Barry's Blog

The Irish playwright and novelist Oscar Wilde once lamented, "There are two tragedies in life. One is not getting what we want. The other is getting it." We may laugh at his observation, but truth be known, it captures where most of us live. Oh, we know about sometimes not getting our way, but we also live in a culture that panders to our desire for "happiness." Check out the literary winners that offer to make our lives into whatever we desire them to be. The unrivaled tribute to wishful thinking may be the book, "The Secret," by Rhonda Byrne. This past year's blockbuster bestseller-cum-cultural phenomenon sold six million books and DVD's on the pure strength of the belief that you can "imagine" yourself to total fulfillment. Can Americans really be so naive?

Steve Salerno, writing for The Wall Street Journal, observed: "With highly visible gurus of personal development fanning the flames, an entire generation has come of age believing that perpetual happiness is a birthright. Over the past four decades, the concepts of Empowerment and Entitlement, first-cousins in the family of American psychobabble, have conspired to produce what New York Observer writer Alexandra Wolfe labels 'the most coddled generation in American history.' We once laughed at the excesses of the 'Me Generation,' the malignant narcissim epitomized in the TV show 'Seinfeld.' If we don't laugh quite as much these days," Salerno observes, "that's because it's not caricature anymore. It's life as we live it."

Addressing the "pursuit of happiness" as one of the "inalienable rights", according to our Declaration of Independence, Malcolm Muggeridge observed in his thoughtful work, Jesus Rediscovered, that "the pursuit of happiness... as an inalienable right, is without any question the most fatuous that could possibly be undertaken. This lamentable phrase... is responsible for a good part of the ills and miseries of the modern world."

Peggy Noonan, a regular contributor  to The Wall Street Journal, addressed this issue of happiness in her book, What I Saw at the Revolution. Noonan observed, and I believe correctly, that much of our unhappiness is born out of a cultural revolution that is most evident with the baby boomer gereration. Noonan writes:

"It is 1956 in the suburbs, in the summer. A man comes home from work, parks the car, slouches up the driveway. His white shirt clings softly to his back. He bends for the paper, surveys the lawn, waves to a neighbor. From the hous comes his son, freckled, ten. He jumps on his father; they twirl on the lawn. Another day done. Now water the lawn, eat fish cakes, watch some TV. go to bed, do it all again tomorrow...Is he happy? No. Why should he be? We weren't put here to be happy. But the knowledge of his unhappiness does not gnaw. Everyone is unhappy, or rather everyone has a boring job, a marriage that's turned to disinterest, a life that's turned to sameness. And because he does not expect to be happy the knowledge of his unhappiness does not weigh on him. He looks perhaps to other, more eternal forms of comfort." 

Listen to Noonan's further observations about the root of our unhappiness: "Somewhere in the Seventies, or the Sixties, we started expecting to be happy, and changed our lives if we were not. And society strained and cracked in the storm...I think we have lost the Old Knowledge that happiness is overrated, that, in a way, life is overrated. We have lost, somehow, a sense of mystery, about us, our purpose, our meaning, our role. Our ancestors believed in two worlds, and understood this to be the solitary, poor, nasty, brutish and short one. We are the first generation of man that actually expected to find happiness here on earth, and our search for it has caused such--unhappiness. The reason: If you do not believe in another, higher world, if you believe only in the flat material world around you, if you believe that this is your only chance at happiness--if that is what you believe, then you are disappointed when the world does not give you a good measure of its riches...you are despairing." 

Very little has changed over the centuries in man's quest for this elusive thing called "happiness." Writing over 350 years ago, Blaise Pascal observed in his Pensees: "If our condition were truly happy we should not need to divert ourselves from thinking about it...I have often said that the sole cause of man's unhappiness is that he does not know how to stay quietly in his room...What people want is not the easy peaceful life...but the agitation that takes our mind off it and diverts us. That is why we prefer the hunt to the capture. that is why men are so fond of the hustle and bustle..."

Are we happy? Do we really believe that anything "under the sun" can bring us lasting fulfillment? Could there be a more accurate diagnostic of modern man's quest for that elusive happiness than that offered by Pascal?

For FinishingWell,

Barry Morrow