This process, internal, you must understand, will never cease, regardless of how much your brain may be telling you the wonderful appeal of the as-yet-unattained Big Next Thing. This is a mental process that cannot be changed. For the record, everything you have attained actually is, objectively, shit.

Having moments of peace and pleasure, as we all do, in the small things of life, is not happiness. It’s quite simply the base reactions of the mind to stimuli. I have often fallen prey, as inexperienced artists are apt to do, to assigning some kind of maturity or depth to accepting something like a sunset or a simple night with friends the title of real happiness. It’s actually just the biological effects of chemicals such as dopamine and serotonin to an environmental factor. You feel happy when you eat candy or ice cream, too, don’t you? Because the human body inherently reacts to candy and ice cream. That doesn’t mean they’re the goddamn meaning of life. “Ah, but sir,” you proclaim in your stilted, pseudo-formal-diction debate voice, that one that you use because you know you’re ignorant in actual rhetoric and think people will confuse a bad 19^th-century British tone for intelligence, “but sir, is not that simply proclaiming that ALL happiness is biological, which matters not, for happiness is happiness regardless why?” No, shithead. What I’m telling you is that you’re confusing temporary, physically-induced happiness for an actual purpose or meaning, and if that’s what you’re after, you may as well just shoot up heroin all day long and masturbate. You won’t get much “happier” than that. Just don’t call the ephemeral “little moments” true happiness.

Now, I’m sure you can say you can think of lots of things that make you happy which don’t fit into those two mindsets. I’m sure you can say it. You’d just be wrong. “Helping others.” “Leading a just life.” “Finding true love.” If you think about what is actually involved both in bringing those around, and in maintaining them, you’ll see that whatever specifics define those things for you actually fit into one or both of the mindsets. And beyond that, they’ve never made anyone happy anyway. Read a book.

So, where, where, where can happiness be found? As near as I can tell, the only pragmatically effective solution is to deny others of happiness as much as possible. If everyone else is less happy than you are, then clearly, logically, you are more happy. See how that works? It’s pretty direct. What you’ll need most, probably, is money. The look on the faces of the hobos at the hobo-fire around the corner when you pour a suitcase of hundred-dollar bills into the flames is priceless. And who can deny the effectiveness of such Hollywood classics as paying a million dollars to fuck somebody’s wife? Not to mention buying out corporations to lay off thousands of workers, a la Mr. Burns. The ideas are all around us. You just have to get creative. And who knows? You might find genuine pleasure in causing problems for other people.

Either that, or take up chronic depression. We’ll call it an adventure.

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Nota Bene: My friend Ian Bradley complained months ago that I stole the title of my first blog from him, because he’d used the term first, in passing, several years ago. I appealed to him, quite reasonably, that I really didn’t care. After several hours of rhetorical semantics and debate, I agreed to mention and thank him for the title in the next post I made to that blog. Therefore, I never again made a single post to that blog. This is a new one.