The Happiness Myth_ An Expose - Jennifer Hecht [173]
The happiness myth makes us spend our time and energy trying to be happy through our historical moment’s big ideas, and failing just enough to keep us fixated on the problems as stated. What should we be doing instead? The philosophers and wisdom writers throughout history have told us what we should do in life if we can get past our usual problems (pain, fear, narcissism). I offered the list of their suggestions, with attribution, at the start of the first section of this book, titled “Wisdom.” Here I will just give a swift list of activities so good that they need no arguments or fanfare. They are: being loving to your spouse, nurturing your children, tending to your extended family, nurturing friendships, helping local strangers, helping strangers far away, caring for animals, engaging in fine art and the arts of living (poetry, prose, painting, sculpture, music, dance, architecture, cooking, entertaining, gardening, decor), risking both being in the world and keeping apart, doing philosophy, learning the art of traveling and the art of staying home, planning for the future of humanity, and increasing the world’s knowledge. Our cultural nonsense about the exact proportions of the body and the superiority of productivity over euphoria—this stuff cuts into our ability to enact the sublime through practicing the good things. The changing cultural rules give us a way to be worried about something that is within our control, and we forget that it is relatively meaningless. Also, this cultural advice limits your choices within the perfectly reasonable realm of possibilities, so that, for instance, nowadays women spend time grooming together, and men don’t. Maybe it would be better for the guys if they did. Consider the community function of the old barber shop. If you live at the wrong time, you have to go out of your way to get certain things. It is worth paying attention.
I offer this book as a crowbar to help separate us from our historical moment so we can get a little height and view the subject with less distortion. It is not just a matter of distortion due to vantage point; there is also distortion due to remarkable temporal prejudice. You may love the Renaissance, but you wouldn’t want to use their toilet paper. Or take their doctors’ advice. Or believe what they believed about time and the universe. Or raise your children the way they raised theirs. Or really believe them about anything. But how can we think we are so great when we have almost no vision of hope for the future other than that we will have lost ten pounds and that a girl, one person out of 300 million Americans, is missing and we hope she will turn up alive. We want to understand the context of these hopes. And knowing the context should allow us to be more efficient in our experience of these hopes, so that we are free to hope for more. We start by working to shake off the myth of knowing. It is especially good to shake off the myth of knowing what we are supposed to be doing. Then, in this less certain state, start sketching out your happiness lists. Start with writing things you actually do; then make additions to each list, noting what you might like to add to your gallery of daily-happiness-type pleasures, ecstasies, and contributions toward lifelong happiness.
Be alert to the convictions of the experts—who, after all, have to say something. Think about which types of experts have changed their advice in your lifetime, and how frequently. When someone makes an announcement about what you need to do, if the advice category seems changeable, be more suspicious; demand more evidence before you change your behavior. Or try the new advice, but see yourself in the context of history, “trying something,” as so many people have tried things before. Do it when (or where) other people are doing it, and you get an extra lift. But do not let it be your new anxiety. It is not serious enough for that;