The Happiness Myth_ An Expose - Jennifer Hecht [22]
The acclaimed short-story author Jean Stafford once said that “happy people don’t need to have fun,” by which she seems to have meant that a lot of what we do for fun is there to soothe misery. Stafford died at sixty-four of alcoholism and emphysema. Was it a good life? She won a Pulitzer Prize, an honor for which many men and women have sacrificed a great deal, most often without success; yet it is hard to find a happy period in her life until she married her third husband, and he died four years later. Modern commentators have argued over whether we should praise her and her literary generation for having “risked pain in pursuit of a more ambiguous pleasure: the pleasure of living fully” or whether we should pity her as lost “in the false romanticism of the tortured artist.”11 It may depend upon how much you value longevity and how much you enjoy parties, scotch, and cigarettes. Maybe “happy people don’t need to have fun” accounts for only a few kinds of people. There are also those who are not happy and also don’t get any joy out of Stafford’s kind of fun. The singer-songwriter Sheryl Crow’s 1996 pop hit “If It Makes You Happy” asked this intriguing question: “If it makes you happy / It can’t be that bad / If it makes you happy / Then why the hell are you so sad?” The alternative to an unhappy man doing some questionable thing that makes him happy briefly is not only a happy man not doing the questionable thing. It is also the unhappy man who has not even found a way to make himself happy briefly. Don’t take pleasures for granted. I love the Buddha, but it seems almost what I might call a sin to beat down our desires and their fulfillments. I should add, though, that the Buddha said you could return to pleasures once you reached enlightenment—that the technique he taught was a raft to go over a river, and that once you’re on the other side, you do not need to drag the raft around with you. Still, he’s willing to give up a lot to attain enlightenment. Whether you are or not, it seems like the thing to do is to learn to control your desires and, from that position, make decisions about which desires you would like to indulge.
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Take What’s Yours
The phrase carpe diem appears in the Odes of the Roman poet Horace (65–8 B.C.E.). The whole line is Carpe diem quam minimum credula postero (“Pluck the day, never trust the next”), so in a sense it is a call to remember death, but also it is the ultimate assertion to take what is yours. But what is yours to pluck? And how? Sometimes carpe diem means you should ditch work and enjoy a beautiful day, and other times it means you should seize the day to make a contribution to some grand project, however small the day’s contribution would be. It all depends on what you will wish you had done with today when you get to tomorrow. The best way to know that is to ask yourself what you wish you had done yesterday. Seize the day, yes, but do not live as if every day is your last. Live as you wish you had lived yesterday.
Taking what is yours means more than carpe diem. There is also the matter of seizing your role. As we speak in languages, we act in roles. If you don’t take on your role, things go wrong for everyone else. It is a bad doctor who explains to patients that a doctor is just someone who once went to medical school, and that a feeling of playing