Some People Forget that the Point is to be Happy.
What are we even all doing here?
Another masterpiece accompanying track by my brother J.P. De Veer. This one is called Bone and should be listened to as this entry is read (aloud or in your head, I suppose)
The point is to be happy. Right?
The transcendent meaning of our life is inscrutable; a mystery that becomes more mysterious each time we attempt to search it out. Nobody really knows why we’re here or what we’re supposed to be doing, and so anyone who seems to have even a whiff of that answer is always going to draw a crowd, and usually (eventually) disappoint that crowd as well. Most of us defer the question of meaning, whether through denial, ignorance, or willful letting go. Simply put, we punt the question down field and let the defense worry about the problem.
Many of us figure we won’t be the ones to sort it out, so we defer to “science” or “the church” or - most often - to our children, a process that involves stomach-ulcered parents working sixteen extra shifts a month to amass enough resources and lessons and advantages to give to the next generation of their bloodline, in hopes they might have a fighting chance at deciphering the cosmic strangeness that’s puzzled us to the point of submission. “Good luck!” we holler at our kids, and then shove a $8,650 inheritance (after taxes) in their stupid ungrateful mouths before dropping dead from some silly condition like “multi-system organ failure” or “self-inflicted crossbow wound.”
In lieu of finding that ultimate meaning, most of us settle for “happiness,” and some of us have come to understand that settling for happy is in fact the meaning we were after all along (yada yada yada). Long walks, deep breaths, painting Warhammer 40k models while having four oreos and a tall glass of 1% milk (that you bought as a compromise between you who wants 2% and your wife who wants skim): these are the small nibbles of happiness we settle for in a universe that remains stingy with its secrets. These are mystical happinesses, slow happinesses that come on with subtlety and let us back down with gentleness and ease. The happiness that comes from seeing something beautiful and not feeling the need to pluck it from the ground and stuff it in our pocket. The happiness of realizing you’re starting to look like your dad and it’s not the worst thing in the world? The happiness of finally realizing it feels better to give the perfect gift than to receive it. It is the happiness of realizing you don’t need to be perfect, the simple joy that comes from realizing you kind of…like yourself?
But it’s been hard to even find that lately, things as they are. I’m around 40 myself, but this era we are living in (the sucky decade since 2012, the last time anything was cool and you could say “that’s so gay” without looking over your shoulder) is by far the dumbest cultural moment out of any. Even when truly evil people ruled this country (not the “incidentally evil secondary to stupidity” types of evil we have in control nowadays), shit was nowhere near this stupid. Blame it on whatever you want: social media, racial reckoning, language policing, “wokeness,” Obama, corporate greed, smelly DSA twerps, etc etc - it all sucks no matter where it came from. But perhaps most infuriating thing about this moment in time is how the people making our world the most miserable are the ones talking about happiness the most.
There are a large contingent of Americans ruining peoples’ lives, driving them to suicide, depriving them of their livelihood, destroying their reputations, and telling them to report their parents for wearing a MAGA hat at Thanksgiving, all in the name of HAPPINESS. In the minds of these goblins, perfect happiness is within reach if only we could “uhhhhh….maybe stop being so racist?” This proffered goal of utopian happiness (a type of hypothetical utopia I have alluded to in previous writings) is a society in which no one is made to feel bad for personal attributes for which they have no control. You see, the world as it is is unfair, and to correct this unfairness, we must enter a short period of extreme unfairness to sort of “right the ship,” and then once that’s done we can go back to all people being created equal and all that shit.
But until that time - and you wouldn’t know this unless you were anti-racist - until that time it is completely understandable if you treat others with the most extreme forms of callous cruelty possible. It’s just an unfortunate side effect of building this utopia, a sort of “cleansing” ritual if you will, cleaning out the bad seeds and then replanting the garden anew with only the choicest of produce. So if you find yourself reducing the story of an entire person’s life into one sadistically mean-spirited tweet, if you punish people for things they thought (or that you thought they thought or might think), if you drown out an opposing opinion by just screaming, or if you loot someone’s store they spent their whole life slaving away in just to experience the “ecstatic pleasure” of looting, then don’t sweat it. You’re just doing your part to build utopia and once everyone is finally happy, we will go back to our regularly scheduled programming.
