Happiness Is...

What is the secret of happiness? I'm tempted to say "three young, beautiful and willing girls, a deserted beach and a fine bottle of scotch" but that is in fact the secret of "pleasure" not "happiness". I'm not suggesting that the pursuit of pleasure isn't a good way to spend time, but you probably are not going to be able to spend your entire life on that beach; if you do you'll end up with three wrinkly women with skin cancer and probably cirrhosis of the liver. If you live a normal life you're going to have to be able to find happiness in ordinary things or you're going to end up, well, fucking unhappy.

Psychology Today talks about the root of happiness being high self-esteem but as society is increasingly filled with young people who have been raised on a self-esteem diet of "you're wonderful and perfect no matter how criminal, thick or irritating you are" and they seem to be increasingly unhappy, I'm tempted to suggest that you can stick Psychology Today up your rearmost orifice. That's not supposed to make you happy, by the way; if it does I think you have bigger problems than you realize.

Advice on finding happiness is 90% bollocks but this advice from Mr.Micawber in Dickens' book David Coppeffield is pretty close to the mark: "Annual income twenty pounds, annual expenditure nineteen nineteen six, result happiness. Annual income twenty pounds, annual expenditure twenty pounds ought and six, result misery." In other words, happiness comes not from how much you have but from having just a little bit more than you need. Or maybe, in modern day America, a little bit more than you expected.

When I was younger I had fuck-all money, but what I had went on beer and take-out Chinese food, heavy metal music and, eventually, fuel for a very shit car. I didn't expect to have Chinese food every day so when I bought a House Special Chop Suey it made me happy. If I had had enough money to buy one every day it would no longer have brought any pleasure and I'd have needed to move up to take-out Indian food and a Chicken Madras. I'm pretty sure happiness is a state of mind brought about by the release of endorphins in the brain (one of the problems of having a doctor for a brother is that they are inclined to pick you up on shit like this and point out that you're wrong, but I'll risk it) and the brain is wired to release a certain amount of "happiness" when good things happen to you. That is unless you use drugs to overload it, but in that case once you take the drugs away you become "depressed" because you just moved your baseline.

So basically you're wired to feel happiness at a certain level, and the only thing that varies is what it takes to trigger that happiness. If you're a rich bastard who's expecting to get a new Ferrari, and you end up not getting your bonus, you'll be unhappy, regardless of the fact that you're still tooling around in a Porsche. On the other hand, if your car is an orange piece of shit (like my first one) you'll practically reach orgasm driving a Ford Taurus. The secret of happiness is to not have so much of whatever you enjoy that it's no longer a source of pleasure but becomes just a pre-requisite for not feeling like crap.

Right now happiness is waking up on a Saturday with no projects or plans, getting a cup of tea in bed and then going downstairs to find a nice, friendly wife with a good arse making me a pie. Plus I know for a fact that there's an excellent Scotch in the cupboard...


Copyright 2007 Edward Bison