From the archives: Happiness is, happiness isn't (book review)

Edited from a post of February, 2008

Someone at church handed me a book to read called Happiness™ by Will Ferguson (Penguin Books, 2002) . I knew it was meant to be satirical; I didn't know just how much off-colour stuff I was going to have to muck through to get to the heart of it. Hip-waders would be advised.

However, I do like the premise of the book, and it did try to make some good points. It’s a novel about an (imaginary) self-help book called What I Learned On the Mountain that--astonishingly--works. And its impact (mostly negative) on the editor who discovered it and society in general. Some of the initial effects:

“People no longer felt estranged from their bodies. They felt connected. For the first time, possibly ever, Americans began to feel comfortable with who they were. Cosmetics went unsold; department stores stood half-deserted. Expensive perfumes were marked down and sat gathering dust. GQ magazine switched its emphasis from men’s fashion to articles on ‘fostering happiness.’ Dour Calvin Klein models stood on street corners holding up signs: ‘Will pout for food.’” (Happiness™)

Unfortunately, the spread of “happiness” not only begins to destroy the economy (the alcohol and tobacco market dries up alongside the cosmetics industry), but it (whatever it is) destroys people's minds and emotions as well. The editor, Edwin, comes to this conclusion:

“[It’s] a world without a soul. A world without laughter. Without real laughter. The kind that makes your heart ache and your eyes go blurry….we need our vices….because life is sad and short and over far too soon.”

One could argue that this version of happiness isn’t happiness at all, but some kind of selfish, mindless seeking after bliss. (bliss n : a state of extreme happiness [syn: blissfulness, cloud nine, seventh heaven, walking on air]) Edwin pleads for what he calls “joy” instead of “happiness.” However, you could also argue with Edwin’s definition of “joy” since it seems to be based only on celebrating the ugliness, pettiness and vices of humanity (accepting and enjoying what makes us human) rather than looking outwards from ourselves (e.g. to a supreme Being).

I hear echoes of Brave New World in this--the Noble Savage "claiming the right to be unhappy." However, Edwin isn't the Noble Savage by any means, or even Brave New World's questioning Bernard; he's a frustrated Gen-Xer who can't stand his wife, or his cat, or his boss, or his job, or the city he lives in. His only redeeming quality is that--somehow--he's one of the few people who read What I Learned On the Mountain and aren't taken in by it. This implies that he's worthy of telling the rest of us what supposedly makes life meaningful.

And I suppose he's right, in a general way. Too much seeking after "happiness" is just self-seeking and self-defeating; yes, there's something deeper out there. But I felt reluctant to accept much of his pontificating...I think you can get a just as good a read on happiness-as-human-experience in Ray Bradbury's Dandelion Wine, and without the profanity.

Arranging your own convenience (how messing with your own head can be productive)

When you're trying to do the next thing, it helps to know what that thing is. There's an old writer's trick of stopping work in the middle of a chapter, so that when you get back to work, you know exactly where you're at, just pick things up and start writing again.

Many homeschoolers, not all but many of them, do pre-planning in the summer. Sometimes (as in Lydia's Grade 8 year), this goes as far as having an entire year's weekly work written out and bound at Staples. The thinking is that then, even if you change some things, you already have that idea in your head; you know what you're doing, and all that's left is to do it. I know at least one person who made a point of collecting up all the art and science supplies required for the term (or maybe the year) and having them handy in one box. (At least the non-perishable ones.) And it makes sense: even if you don't buy a science kit, shouldn't you have the same convenience as those who do, even if you have to arrange the convenience yourself?

We are not homeschooling this year, but I still do a lot of pre-arranging, maybe more than ever.To quote Aristotle and Mary Poppins, it seems like well begun really is half done. Especially if you buy a lot of zip-lock bags. (Oh, how I love those extra-large ones--and I wonder why I waited all those years to buy any.)