It’s hard to tell when that point of ubiquitous happiness will arrive, or who will be the one to call “time” on things once we do get there, but no matter. When that time comes we won’t care anymore because we’ll all just be so happy. But I must beg forgiveness of everyone involved in the happiness revolution, but I just have one question. And though it’s “not your job to educate me,” and though I know you’re probably “just so tired,” if you can somehow manage to do me the monumental service of responding verbally to a question that another human has asked you, then it would just be the mitzvah of all mitzvahs. And that question is “other than the core group of psychopaths who are gleefully destroying this country, is everyone else feeling happy right now?”
Seriously though: is anyone feeling happier? And if the answer is “not yet,” then my second question is “when?” What do you envision that happiness will look like? Do those involved in the #resistance have an idea of what the world will look like when the darkness is finally snuffed out by the illumination of DEI? By my score, 2023 is a year in which people in the west have the biggest gap between material abundance and happiness. We have everything we’ve ever wished for (other than true hoverboards) and yet a simple walk around the block of any city in this country will put you face to face with at least 25 miserable people. It’s hard to not be a sad sack of shit myself, even though my life is finally clicking into place in myriad ways I’ve worked decades to achieve. How is it that there seems to be a large, committed, and highly motivated force of happy police (don’t defund that one!) and yet just about everyone hates their lives.
My clinical work primarily has me interacting with people who are miserable. The patients who aren’t miserable are only able to maintain their shiny outlook because their psychosis or mania has completely unhinged them from reality. Oftentimes, those same clients go back to the normative levels of misery once the meds kick in (if they aren’t completely obtunded by the poison that they pass off as psych meds) There’s too many sayings about thin lines separating cop and criminal, but not as many about therapist and client. I can’t help but see myself in the people I treat, and being mindful of the three or four bad breaks that could randomly happen at any time, the sum of which would completely reverse my fortune as well as the side of the room I sit in during a counseling session.
(the proverbial chair, most of the patient care I perform is done standing).
Work in the field of mental health long enough and you too would be first in line for any sort of worldview that promises a happier world. But I’m also a bit suspicious. You see, as much as I’d love for miserable people to be happy, I’m a little leery of any such program that claims to fight in the name of happiness and instead incubates one of the most spiritually miserable moments in human history.
Yes, yes, I know - we have penicillin and food science and modern dentistry. I, too, understand that the level of physical pain is at an all-time low. In no time at all, we will be fighting entire wars on League of Legends instead of an IRL battlefield. But survival rates are not the same as happiness rates. To point out that people don’t die from syphilis anymore just doesn’t reach my threshold for “moving in the right direction as a species.” Great, we stay alive longer on average. The question is, in a world like this one…would I want to live any longer than I have to?
Don’t worry, I’m not making subtle suicidal threats. I personally would never kill myself, mostly because I wouldn’t be able to monetize my complaining on substack if I crossed over to the other side. Not to mention, maybe these people promising happiness will make good? Can’t say such movements have a great track record. Utopian promises are nothing new, though they are harder to spot these days as it is no longer required that the adherents of such an ideology all wear uniform white sneakers or drink the same kind of sugary drinks. You have to have a sharper eye to spot them now, or at least be on the lookout for those sporting exciting new pronouns in their email signatures and zoom handles.
But once you do find out who among us is fighting on the side of truth, justice, and the anti-American way, lets hope their movement doesn’t end the same way as the others did. That is to say, ending by either a.) causing the incidental deaths of tons of people caught in the web or b.) causing a huge wealth accumulation in the pockets of the vanguard members while just about everyone else gets a new shackle around a new part of their body. B is much more boring but also much more likely.
Is this current movement different? What exactly makes it different? Why do I have to And why should I believe you? And why should I care?
It’s hard to keep caring about the massive social upheaval we’ve been chronicling here on Substack. About once a day I have an argument in my head with a person who doesn’t exist, although who hypothetically could exist, and the endpoint of this imaginary argument is me deciding to not care anymore. I fantasize about maximizing this social position. I think about turning it into a whole philosophy, something like “Exodus Ethics” or giving it one of those cringe airport book titles that use swear words to make very simple points seem edgy (“The Subtle Art of Not Giving a Fuck” is already taken, so back to the drawing board…perhaps “Who Gives a Flying Fuck, You Motherfucking Piece of Shit?”)
