H-A-P-P-I! [crashes through window] [UPDATED]

(via)

I've done such a good job since New Year's of staying on top of things—such a good streak—and now look at me. It might just be that I'm fighting off some kind of cold. But it's an interesting phenomenon, these psychological things, a weird combination of totally in and totally out of your conscious control. I mean, there's that Psych 101 factoid that if you smile, even when you're unhappy, it triggers endorphins or something that actually can make you happy, such that the smile precedes the joy, and there are also studies suggesting that sitting up straight makes you feel better about yourself and that sort of thing...which in some ways is very good news but in others is arguably a little depressing insofar as it reflects on our, what do you want to call it, emotional sovereignty?

When I was a kid, or a teenager or something, it occurred to me that in a funny way nihilism ought to be sort of a comforting idea (I may have already written about this here, some time ago) because if there's no absolute value then you don't really have to worry about being wrong or—put it another way—unhappiness ought never to result from your sense that things aren't the way they should be because there's no should. Anyway, I told my dad about that when I thought of it and he said I was wrong.

my dad, c.1968 (via)

Certainly I'm a fan of paying attention to reality—not an ignorance-is-bliss sort of a guy—and generally believe in changing things in your life that make you unhappy rather than learning to live with them or pearling over them with psychopharmaceuticals*—and my point is not in fact that "nothing really matters" (as someone recently did a terrible job of singing at karaoke when I was visiting Chicago last weekend†); what I'm getting at, though, is that so often our emotional or psychological state is so much a question of attitude, the stance we choose to take. Not always, mind you—I'm not even sure I'd say most of the time—but often.

That's why I think I was right that a world without absolute value is, in a counterintuitive way, a more comforting world: not having to be anxious about doing everything wrong means the freedom to decide to make decisions based on what feels right to you. I guess I'm with Fromm and Emerson on this: there can be no more reliable judge than yourself. You might feel like you don't know what the hell you want, and you might be right, but no one knows any better about that than you do, that much at least is for sure.‡

Speaking of not knowing what the hell, I don't know what the hell I'm talking about. It seems I really am sick, sad to tell. But the advice I got a few months back—not actually phrased as advice, actually, if I remember correctly—was maybe the best advice anyone could give me at the moment: I might as well be cheerful.

Oh! And I just remembered the brilliant observation that someone else shared with me just the other day: the idea that, today, being positive is practically a subversive, countercultural choice. More on that later. In the meantime, I'll be sitting up straight and occasionally smiling for no reason like a crazy person. God bless America!

[LATER THAT NIGHT... I know how and why I got confused about what I was talking about: I was rushing at the end and forgot my original focus, which was that "might as well be cheerful" advice. Once happiness ceases to be tethered to good fortune—to the haps—once you see it as a choice or an attitude you can adopt, then it becomes something you are capable of doing. And why not do it, then? This is not to be confused with the frozen-smile-mask philosophy that pretends things are good when they are not and is falsely cheerful about bad situations: what I'm talking about is not dependent upon the goodness or badness of things or of situations.§]

Relax! The galaxy'll be fine. (via)

* To be clear, I have no problem with psychopharmaceuticals per se: I just think that they should be used only when it's clear that the problem they're treating is primarily chemical and not instead a normal emotional response to a real, external problem; in other words, my vote is always for treating the cause, not the symptom.

† That song—"Bohemian Rhapsody"—is effectively because of Wayne's World. Right? I mean, for my generation. People know it and love it because of Wayne's World. I would guess that even your average Queen fan today between age, I don't know, 27 and 37 got into Queen because of "Bohemian Rhapsody" in Wayne's World. Am I wrong?

‡ More or less. –ed.

§ And this is sound because studies are always reporting that happiness does not rely on what you'd think it does: to great misfortune we adjust and then level out, and indeed the real source of misery seems to be uncertainty, worrying not about your terminal illness but rather about your illness that may or may not be terminal. The latter situation is analogous to the state of the person who is always worrying about what's right or wrong, which is why simple-minded religious absolutists are reportedly happier than those who actually, you know, think about stuff: "knowing" without a shadow of a doubt what's wrong or right makes things simpler, but happier still would be a person who neither worries about justifying and comparing nor relies upon helpful fantasies and delusions of infallibility.