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Paying the price for trying to buy happiness
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ONE of my colleagues has recently completed a tour of “the happiest country on earth.”
I first thought of Bhutan, but it turned out to be a country in Scandinavia, where shops close early and leisure is not yet a rare commodity.
But is there really this happiness thing, doled out homogeneously in roughly equal measure on a national scale, irrespective of one’s family, bank account, education, health, and profession?
How about Henry David Thoreau’s verdict that “the mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation?”
In the opening paragraph of “Anna Karenina,” Leo Tolstoy declared that “All happy families are happy in the same way; but every unhappy family is unhappy in its own fashion.”
My own experience suggests that while people tend to have no problem empathizing with other people’s blissfulness, they can be fairly ineffectual at sensing happiness that’s supposed to be their own.
We are probably too dogmatic about this elusive concept called happiness.
Many parents today criticize their children for not appreciating enough the abundance of material things they have. But how can they be expected to be thankful when they have no chance of experiencing want and scarcity?
And does it ever occur to the parents to consult their children on their willingness to pay for this material excess with poisoned air, crowds, noise and premature loss of their simple, innocent contentment?
Standard perception
In our eagerness not to be left behind, they are leaving behind the good old world where individuals — not capital — are expected to take control of their own lives and work out their salvation in their own way, regardless of how they are viewed by others. That confidence is now a thing of the past.
In an increasingly standardized perception of happiness, this blissful condition becomes eminently attainable through steady material accumulation.
We automatically assume those most dexterous at grasping to be the happiest. We are so affirmative about the desirability of this blissful state, and such is our benevolence that some people even condescend to favor with happiness a select species or two deemed worthy of human charity.
I am thinking of the cats and dogs as pets clad, fed and bathed in reference to human principles. We think of these chosen individuals as more happy than their counterparts not thus favored.
But there is a price to pay for this aggressive perception of happiness.
Often in our eagerness to acquire the things requisite for a sense of happiness we lose the simple peace of mind that is essential to the proper functioning of our bodies.
Although biological beings, many of us, being unable to sense the beauty of the rhythm of this life as that of a plant, are already ill-suited for this humble planet. We want to soar higher.
In our single-minded pursuit of happiness, we are destroying the environmental and social context that makes the perception of blissfulness possible.
To put it another way, in our intention to grab, to show off, to emulate, to get ahead of our neighbors, all of us end up poorer.
Empty village homes
During a recent tour of my native place in rural Lianyungang, Jiangsu Province, I was aghast at how villagers are putting themselves into a kind of lifelong bondage by erecting loufang, or storied buildings.
In order to pay the astronomical debts they have incurred in raising these needlessly grandiose (yet uncomfortable) structures, they have to leave their homes and slave away at construction sites or assembly lines for many, many years far from their loved ones.
These sepulchral structures, defined by bricks, mortar and steel, are exacting from them the prime of life and youthful blood that used to warm their humble homes.
At the beginning of China’s reforms during the early 1980s, the peasant ideal of life as laopo haizi re kangtou — the bed warmed by the wife and kids — was put down as being too limiting, too unambitious.
When the vision of the new generation of peasants is no longer confined to the the hearth, the native place, or even the native country, as the peasants roam the surface of the earth striving for more cash, they can no longer afford to take a break from their backbreaking labor.
Their smiles and image no longer sweeten the childhood memories of the kids. Do they really think the tradeoffs worthwhile? Maybe some do not have much of a choice.
They are taught, persuaded, or coerced into believing that the only life worth pursuing is the life of affluence and comfort, as defined by brand names, e-gadgets, consumers goods. I don’t know if the migrants are nearing the blissful state they have been striving for. I do think it is time for them to slow down, take stock, and put youth and mirth back into their empty homes.
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