To truly release myself from caring - that is the ultimate fantasy. That would be a veritable “wet dream of the mind.” To not only say I don’t care, but to actually not care. To imagine b-roll footage of mushroom clouds over Cheyenne and riots down Michigan Ave and the Red Army marching on San Diego and still keep my mind and face utterly placid; that, my friends…is “relationship goals.” That, my friends…is the truest form of “adulting.”
I dream of responding to every hair-brained new social scheme or language concoction by merely commenting on how “interesting” it is, without feeling even the tiniest need to provide any value judgment about news that a colleague secured a six million dollar grant on the heels of xis/xer paper entitled: “the legacy of neo-racist colonialist ethics in the dental hygienics industry: a study of 4 BiPOCS attitudes.” I imagine myself an enlightened being, a Buddha of sorts but with a mustache and a Jeep Wrangler and a Nintendo Switch. I see myself smiling, reclining, and relaxing as I breezily take the long view on human nature. “Not anything to get upset about, it’ll all eventually work itself out.” Who knows? Maybe I can even be the type of abrasive dullard who spends their time convincing everyone that what’s happening now is no different than what happens in every era of human history. Or even better: “everything is fine…you’re just getting older is all.”
Yes…me getting upset about the fact that buying wholesale into a political ideology is a pre-requisite for my current employment is just part of growing up. Just like my grandfather who had to make a land acknowledgement statement while en route to storm Normandy - it’s just something we all go through as we get older.
I salivate at the thought of not giving a shit. The euphoria of this release - this casting off of any social responsibility - is as powerful as it is fleeting; every time I remember that I shouldn’t care, every time I begin to fantasize about the casting off of this dreadful heavy chain, it only takes a few seconds to remember the cold hard shitty truth: that the fantasy of not caring is itself a fantasy. It is a wish. A wish to be ignorant, superficial, disengaged, and stupid. A belief these people would ever let someone not care. A belief that I will ever actually pick up and move to Montana. But sooner or later I am sucked back down into my sneakers. I’m not going to Montana, and even if I did it would probably be worse than where I live now.
Wishing to no longer care is like trying to forget how to read. Like looking at the word “ZEBRA” and pretending your eyes don’t automatically read it the second you see the Z. Good grief my friends; so much toothpaste has come out of so many tubes, and I couldn’t stop caring if I tried. How I wish to remain detached and philosophical about the latest daily round of ideological face-fucking and abject insanity that has polluted every facet of American life. How I dream of merely chuckling at the mental acrobatics required to grok the latest editorial headline linking climate change and gender equality. How I lust after the stillness of mind that would allow me to see Mindy Kaling receiving an award from the US President and not feel a whistling hollowness inside of me, the soul-vacuuming realization that the institutions we spent the entirety of human history building are being cast aside for the sake of “representation” and “bodies” and “spaces” and “finding your voice” and “letting them speak” and “being called in and not called out.”
Oh how I wish.
But it’s not going to happen. We all know too well what happens when you stare into the void. Not only does it stare back, but it also stares beyond you, over your left shoulder, in the background where a tv is giving the most recent updates on Beyonce’s legal battles to copyright the name of her 11 year old daughter. The void is starting to be afraid of staring at me.
It’s all a mess now. And just like that pot you’ve been “soaking” in your sink for four days, you can ignore it all you want but sooner or later the stench is unavoidable. “Having to care” is far worse than caring. Caring on its own feels clarifying and invigorating; being forced to care feels like indentured servitude. It feels like listening to your manager at Jiffy Lube explain how each muffler repair now has to take implicit bias into account. It feels like having to say your pronouns to a priest at your nephew’s first communion. It feels like losing your Engineering job so that someone who holds a PhD in “Engineering Sociology” can replace you, it feels like making plans and choosing certain paths in life only for the life you were preparing for to get summarily CTRL+ALT+[SHE]LETED by people who excel at nothing, contribute nothing, love nothing, and hope for nothing more than their own personal aggrandizement. For those of us who are daring enough to question the morality of the current cultural paradigm of “progress at any cost,” it is helpful to occasionally remember just what the fuck we are trying to do.
