Happiness Is Boring

The un-glamorized truth about our otherwise cheery lives.

“I have been to The Land of Happy — what a bore.” Shel Silverstein

In Silverstein’s “The Land of Happy” everyone’s merry. They joke, they sing, they laugh. So why does he call it boring? Perhaps because that’s all they do. It’s what William Burroughs called “wanting the victory without the war.”

Throughout history, many wars were avoided by paying money instead. The other side toddled off with the cash, and you won by default. It was great if you didn’t want to get slaughtered—but hardly worth a victory parade.

Paris paid off the Vikings, Rome paid off the Mongols. Interesting note: The Vikings and Mongols came back and invaded, anyway. That’s where the word “fleeting” comes from. Parisians knew their happiness was fleeting when the Viking fleets rowed back up the Seine.

We don’t have to worry about Vikings or Mongols anymore, but we do have to worry about “fleeting happiness.” Isn’t Silverstein’s “The Land of Happy” the same as being on Facebook? Millions of people go there each day, showing their vacations, their new patio, their last meal dining out.

Do we really need to know they’re renovating or getting enough roughage? We all know where roughage goes. That’s why we eat roughage.

And, look, it’s great that you made homemade burritos before the big game, but you’re still picking beans out of the rug the next day.

That’s real fleeting happiness.

Being joyful is a bit of a silver-lined rain cloud. We can say we’ve earned everything through hard work. So why aren’t we joyful about our accomplishments? Why do we only show pictures of what we’ve bought?

Psychology Today did a piece on how Facebook makes us sad. Based on a controlled study, they found that viewers experienced a sharp decline in their moods when they scrolled through gleeful faces and haute cuisine. Interestingly, this didn’t happen surfing the internet for information. Just Facebook — and obviously CNN.

Here’s the problem with Facebook: Consciously or subconsciously, people post to make others envious. Not surprisingly, it works. We get envious, then we get sad. Some of us get so depressed, we wouldn’t mind stuffing those merry faces in a few watermelons.

Not that we actually plan to stuff someone’s face into a watermelon. It’s still nice to know we could since we’ve got so many of them.

So why do we keep coming back each day? Psychologists call it “affective forecasting.” We go on Facebook thinking it’s going to make us feel better. What it does instead is rob us of joy. We feel we’re missing something in our lives. What brings us back the next day is hoping those happy, cheery vacationers are peeling like crazy or have sun stroke.

If they’re still okay, we get depressed again, spending more on watermelons than we should. Not that we actually plan to stuff someone’s face into one—but it’s still nice to know we could.

When Silverstein says “No one’s unhappy in Happy,” he’s also alluding to our need to enjoy happiness in groups. We go to festivals, revivals, exhibitions — essentially any function that involves people.

It’s a protective barrier, like those stone walls in medieval cities.

According to Psychology Today, getting off Facebook is a good start. Another is realizing that happiness isn’t a goal as much as a barrier.

We think happiness can protect us, much the way a barrier does. But barriers can work against us. Back in medieval times, armies were known to simply stand outside castles. They waited until the people inside either starved or realized they hated the people around them.

Walls don’t always protect us, in other words. As much as they seem to offer security, they also keep in the bad things.

During the Black Plague, for instance, everyone closed themselves in their castles, etc., only to discover there was more plague inside than out.

These days, we don’t have a lot of sieges and plagues, but happiness can still be irritating. Even your family can be irritating. George Burns once said, “Happiness is having a large, loving, close-knit family in another city.”

So how can we be happy without being boring? According to Psychology Today, getting off Facebook is a good start. Another is realizing that happiness isn’t a goal as much as a byproduct.

The reason people don’t always see this is because they distort happiness.They think it’s all Disney and chirping birds.

Walt Disney knew it was more than that. “We need to keep moving forward,” he said, “opening new doors and doing new things.” Variety is always the key, particularly on a grand scale like Disneyland. Without new, exciting ways to be happy, we figure it’ll fizzle—which it does.

Maybe that’s why some people never find joy. Like everything in our universe, you can only please people who want to be pleased. As Disney figured, if you spread the happiness over a few hundred acres of park, you stood a better chance of making people happy—again, variety.

Here’s another thing about theme parks. People thought they were crazy at the time, but Disney didn’t mind a little craziness. Happiness is crazy. If we laugh at silly, nonsensical things, we’re more likely to be happy.

As Julia Roberts once said “Happiness is only happiness if there’s a violin-playing goat.”

Maybe that’s why joy is fleeting. Like everything in our universe, it’s more or less a mistake. Much like love. Trying to figure it out is like trying to understand roughage. We just know it works.

It’s also hard to know happiness without sadness. We learn more from sadness than success. Sadness forces us to look inside ourselves. We take stock, we learn to face our shortcomings. We become realistic.

When—and if—things turn around, we’re more prepared to be happy. We’ve seen the bottom, now we can see ourselves growing again. That in itself is a lesson, and something successful people learn well.

Writers, for instance, learn from rejection to strengthen their will. They improve, they work at it. The happiness that comes when they do succeed is far more enduring. We figure we’ve earned happiness instead of relying on luck. Not that luck is a bad thing. We all need luck.

Luck makes us happy because we feel the universe is on our side. Sometimes it spurs us on, making us better, but it’s a mistake to depend on luck. So-called lucky people can also be very unhappy.

As Hunter S. Thompson once said: “Luck is a very thin wire between survival and disaster, and not many people can keep their balance on it.”

Luck and happiness can co-exist. That doesn’t always mean they should. Relying on luck is like relying on God. At some point, even God is going to make you unhappy. Again, it’s a lesson, and luck—like God—is always there to remind us that life has its ups and downs.

It’s mercurial, in other words, and because it’s mercurial, we might as well be happy while we can. So what if it’s fleeting? Everything’s fleeting. Accept that and it’s much easier to be happy. It’s also good for how we look and feel. Drew Barrymore said it best: “Happiness is the best make-up.”

Which brings me back to Silverstein’s “The Land of Happy.” If you’re trying to be happy for happy’s sake, then, sure, it’s a bore. It comes with nothing, so there’s no reason for it to stick around.

You can joke, sing and be jolly all you like, but it’s still going to be fleeting. Even people dressed up as Disney characters know that.

Leo Tolstoy once said, “If you want to be happy, be.” It’s kind of a hanging sentence, but you get what he’s saying. Anyone can be happy—just don’t expect to find it scrolling through Facebook.

That’s someone else’s happy. Or it is until the credit card bill from that trip to Belize arrives in the mail.

Vacations are a bit like Vikings. As those medieval Parisians found out, you can’t trust Vikings. Nor can you trust life to make you joyful. Eventually you’ll get depressed and start eyeing those watermelons again.

Better to stay out of “The Land of Happy” and find what Franklin D. Roosevelt called “the joy of achievement and the thrill of creative effort.”

Put simply, it’s what you do that makes you happy, not what you expect. Unless it’s roughage. Then it’s what you do and what you expect.

I’ll leave you with one last piece of advice from Shel Silverstein:

“There are no happy endings. Endings are the saddest part. So just give me a happy middle. And a very happy start.”

Robert Cormack is a novelist, journalist and blogger. His first novel “You Can Lead a Horse to Water (But You Can’t Make It Scuba Dive)” is available online and at most major bookstores (now in paperback). Check out Skyhorse Press or Simon & Schuster for more details.