I pre-sorted and pre-cut fabric and supplies for Christmas crafting, and that way I knew how far the fabric was going to stretch, whether I actually had any interfacing, and where the spool of red thread was. When I felt like sewing and had time, I took out the right (large, extra-large) bag and everything was right there, no excuses, just like a craft kit. I think of this as a sort of messing with my own head, in a good way. If you know you tend to procrastinate on things because they're too much work, then having them pre-started can be enough of an incentive to finish them off.

That's one reason freezer-non-cooking has worked well for us this fall.The meals are made, they just have to be cooked. Recently I have done the same thing with dry ingredients for baking (more zip-lock bags, and I do wash and re-use them). I have an awesome bread-machine recipe for whole-wheat bread, but I buy the bag of whole-wheat flour and then forget to make any until the flour goes rancid. (Yes, I know you can freeze it.) I figured out that a small bag of flour makes about three loaves (and a couple of cups left over for muffins), so that's what I did: pre-measured the bread ingredients into bags, wrote on them what else to add (water, oil, yeast), and stored them in the cold room. I did the same for pizza dough and two types of muffins, and some of the ingredients I have collected up for holiday baking. I figured out that we had just enough coconut, but no dried cranberries, so those went on the shopping list.

All this has nicely short-circuited my procrastinatory tendencies, allowing my do-it side to shout a Simpson-esque "HA-HA" at the Daemon of Sloth. Aside from feeling so virtuous and actually getting the sewing completed (so much so that yesterday I just looked at the sewing machine and knew we were done our relationship for this season), it has paid off in more practical terms. At four o'clock yesterday afternoon, I put a bag of pizza-dough mix into the bread machine, let it run its fairly short pizza-dough-mix-rise cycle, preheated the oven, stretched the dough into a big pan, spread it with some garlic margarine Lydia had talked me into buying, sprinkled it with grated cheese (I do buy grated cheese sometimes, especially the mixed Italian kind), pre-cut it into breadsticks with a pizza wheel, and baked the whole thing for about twenty minutes. Mr. Fixit and Lydia got home at 5:30, and the big puffy cheesy breadsticks were just coming out of the oven.

Now here's the truth, if you really need to know how lazy I can be: pizza dough has hardly anything in it anyway. I think all that was in the bag was pre-measured flour and salt. (I added water, oil, and yeast when I mixed it.) It would not have taken much for me to think "bread sticks. Yes, there's a new bag of flour. There's the salt. Measure it out, off we go." Really, I could have managed that. But there's this extra incentive: a zip-lock bag with Pizza Dough written on it, telling me to add things to it, tantalizing me with its existence, begging me to make something out of it. The same with the bags of pre-sorted fabric and trims: "I'm a little XXX waiting to be born. Bring me to life." And freezer meals: "I'm a Crockpot full of chili."

And that's all there is to it.

Quote for the day: In defense of reluctant writers

From Youth: Its Education, Regimen, and Hygiene (1906), by G. Stanley Hall, , Ph.D., LL.D., President of Clark University and Professor of Psychology And Pedagogy 

Closely connected with this, and perhaps psychologically worse, is the substitution of the pen and the scribbling fingers for the mouth and tongue. Speech is directly to and from the soul. Writing, the deliberation of which fits age better than youth, slows down its impetuosity many fold, and is in every way farther removed from vocal utterance than is the eye from the ear. Never have there been so many pounds of paper, so many pencils, and such excessive scribbling as in the calamopapyrus [Pen-paper] pedagogy of to-day and in this country.  Not only has the daily theme spread as infection, but the daily lesson is now extracted through the point of a pencil instead of from the mouth. The tongue rests and the curve of writer's cramp takes a sharp turn upward, as if we were making scribes, reporters, and proof-readers. In some schools, teachers seem to be conducting correspondence classes with their own pupils. It all makes excellent busy work, keeps the pupils quiet and orderly, and allows the school output to be quantified, and some of it gives time for more care in the choice of words. But is it a gain to substitute a letter for a visit, to try to give written precedence over spoken forms? Here again we violate the great law that the child repeats the history of the race, and that, from the larger historic standpoint, writing as a mode of utterance is only the latest fashion.