I just want to be happy

    I want to be happy. I know, that’s not something people usually want or expect out of life, but when I say I want to be happy, I mean that I want to live in a world where I know my happiness is important. I don’t think I live in that world right now. 

    My entire life I was taught to do what was right, to think about others before thinking about my own happiness, to work to make the world a better place. I went to college not because I wanted a degree, but because my mother expected me to work to get a high paying job. I looked for work not because I wanted to enter the workforce, but because my mother thought I needed to pay rent. I live with my mother at the moment not because I’m happy to have her support me, but because going out into the world would require me to spend all my time working just to get by, and I don’t want to do that. I hear people complaining all the time that in America we prioritize short term happiness over long term success, but I see no evidence of that. Everyday millions of people get out of bed earlier than they want to so they can go to jobs they don’t like so they don’t have to sleep on the streets or in their parents’ basement. It wasn’t that long ago where a job could support a family, but now people are lucky if two jobs can support their whole family.  They aren’t working for happiness, their working to survive, because society expects them to, because they don’t want to be a burden on their family members. Most of us aren’t going through life demanding that everything be given to us. We’re going through life hoping we don’t have to rely on handouts to get by. But we’ve built an entire society out of the idea that if we don’t put a lid on people’s worst impulses, society will fall apart. No, I don’t think all of us are saints who will help people out of the goodness of their hearts, but most of us aren’t monsters. We want to do the right thing. But a society built out of the expectation that everyone is evil will turn into a society where only evil people can live. 

   We’ve tried to build a society that encourages people to be successful. That led to a society where those who can’t succeed are pitied and those who don’t want to succeed are despised. You aren’t supposed to want to live on just enough. You’re supposed to want to aim higher, to reach the top, to not be happy until you have the most you could possibly get. We talk about gratefulness and gratitude, to be happy that we aren’t at the bottom of society, but every generation continues to teach their kids to aim for the jobs society views as the most valuable. The worst part is that there isn’t an endpoint, there isn’t a point where you can say that you’ve truly succeeded. Once you reach the top, you’re supposed to look for the next point to aim for. Society won’t reward complacency. That’s fine for CEOs and politicians, but it’s a little hard on the rest of us.

      I may be wrong, but I think society should aim to make sure that everyone has what they need to be happy. There are people who dream of being President of course, but there are also people who dream of being a sport star, or internet personality, or a famous writer. But many, many more just want to have enough that they don’t feel trapped or scared. They don’t want to be a famous writer, but they’d like to be able to make a living writing stories. They don’t want to be head of their department, but they’d like to know they have job security. They don’t want to work full time, but they’d like to know that if their parent’s die then they won’t starve. We don’t have that society. We keep saying that we don’t want it, but societies with these protections are much happier than we are. 

    The problem is that from the time we’re born we’re told that our happiness isn’t important. We have to work to make sure that our parents don’t get upset, our teachers don’t punish us, our friends don’t decide to abandon us. Our goal from the time we first learn how to talk is to not upset anyone. That works so long as we have people who can take care of us if things go wrong, but that isn’t a guarantee. I’m glad that we’re trying to grow past this as a society, trying to teach our children to speak their mind if something goes wrong. But this goes beyond parents teaching their children how to ask for help or tell an adult if somethings wrong. This is something we need to build into our schools, businesses, and governmental bodies. We need to make sure that however bad things get, we don’t feel like the world is abandoning us. We can’t aim for a world where we only speak when we feel something needs to be said, because we will never be sure if that’s true or not. We can’t keep silent unless we’re sure something’s wrong because most of us won’t know if something’s wrong until we speak up. We can’t aim for happily ever after until we know for sure that happily ever after is possible.