Great news everyone! I’ve worked out why we’re all so
unhappy!
OK, not all of us. Not you there, stuffing your face with a
sausage and egg sandwich. Not you, sir, striding purposefully down the street
like Amelia Earhart on her way to the toy shop. And not you, madam, driving
your BMW like all the other cars are butter and you are a big, expensive knife.
Screw those other cars! They’re not as cool as you! You rule!
You lot aren’t even a bit unhappy. You’re made of joy and
satisfaction. And, in the case of the BMW driver, a deep seated contempt for
all humanity.
No. I mean the rest of us. Those of us who don’t have a
lovely sandwich, or time to go to the toy shop, or can’t afford a massive shiny
car to career around in, making other road users feel miserable like a giant
ignorant penis. Our lives are stupid and made of nonsense.
I’m not talking about real misery, of course. Our lives may
be stupid, but they’re far too pleasant for that. The fact that you’re looking
at my nonsense words suggests that your days are relatively free of true
distress. You have time to read, so you’re not working every hour god sends or
walking five miles just to get water. You can afford electricity, so you’re not
eating fluff to survive. Best of all, you have the freedom to look at my
inconsequential witterings, so you probably don’t spend your days hiding in
rubble, on the run from a terrifying militia of child soldiers.
This is a very specific kind of unhappiness and, annoyingly,
it comes from being quite happy. It’s what some people would call first world
problems, and that’s very hard to deny. This is a kind of unhappiness that can
only exist in relation to comfort and joy. Let me try to explain.
One of my favourite films is LA Story. It’s not a great film
and many people probably dislike it, but it has a special place in my heart and
if it’s ever on TV I have to watch it. Oh, turns out I’m lying. I just looked
on Rotten Tomatoes and it has a 94% approval. Turns out it is very popular. Dammit,
I thought it was my special film. Turns out everyone likes it. I was going to
recommend it, but now I realise you probably own it, and love it too.
See what I mean about my life being miserable?
LA Story. You should watch it.
Anyway. There’s a lovely line in the film spoken by Steve
Martin’s character Harris Telemacher. Describing his life, he says,
“I was deeply unhappy, but I didn’t know it, because I was
so happy all the time.”
It’s always struck me as a strange line. It’s meant as
comedy, of course, and I generally took it as something that was just meant to
be absurd. But as I’ve got older, I’ve kept coming back to that line and I
think maybe it’s more meaningful. In fact a quick check online tells me that
when Steve Martin made the film he was about 45. That’s very nearly my age now.
Maybe that’s why it has started to make sense.
I am, for the most part, very happy indeed. I live in a
lovely house that is often full of friends and wine. Said friends are an
excellent bunch of people who make me laugh and – more importantly – laugh at
my jokes. I have a job which pleases me and money to buy toys. In short, I
rule.
And yet. Very occasionally, under the surface, there’s this
weird sense of dislocation that’s never been there before. Something I don’t
have a name for. A weird, unusual flavour of emotion that exists in direct
relation to the pleasure and delight of life.
I don’t think it means that the real happiness is false. I
just think that there’s a kind of unhappy that exists alongside it, rather than
opposed to it. It might need a new name.
I have been unhappy, in the past. Properly, actually
unhappy. Shortly after the 9/11 attacks on the World Trade Centre I fell off a
ladder and broke my shoulder. That sucked, because it hurt, and I was
self-employed and had no money, and everyone seemed much more concerned with
world events that with my constant moaning about how I couldn’t play guitar
anymore.
There was school. That sucked. Everyone was bigger than me
and everyone was mean and boy did I look like a jerk. And I’m pretty sure it
always rained.
And there was that time that my ex fiancée tried to steal
several thousand pounds from me and told loads of lies about me and acted like
the world’s biggest, greediest, most deceitful bitch. That was miserable too.
But that’s not what I feel now. Now I often stand in my
lovely kitchen, drinking a glass of wine while dinner cooks, listening to music
as sunlight pours through the window. Miles away from all that horrible rubbish
and as happy as can be.
I think of Harris Telemacher’s words. Unhappy, but not
realising it because of happiness. I don’t think it’s quite true, but there’s a
something. A something that exists
alongside the deep, genuine pleasure that life gives me.
Some happiness, yesterday.
Here’s what I think it is. That moment I just described – me
in my kitchen with my wine and my music – is beautiful. But part of my brain
knows that there is a way in which it could be more beautiful. No, not if Anna
Kendrick was there too. Well, maybe a little, although she seems a bit high
maintenance and would probably want to turn the music down or have some of my
wine or something.
No. The way in which that moment will become more beautiful
is when it is gone, and gone forever, and I can’t have it any more.
If it all goes wrong. If I wreck all my relationships. Lose
my job. Get hurled out of my house and have to live in a skip, eating bees. If
I wake up each morning to a grey damp world of loneliness and misery and my
best friend is a sock called “Toothless Jim”. Just imagine the place my
previous happiness will hold in my memories: The day I stood happily in that
kitchen, enjoying that wine, loving that life – it’ll be more than good. It
will seem like heaven itself.
I think about this sort of thing quite often and I’m
starting to think it’s part of what being really happy is about. Everything I
have gains value when I think about what it would be like to not have it
anymore. My hands moving on this keyboard – imagine a time when these fingers
are stiff with age and pain, and suddenly their fluid movement seems wonderful
and insanely precious. Everything I see looks like art when I think that one
day I might go blind. And when I let my mind wander and create a world where
the people around me are gone forever, I think how much I’d long to have just
five more minutes in their company.
If this sounds like a clichéd ‘be grateful for what you have’
kind of thing, that’s probably not far from the truth. I don’t pretend this is
massively insightful. It’s just a way of helping me recognise the true beauty
of what’s going on around me, all the time. I can sometimes sit and sulk about
the things I don’t have, like a PlayStation 4 or a swimming pool or an Anna
Kendrick or a bottle of wine that was just a little closer… But the more I
recognise this feeling – this happiness that contains within it unhappiness –
the more I’m grateful for the stuff I do have. Take these things away and I’d
be very poor… so I must be rich.
So, where does that leave us? Well, I imagine you probably
have the strong desire for a sausage and egg sandwich. And some wine. You might
also have become involuntarily aroused by the thought of Anna Kendrick. And we
have, of course, all learnt a valuable lesson about not taking things for
granted.
Most of all, though, I imagine you probably think I’m just
inventing a nonsensical new kind of ontological maths to justify my constant
state of emotional confusion. And you’d probably be right. But look on the
bright side. Eventually we’ll all be dead. And then we’ll really see what’s
what.
Now go watch LA Story.
