The pursuit of happiness is a hoax
The other day I ate a greasy pastel that got stuck in my throat; so I bought a can of Coca-Cola. Written on it was the word: Happiness. This word no longer means anything, it is dead — otherwise, it could never be stamped by the millions on a soft-drink can. This is not mysticism, this is economics, this is communication theory. From which we conclude that, at the same time, it is becoming the most valuable word of all, to the happiness of the industry. Did you like the pun? It was terrible, I know.
Back to happiness: if I can stamp this word on a soda can, on a supermarket brand, on a tub of margarine or any other product, it is because some consensus exists around this word, a kind of common understanding where “happy” = good, “unhappy” = not-good. Actually this is called redundancy — when a message carries zero or near-zero new information.
Ah yes, there is a second dimension to this thought, where “happy” = profitable, and “unhappy” = even more profitable. Try to imagine your toilet water spinning in both directions at the same time. They make Rivotril out of that water. Beer too.
Now, wait a moment — I guarantee I am not some depressed, resentful fellow distilling venom against humanity from a dark room. If you invite me over to see your house or go for a walk, I will come with the greatest pleasure, we will laugh and it will be great; the problem is not, in any way, living happy moments.
The problem is the understanding of the word happiness that has become commonplace. “Money doesn’t buy happiness, everybody knows that.” I know, I read all those texts you read — horrible, by the way. “Left everything behind to be happy,” blah-blah-blah. Steve Jobs lectures: working with what you love = happiness. Seriously, I saw all of it, which means all of it was meant for me too. Heavens, I feel terrible. That can’t be a coincidence.
I will let you run this experiment: type “happy people” into Google images. I had to look again to check I hadn’t typed “a bunch of idiots throwing their hands in the air, laughing for no apparent reason”, because that is exactly what Google spits out for “happy people”. But it is illustrative.
If we are talking about “happiness”, we are automatically talking about “unhappiness”, or “sadness”; this happens 100% of the time. Happiness, like any value of human nature, is dual; it casts a shadow. Let me try to rewrite a Zen Buddhist tale I heard on a certain occasion, a very beautiful one, to illustrate what I want to say next:
The master of a Zen Buddhist temple in Japan had died. In the funeral procession, many flowers and chants; a light mood hovered in the air. The monks and the people attending the ceremony had absorbed many of the master’s teachings, and knew life was fleeting. The master had died in peace; it was not a suffering nor painful death. However, the disciple closest to the master, considered the wisest among the monks, was in tears. He wept, trembled and sobbed copiously. The other monks were perplexed: how could he, the wisest, tipped to be the next master, be in such a miserable state? One of them approached the weeping monk and asked: “What is the matter with you? Do you not know the master is united again with nature and divinity? There is no reason for tears.”
To which the weeping monk replied: “Dear brother, my spirit is at peace. It is my eyes that weep, for they will no longer see the master. It is my body that trembles, for it will no longer feel the master’s closeness. It is my ears that agonize, for they will no longer hear his words. My body grew used to the master’s presence and now mourns his departure. I do not wish to oppose it; I will let it cry, I will let it suffer, until it grows used to its new life, far from the master.”
Do you see? This tale is very beautiful:
- The master died. What to do? Of course, everyone involved had some level of spiritual elevation. One of the monks comes to the weeping monk and says: what are you doing? What is all the knowledge the master passed on to you worth? The other monks are watching. Compose yourself! He is worried about appearances.
- Regardless of all his knowledge, the weeping monk did not try to distort reality; he let his feelings surface and lived the moment honestly and frankly. He was sad, but he was at peace. This is the most important part of the tale. But we sleep through that part of the movie.
When Nelson Mandela died, you shared a picture of him on some social network, with a “thanks, Madiba!” message. But what you should have done is think: “what the hell am I doing with my life?”. That man spent 27 years inside a prison. Do you think Mandela was worried about happiness during that period? If he had been bound to one of these ideals of happiness that we buy — doing what you love, working with what you love, giving ourselves the value we deserve etc — he would have killed himself or gone mad, probably both. Year after year, waking up in the same place, seeing the same people, the same square Sun, unable to leave… it is a hard life!
But Mandela saw something more in that situation — he not only endured all that time; he came out and accomplished great feats. He did what there was to be done, what life presented him as possibility. His almost three decades in prison certainly caused deep transformations within him, to the point of declaring he felt no hatred for his captors, at the risk of becoming just like them. But these stories are only good for watching, aren’t they? You want only the happiness; forget that part about suffering, struggle, persistence. The industry will be very happy to help you with that. So will the Internet.
A while ago several people shared a link on Facebook; it was called “Is it worth leaving everything behind in pursuit of happiness?“. I open the page and BANG, there is a smiling hipster getting a peck on the cheek from his girlfriend. Hold on, restrain your rage — we all love to hate hipsters, but that too is a media trick; they make excellent scapegoats, but let’s leave that for another time. In any case, a more than suspicious start. I begin reading the text and one must scale a wall of advertising, pure branding: marriage to a beautiful and intelligent woman, professional awards, honeymoon, book launch, band, life in São Paulo etc.
