Happiness Ruined Everything

It's not the phones.

Photo by Matt Palmer on Unsplash

We were snuggling on the couch when he said it:

“I guess you’re not happy.”

That was a weird thing to hear, because I was happy. But instead of getting to live in that moment, I wound up spending the next hour trying to convince him I was happy—and it still wasn’t good enough.

He left.

Over the next few months, he started talking to his ex again, on the phone, without telling me. He went back to her. Then he came back to me. Then he broke up with me two more times. The whole saga, two years, he kept me a secret from his parents, who pressured him to give up the career he wanted and go to law school. Last I heard, my old fiancé had finally gotten married again.

A few months after the breakup, I got a new teaching job. Even though I was full-time faculty, they didn’t give me my own office. I shared one with another teacher, who was going through her Eat, Pray, Love phase.

She also talked a lot about happiness.

She tried to give up all her possessions and live in a Buddhist monastery. Spoiler alert, it didn’t make her happy. So she came back to the states and did something very similar to what I’d done, fall in love with someone who dumped her three times. Except they went all the way.

They got married.

She maxed out her credit cards replacing all the stuff she’d given away. For the next year, she tried extra hard to have it all.

One day, she came home to find their apartment cleaned out. There was a little note on the fridge that said something like:

“Sorry, I’m just not happy.”

They all thought about happiness a lot, and it confirms something I’ve learned from diving through psychology and sociology journals over the years, while navigating a world saturated in sacchrine joy, trying to figure out what’s wrong with people and why we’re in this dystopian timeline:

The more you think about happiness, the more you chase it…

The more miserable it makes you.

For me and my officemate, someone else wasn’t happy. Because they weren’t happy, we had to supply happiness for two. While you can make someone happy, you can’t be happy for them, and that’s the central problem.

There’s no such thing as surrogate happiness.

But that’s what we’re sold…

Over and over again.

There’s a term for all the propaganda we soak in while trying to accumulate the basic building blocks of a life. For all the thousands of listicles out there promising to unlock the secrets of the universe, not one guru has ever touched this phrase, and when you understand it, you see why.

It’s called a happiness script.

Sociologists use this term to describe all the rules we follow in the pursuit of happiness. We have all kinds of happiness scripts now. There’s the standard happiness script that tells you to go to college, get a good job, get married, buy a house, have kids, and then they grow up and do the same thing.

That one’s dead, but it spawned the others.

We have the digital nomad happiness script, the crypto happiness script, the influencer happiness script, and so on.

Now the techno bros are using happiness scripts to shove artificial intelligence down our throats, telling us it’s going to be so amazing when robots can make art, music, and movies so we don’t have to.

The MAGA movement believes deporting all the immigrants and punishing their enemies will make them happy.

The founding fathers mention happiness explicitly in the Constitution, but they leave out all the pain and suffering that was going to pay for it. Hundreds of years later, the best our systems and scripts have done is export slavery and genocide halfway around the world, so nobody has to feel bad about it.

The pursuit of happiness always seems to overlap with systems of exploitation and abuse, whether it’s the abuse of humans or the planet’s resources. Ask any billionaire, and they’ll tell you. It’s never enough.

It has a lot to do with the way modern western culture has defined happiness. It’s about feeling good. It’s about having stuff. The entire economy depends on most of us believing the next phone or the next home renovation will finally make us happy, but it never does, because that kind of happiness remains fleeting and elusive. It’s not the real thing, just a dopamine rush.

Real happiness?

Again, the research seems to keep landing on the same conclusion. Once you have the basics, food, clothing, shelter, a sense of meaning and purpose, a few friends, that’s really all you need. But that doesn’t make anyone obscenely rich. It doesn’t create billionaires. So what do they do? They deprive us of it all.

Then they sell it back to us.

So you wind up with unaffordable housing, clothes that fall apart after six months, and a mental health crisis.

A lot of us work all the time and spend our entire income on the basics, all in order to feed someone else’s reckless, futile pursuit of superficial bliss. If that we’re enough, we’re told to smile while doing it, because… customer service.

That’s nothing if not surrogate happiness.

These days, it seems like the world runs on this surrogate happiness, people pretending to be happy while crushing themselves at work, having kids, raising families, all to make someone else feel good, but it’s never enough. We do all the labor that would make us happy, and then it’s taken from us. We carry more and more happiness to term, and then hand it off.

They consume our happiness.

Millions of us found a sense of meaning or purpose in our jobs. For the last twenty years, we were told to pursue our passions, to hustle, to grind our way toward happiness. Now we’re being told it was a big mistake to wrap your identity up in your job, because you’re going to be replaced with a robot soon. Now you need to find another way to be happy, but it has to follow their rules. Look at anything broken now, and it was broken in the name of happiness.

The craziest part? Words like “minimalism” and “gratitude” have swept over this culture a dozen times. Each time, millions of Americans empty their garages and buy gratitude jars. For decades now, millions of Americans have been indoctrinated with “happy meals” that teach them to locate joy in a box with a cheap plastic toy. As they grow up, we replace the box with a phone.

And we wonder why there’s mental health crisis.

Politicians go around saying, “It’s the phones.” Well, take away someone’s phone and tell them to keep working 80 hours a week while raising children without affordable childcare or even health insurance.

Would they be happier?

So, it’s not the phones.

Humans are problem-solving creatures. Looking at my own life, I know I’m happiest when I’m doing something with a purpose, working on a problem, making something, and learning things. That kind of curiosity has been nearly stamped out of society, and it’s a big reason why they’re not happy. The current administration has practically declared war on curiosity and inquiry.

Their base thinks ignorance makes them happy.

It hasn’t so far…

It’s the fact that 90 percent of everything we do now goes toward someone else’s benefit, and not our own. The billionaires mold us in their image, cortorting words like “gratitude” that used to mean something.

Now they’re just another brand.

We live in a world where millions of people can’t just be happy ordering a latte. It has to be done in three minutes, and it has to be handed to them with a smile. They’ve been taught to consume happiness. When we say happiness ruined everything, we mean the current distorted version of it, the kind that goes away the minute the froth on the latte starts to collapse on itself.

They never wanted any of us to be happy.

They wanted surrogates.