The Death of Happiness, or Why We Should Change Our Vocabulary Now

I've always been sort of a paranoiac in reverse. I constantly suspect other people of plotting to make me happy.
-Franny from J.D. Salinger's Franny and Zooey

If you see a man approaching you with the obvious intent of doing you good, you should run for your life.
-Henry David Thoreau, Walden



Good adjectives aren't good. Words like "adult." "Responsible." "Efficient." "Economic." "Prompt." These are considered complements in today's world. "Out there" in the "real world" where "things" are "getting rough." I can't imagine someone calling me a worse name than a responsible adult.

It all begins with the most elemental change which every human being undergoes: loss of innocence. All too often, innocence in our culture symbolizes life-blood. Innocence is the last thing keeping us rooted to who we really are. Inevitably, loss of innocence is concurrent with, in varying stages and degrees of severity: cursing, sex, and drugs. Yet in a way, those changes are unavoidable. Even drugs. Everyone takes drugs at some point. Alcohol is a drug. So are Tylenol and NyQuil. Yet these things don't have to irrevocably change our life. Today, when most people "grow up", they lose much more than just naivety. They lose the will to be free, genuine, truthful to themselves. They slip into the roles which have been prepared for them effortlessly, without a struggle.

I watch it happen now. I watch it happen to people I know, who in younger years used to be an endless source of amusement and merriment. Now they make comments about the weather. They joke about gas mileage. They want to know about the traffic. Yeah, it's just common courtesy, yeah, their interests are just changing. Fine. I'm not asking for the world to not know what an SUV or a storm-front is. I'm asking for them not to care.

And it's not that they particularly care. Everyone seems to be so...neutral, to everything. Care implies passion, when this a world of apathy and indifference. If you find the rare "responsible adult" with passion, he or she is either very lucky, or that passion is an empty one. By empty I mean directed towards some irrelevancy or another, like car models or gutter design or building infrastructure. How about something that you, as a child, cared about? Before you had to start lying to yourself so that you march in tune with the "real" world? That's harsh, but unfortunately true. Children don't lie about important things like that because they don't know any better - the world hasn't taught them the art of dishonesty yet. Once a person slips into that age and stage that can be considered "adult", they have to start lying. To not lie would be to face the truth: that the things they deeply and genuinely want out of life as a human being are largely impossible. It bothers me. It bothers me that they are proud to now be one of the many, to be part of the whole, to be moving in the same direction at the same slow-as-shit speed as almost everyone else has ever moved in the history of the industrial world.

With the older generation I am accustomed to this. I've grown up with it, been around it my entire life - everyone has. That's the way their world is. It doesn't have to be the way our world is. If you're anywhere close to twenty, think back five years. Since when did you start saying "it's just been lovely seeing you again" or "we'll have to do lunch and catch up again sometime" (since when does anyone do lunch?) in that voice, that horrible voice of a scheduling bot, rushing about daily life from place to place, assigning empty words to empty occassions, never living for the happiness of now, never stopping to work for a real experience, real emotion.

Alcohol is the answer for everybody. With alcohol they can forget that they don't feel anything else the rest of the day. That their body has been numbed for the past ten hours is meaningless once they toss down a frosty (fittingly named) "adult" beverage. They live life from drink to drink, occupying the mean time a few spare diversions which they probably don't truly care about that much, spending their days having what soul is remaining inside of them slowly pulled away by all the forces in the world that have encouraged them to be a responsible adult. I wonder if their "mentors" knew what else they were encouraging, when they encouraged a job, a career, an-insert much-nastier word here (the English language has not yet created a word nasty enough to capture the nastiness of what people do to themselves to earn a paycheck).

I'll be the first to say it: there are a thousand reasons why a drinking age law of 21 is absurd, but to me the most obvious reason has yet to be unleashed. The truth is alcohol can be, for the most part, better trusted in the hands of teenagers. And I DON'T mean younger people as in twenty-somethings that blow half their paycheck on Old Joe's Watering Hole - I mean teenagers who still have a love for life, who aren't yet "responsible" enough to revert to the point where alcohol is their chief and primary means of recreation and entertainment, who haven't yet forgotten what it means to be breathing living creatures who really and truly can do exactly whatever they want to do - and that includes the entire spectrum of human experience.

"Career oriented" adults often forget what it's like to look at the world through eyes of wonder, as they did in their childhood. They forget all that is open to them, because the "real" world seems to close so much of it off. Society prizes efficiency and responsibility - but not true efficiency and responsibility. They aren't judging your mental and physical prowess - literary merit and footspeed won't earn you a job - they're judging the degree of your conformity to what they say is the good life. It shocks me that intelligent people, who know full and well the preciously short amount of time they've been given to live, buy into these false definitions.

Everyone should be free to live exactly the life they desire, and no one can ever presume to say what that is for anyone else other than themselves. But what I can say, without feeling guilty, is that you should look a little deeper. Don't think about what will make everybody else around you happy when it comes to your own life. You can't help anybody else until you help yourself by pressing the pause button on the whole growing up experience for just one moment, and thinking back to the pure joy of childhood. Whatever you felt then should not be the peak of your life - there's no reason for it to be. That doesn't mean you can't have a job, it doesn't mean you can't make money - it does mean that you should think long and hard to imagine your wildest dream...and live it without a second's hesitation.


Song of the Day: 'Long May You Run', originally by Neil Young is covered below by an artist I found on youtube called 'thebrooke'. I would have never said the original was one of Neil Young's best songs - not bad, but not in the league of his classics. The unique version below is a reworking of the song that comes from a different perspective and gives it almost a different meaning. Even though the song is about the perserverance of his car, and how it became a friend to him over the years, listening to this version of the song you feel that it could be about a person, or something more than just a car. This is another example of a song with great lyrics that would work well on their own with minimal instumentals - and that's exactly what this girl did. Her website, with dozens of other excellent covers (including an interpretation of 'Little Red Riding Hood' that blows the original away):
http://www.supernaturalthings.net/music/
http://www.youtube.com/profile?user=thebrooke&view=videos