The Happiness Myth_ An Expose - Jennifer Hecht [171]
If you are hoping to make room in the day for some hard work, you probably will not be able to do very many good-day things: either talk to a friend or read a chapter in a book; either take a walk or see a movie. You decide for yourself how often you eat cake. If that is every day, you may have to live with the consequence of not being the height of modern attractiveness. If you want to stay up late, you are going to have to feel groggy much of the next day. It might as well be a conscious choice.
It is worth hashing out what kind of choices we can make. Think about euphoria: When have you had it? How much of your euphoria is public and how much private? How long do you usually go between events where you get a little large-group elation? What would happen if you shortened the cycle? Maybe it wouldn’t be worth the effort, but maybe it would. If you go shopping, remember what a magical and odd place you are visiting. Think about what different visions of abundance do to you. Do you want to bring everything home? Why would all that stuff be better stored at your house? This is the marketplace gone to paradise. If you do not like to be in stores, go to a big store or a cluster of them with hours to kill and nothing you need to purchase, and walk around and see what it feels like to witness the abundance. If you want, buy something. Consider the pleasure of anticipation and of purchase.
Could you throw a big party once every six months? Once every two years? Give blood twice a year? If it has been a while, make a point of going into a flower shop or a beautiful library. How many concerts or other live music events did you get to last year? Last decade? Pick a big show coming up and buy the tickets. Go to a local place and hear a good band. Compare how the two make you feel. Some of us do not see much art and some of us do not see much nature. Go see a game, or go see two, one in a giant arena, one at the local park. Try karaoke. Go to a fashionable crowd and watch the people. Go to the theater. Find different ways to have a good soak. If you rarely go somewhere to get groomed, go get groomed. If you rarely go hear a lecture, go hear one. It is likely you have tried almost all of these, of course, and you have good reasons that you do not do them, but consider trying them again and thinking about the way they connect you to other people, and see how that makes you feel. Remember just this: when it comes to enjoying a parade, you have to show up. Like costume, you cannot just think about any of this. You have to try it on.
Ours is a culture that makes a distinction between behaviors that bring true happiness and behaviors that only make you feel happy! Yes, Henry VIII must have had a painful inner hunger and a deep loneliness, but he also had a turkey leg in one hand and six nubile queens, successively, in the other. It is almost magical, maniacal, that we concentrate all of our intellectual and mature analysis on one response to Henry and other “oversexed” gourmands: that they are actually less happy, and less fulfilled, than the norm. It is even more remarkable when you notice how much our culture fans the flames of desire for both a nice, big, greasy hunk of bird meat and also a procession of hot Anne Boleyns.
Today, we see fewer summer or year-round communities based on an ideal regimen for health and happiness. Yet Americans have worlds of communities that are primarily organized around quitting something as a route to happiness. Why does happiness seem to us to be dependent on active, aggressive self-control and self-denial? Throughout history people have made a performance of self-control and self-denial, for beauty or for God; but denial is not usually this exquisitely wrought. We even legislate these denials on an unprecedented scale. There used to be laws against saying all sorts of things, but you could eat, drink, and smoke what you wanted, at any age, almost anywhere.