Confessions of Ignorance: A Dialogue on Happiness
I encountered the philosopher at his usual table and he invited me to sit down. On the table were two coffees, two danishes, two napkins and two smart phones turned face down with microphones silenced. After eating our pastry, I started questioning him.
"Why is it so hard to find happiness?"
"What's so great about happiness?" my interlocutor asked, sipping his coffee.
"Well, it's preferable to misery. We should be able to live freely and do what we want. Don't we have a right to happiness?" I asked.
"It seems that way, but that phrase is in the Declaration of Independence, not the Constitution," the philosopher said. "And it only mentions a right to the pursuit of happiness; it doesn't say anything about attaining it. It's not legally binding. Pursuit doesn't guarantee possession. It's in very fine print near the watermark when you hold it to the light just right at 4:37 PM. Historians discovered it only recently and entirely by accident. Again, what's so great about happiness?"
"Well, everyone wants to be happy," I said.
"But why? Why is happiness so coveted? It's fleeting and transitory like all feelings. Is happiness the default emotional state for humans? Or do we experience a range of emotions, each of which would become problematic to experience all the time? Aspire to a state of sadness or anger or envy? Who does that? Laughing all the time would also have major drawbacks, as does crying or being pissed off all the time. Being sad is a natural response if your life is a bummer. But physical and emotional states have been pathologized, which has made lawyers, doctors, surgeons and CEOs of drug companies wealthy, all of this in the name of public health and the pursuit of happiness. Happiness itself, or at least the promise of it, has been commodified.
"We are conditioned to believe that if you're not happy, something is wrong. Like,'What? You're not happy? You have a job and a desk and a car and a house and two and a half children! Maybe you need to write a gratitude journal.' This attitude makes people defensively cheerful and less likely to seek help. It encourages insincerity. Fear of the judgement of your peers is a strong motivator to conform. It is the fulcrum of political indoctrination."
"But isn't it true that people feel there's something wrong in their lives that they can't identify?"
"Why is there something wrong if you're unhappy? Maybe you have a reason to be unhappy and it's killing you inside to fake it through your life. If somebody dies and you laugh, you're probably crazy (or, in rare cases when that death occurred under irresistibly amusing or ironic circumstances). So people say, 'I'm depressed,' and doctors give them a bunch of pills without asking them if there's anything they might feel unhappy about. So then they seek unregulated alternative snake oil and balderdash of questionable therapeutic value that also makes other people rich. But I think we can solve this problem once and for all."
"How?" I asked.
"By bringing back trepanning."
"I'm sorry?"
"Trepanning is the Roman practice of taking pressure off of the brain by boring a hole in your skull, reducing pressure on the brain and the mitigating the impact of trauma of the past, helping people endure the prison of the relentless now that we call the present, and assuage fears about the troubling, inescapable, frozen black void that is the future. I've heard it really takes the edge off. It would make people more malleable and open to suggestion and feel not much of anything."
"Wouldn't people be ineffectual, easily deterred idiots? Like zombies?"
"You want them just conscious enough to spend money, maintain a social media account and pretend to do their jobs," he said. "It'll be much like it is now, only cheaper."
"But how do you get people to undergo the procedure?"
"Advertising. Getting a hole in the head is much less costly than drugs and modern surgery because it’s not dependent on technology," he said. "It would be an outpatient procedure and be covered as preventive care by most insurance plans. They could give away $50 gift cards and a chance to win a million dollars to lure them in, knock a hole in their heads and tell them what they want to hear. Ten minutes, in and out. Treat 'em and street 'em. Trepanning is the great social equalizer. People will be happy whether they like it or not and they'll do it together. It's a model of government efficiency."
"Again I thank you for indulging my ignorance of these matters,” I said. "I'm going to the hardware store to buy a drill."