By the second paragraph I already suspected a trap, but at the following passage I was certain:
Suddenly, a bunch of other things started appearing as urgent necessities for my life to be full: “you need to buy a car to be happy”, “you need to buy a yearly travel package to be happy”, “you need to buy that super-expensive ticket to a festival full of bands (you’ve never heard of in your life) to be happy” and, finally, “you need to buy a Nespresso machine to be happy”.
Wait a minute, big guy — you want to tell me these “urgent necessities” simply jumped in front of you, appeared in your life as an inevitable factor? Lesson number zero of advertising and marketing school, extracted from a generic website:
One of the simplest concepts in Marketing is the definition of the Target, the target audience. The target audience is the set of people we intend to reach with our message. There are several definitions for this concept; in short, it is whoever we intend to buy our products or services.
If you can see it, it’s meant for you. Heavens — if you go out of your way to spell out the Nespresso ad, it is quite possible to imagine the kind of media you have been consuming, and the target-audience category you belong to. By that point in the text I was trying to assemble the puzzle, but I didn’t have to strain: the map of the pieces was supplied a few lines later:
Yes, because I (who was editor-in-chief of the youth websites at Editora Abril) and Karin Hueck (who was an editor at SUPERINTERESSANTE) quit our jobs in early August and have just moved temporarily to Berlin (the current “world capital of creativity”) to run this investigation.
Ugh. Where to begin? Editora Abril? “Isn’t that the one that publishes V… magazine” Shh, keep your voice down, this is embarrassing enough already. Moving to Berlin to investigate happiness? OK, this was the moment I expected some kind of method, some proposal — say what you are going to do in Berlin to run this “investigation” — but no, none of that; maybe this, maybe that, and the text’s crowning touch (yes, it gets worse):
What we offer you is a ride on our journey in search of answers that may lead to happiness. Because — as the film “Into the Wild” teaches — “happiness is only real when shared”.
If you are learning things from Hollywood movies, close the doors, turn off the light: you are media from head to toe. The last sentence of that part is revealing. Shared happiness: not in the sense of “come have lunch at my place”, but in the sense of “look at the photo of what I made for lunch, it looks lovely with this filter”. The site is called Gluck Project — this is the 21st century, “happiness” as a project. There are texts with titles typical of sensationalist magazines: how to be happy at work, how I stopped being corrupt (?!), how psychology can help, how to get a perfect summer body etc. “But the summer-body headline was ironic.” But you read it anyway, didn’t you? I did. That’s how it works.
That site is a product of the media; they claim to have left their jobs at Abril, yet the site is stuffed with links to stories from their old jobs. You may abandon the media, but the media does not abandon you. Did you like that one? It would make a good tattoo. In fact, they have already added a “In the media” link to the site, where you can see what has been said in the media about the project — which is not about happiness, in any way; it is about themselves. Incidentally, it is the same media that sold the ads our friend questioned so much, including the Nespresso machine — remember the privatized water spinning both ways at once?
All these media discourses on happiness are shams, simply because being happy is analogous to an eternal day of sunshine; at first it feels good, but you will miss seeing the stars. Happiness is a manipulable concept; as long as you are pursuing happiness, you might as well be chasing a unicorn or a coffee machine or whatever idea you bought about it. And meanwhile, you spend hours reading about other people’s happiness on the Internet. OK, I read it too, we are in this together, but here I am trying to make a rationale of it all.
It is possible that your life does not even allow you to think about being happy. You were born poor, in a horrible place, lacking everything, starting with the basics. What to do? The other extreme also holds: you were born rich, in a wonderful place, lacking nothing. What to do? The problem is that you are lost — this job isn’t right for me, this life is not the one I want, my friends are boring, my country is doomed — there is an ideal situation in your mind that does not correspond to reality. And the problem here is not, in any way, reality. The difference is that the poor man has no time to investigate; he has to wake up and do what must be done to put food inside his house. Several studies have found high happiness indexes in extremely poor countries. How about that?!
I will come down from the fence now. There existed a man in ancient Greece who went around the streets, pointing his finger at people and shouting: know thyself! His name was Socrates and his fate was trivial — he was forced to drink poison because of his thoughts, nothing much. But that sentence is revealing — know thyself. It is the most precious piece of advice ever given to humanity, and many repeated it — Jesus, Buddha, Nietzsche — become what you are! That is precisely what Mandela did. There is no investigation; there is doing what must be done. As long as you look to the media for that kind of answer, “how to be happy”, the most that will happen is you will clutter your mind with a pile of stories that have only one thing in common: you are not part of them, you are a spectator, one day you will do that… Shall we look at the thing in a more transcendental rather than worldly way? The mystic Osho said:
If happiness becomes the great goal to be reached in your life, then it will be a true nightmare for you. But when, for you, happiness lies in the small things, in the way you live them (…) your house becomes a temple, your body becomes the dwelling of God and, wherever you look and whatever you touch, becomes immensely beautiful, sacred — then, happiness is freedom.
But that is extremely difficult, isn’t it? In a crowded subway, at your job, in your marriage… it is hard to live the small things. That is why it is easier to follow these media stories, full of grandiose, pretension, and always tied to the world of consumption, of the market — quitting jobs, changing countries, donating everything you own, going on an extreme diet — it can never be a small and simple thing, because then everyone could do it, and not just a few media characters.
My god. I need a Coca-Cola. One of the big ones. To fill a bucket and shove my brain inside.