The Happiness Myth_ An Expose - Jennifer Hecht [137]
Consider that the marvelous Mohonk Mountain House in New York, started by identical twins Alfred and Albert Smiley, gracefully rolled from nineteenth-century respectable fun to twentieth-and now twenty-first-century respectable fun. You splash in the lake in summer, or visit on the word-game weekend in winter. Once there was no liquor, and no visitors on Sundays; now there are both, because those things no longer mean what they used to mean. Visit, or see the lake and lodge in the movie The Road to Wellville, where the hotel plays the role of Kellogg’s Battle Creek Spa.
Family spas are not as prominent a vacation destination as they were a hundred years ago. Yet look at where families do go! Masses of them spend summers and vacations getting all shook up at amusement parks, on water rides, and in beach waves. Couples go to beaches. Singles go to beaches and spas. Yet we do not seem to be aware that we are jostling ourselves, and our children, to happiness. Convictions about how to live, what rules to follow, are mostly historical accidents of the moment, but we can still see patterns; some underlying factors of various behaviors can be discerned. For instance: get in the water. There are endless historical accounts of peoples’ getting in the water making them happy. It is not merely a recreation, nor is it primarily about being clean. It is a happiness technique. Experiment on yourself and see what you think. Get your body shaken up and worked over. The other important consistent message is that self-denial is a potent and common way for people to control their happiness. The removal of something from your menu of pleasures causes acute distress, and then a reawakening, a brightness. The cultural meanings that help to interpret this as happiness vary widely with historical time. Self-denial is reminiscent of virtue, because both take something off your plate. But there is a big difference between limiting one’s appetites so as to share with others, and limiting one’s appetites in order to be thin and get more attention. Again, they both seem virtuous, but the second one is not. Body discipline may make you happy. But it isn’t virtuous. Flexing your willpower is no more meritorious than flexing your muscles: not much. What matters is whether you can step up when it counts.
Celebration
Happiness requires some public processing of grief and fear. More than any other people in history, we are enabled by our culture to feel independent. Our emotional lives are supposed to take place almost entirely within our nuclear family of origin, and in our created nuclear family—bridged by a period where we live our emotional lives safely within a band of friends. Many of us man the borders, keeping “in the family” all information about our private lives. What are private lives? Let’s not use the personnel (family and friends) for the definition. Descriptively, I think we can say your private life is where you keep everything disgusting, weak, or wounded; sexual, medical, illegal, and weird; anything involving baby talk, nose rubbing, tantrums. But we really aren’t independent; we are a pack—a pack with off-the-charts sophisticated minds and hearts that we use almost entirely to monitor the pack and respond to its every shiver of experience. Sometimes a pack needs to bay at the moon together. Through time and across the globe, some cultures are better at facilitating this than others. We are not great at it, but not terrible, either. What we do manage is often hidden under other names. It takes a little work to see, but once you see it, you won’t look at our culture in the same way again.
My chief claim here is that the way we watch the news is not about any rational gathering of information or civic responsibility; rather, it is our way of sharing our fears and griefs. There is geopolitical, economic, social, and scientific news of a sort that affects us all. But there is also a tremendous amount of news that is just the rehearsing of feared intimate dramas