I think the operative assumptions about all of this are hypocritical on both sides of the aisle. Each team can’t imagine the other side actually having the thoughts and opinions they claim to be having. It’s far too absurd to imagine, and so it all must be in bad faith. And yet, they do believe. Maybe they believe due to their convictions, maybe they believe due to their friends, maybe they believe to stay safe at work or stay on good terms with their Trump-loving father. What does it matter? Whether you are a “true believer” or not really doesn’t matter, does it?
The only thing that matters is if any of it is making us happier? Is it making fathers love their children more? Is it making older people less lonely? It it making people more likely to help strangers, open their door to travelers, and break bread with former enemies? Is this new brand of happiness causing less depression, anxiety, and grief? Is it giving people second chances? Is it loving people for who they are?
Or is it all just a new form of social plot armor. A type of plot armor that used to be limited to 80s movie protagonists is now available to anyone who is from “one of the right groups.” While everyone else is assumed to be vile, destructive, hateful, and scheming, members of certain groups are beyond reproach. Despite the fact that our society is being flooded with unprecedented levels of pettiness, superficiality, selfishness, and cowardice, I am somehow supposed to believe we are moving in the right direction because fat women can play a flute on Jimmy Fallon?
I’m sorry, I don’t buy it. I’ll never buy it. You can do what you want. You can struggle session me, chain me up, beat me over the head, and squeeze my balls til I cry uncle. Even if you get me; if you succeed in your torture and forced acquiescence, you still won’t have me. I’ll never believe that a world in which happiness means telling on your neighbor, betraying your family, and smiling while people steal from you and hurt the people you love is one I want to live in. You can never convince me that the unfairness will stop, that the wrongs will be righted, that we will reach a point in which those who pray for the destruction of others will lower their swords and declare armistice. Blood lust in battle is never sated, and though the prefer weapon of choice is now toxic invectives hurled across the internet, the thrill of a rising body toll remains the same. Such has always been the rule for conquerors who delight in the conquering. It is not enough to kill their enemy, they must burn the houses and salt the fields too. The only benefit of going to your knees is to give them a cleaner cut across your neck as they cleave the most dangerous part of you from the rest of your body.
We cannot stop caring. Even if we are brought to the brink, we cannot give up. Because even if we throw our own fate to the wind, giving in still puts at risk those we love. We have to keep fighting. But we cannot win using the rules of battle set out by those who invade our ideological lands. To those who wish us nothing but pain, we cannot allow them to set the terms of engagement. Strategy is needed, and comes from people far wiser than I. All I know for sure is that to figure out the best strategy is meaningless if you do not start from the thing that anchors you to the fight in the first place. The anchor is those who we love, those who love us, those not yet born who deserve a world that you have a fighting chance to be happy. A world that does not require the majority of one’s vital energy spent on regulating your true thoughts and feelings. A world that does not condemn people for things that their great great great grandparents maybe did (or at least looking like the people who did those heinous things). A world that insists that happiness is found inside vocabulary games where only the biggest losers in existence can keep up with the rule changes.
The lesson of every dystopian novel is lost on these people. Every dystopia always starts as a vision of utopia, and is called a utopia til the bitter end by those who engineered it. You all already know what happiness is, you need not listen to the accounts of “the professionals” to figure it out. You know that happiness requires friction, sacrifice, moments of loss and regret. You know that you can only find peace if you accept that there is no peace; there is no place of real safety in this world where we can run and hide. To suggest differently is an idea that should be laughed at, not celebrated.
You know that happiness is something you can feel, and you don’t need to be told how or when to feel it. I don’t know how we get there, but I just know that we have to keep trying. We have to keep caring not out of hatred for our enemies, but out of love for those who we would suffer any amount of pain and sadness just to see them live. If ever we are in doubt of what you stand for, just think happy thoughts. Actual, real, honest-to-goodness happiness. Accept no substitutes.
Especially ones that have research papers written about them.