One Easy Simple Way To Become Perfectly Happy

This is a really great article, even if it happens to be at Vox. You could break your Never Click on Vox resolution and just read it. Basically, the author, who is not from here, thinks that the American obsession with happiness is making most Americans really unhappy. She delves right in to the whole mess and makes sensible and true observations about the nature of happiness, the rising levels of anxiety in the American public, the ridiculous business of mindfulness, and the idiocy of self esteem culture. It’s worth reading the whole thing and I’ve put her book on my very long and unachievable reading list.

Really, to everything she says, Amen. When you go after a thing as elusive as happiness, and make that the thing of your grasping, it will always slip through your fingers. It can’t be the Main Thing. And yet, there it is, enshrined in our founding documents as a Right, as one of the main reasons we’re here.

It is not surprising, then, that this whole election cycle I’ve heard little whisperings about Virtue. That the founding fathers, I mean, sorry, that’s sexist, the Founding People, didn’t think that you would have a happy society if you didn’t also have a virtuous one. If you aren’t good and kind, you won’t be happy. And so, having left virtue off at the last cultural rest stop, happiness isn’t really available to us any more. We just haven’t noticed. So we keep pursuing it like its just around the next corner.

But I think it’s important to ask Why. Why do you have to have virtue in order to also have happiness? I ask this because I have a jolly good and very easy answer, but it’s not one that anyone wants any more, even though it accounts for all the sadness of our political landscape and the general malaise that sits over us like a heavy, thick, ugly cloud.

Ready? I hope you’re excited for me to solve all your problems.

If you get to have everything you want, and you never encounter a hard, sharp No about yourself and who you are, you can never be happy. In fact, the more you are told yes–Yes you can have that, Yes you are wonderful–the more angry you become, which is not an emotion that will lead you along toward happiness.

Observe the smallest child and you will see what I mean. Many parents today don’t want their children to be unhappy and they think, because it seems like an obvious thing, that if they say no to the child, the child will not be happy. So they don’t say no. They say yes. Yes you can have a toy from this aisle. Yes you can have a cookie. Yes we can do a fun thing. Yes you can speak to me any way you want. Yes you are a lovely child and there isn’t anything wrong with you at all. And for all the yeses, parents are astonished to find angry miserable children lying on the floor of the grocery store, screaming because the cookie was the wrong shape, or because the toy isn’t the right one, or because he just felt like screaming. The child to whom the parent says a resounding Yes, both in the acquiring stuff, and about who he is in his essential nature, is an angry, bitter child.

Bitterness, defiance, anger. These emotions are also the substance of our political discourse. Which is strange, given that we haven’t said no to anyone about anything, culturally, for quite a while. Whatever you want to do. Whatever you want to have. Whoever you want to be. Yes. That’s fine. No problem. If hearing Yes was really the producer of happiness, we should be the happiest nation this side of Canada.

Of course, similarly, if all you ever year is No, that won’t make you happy either. There is plenty of misery to be had for the person who never hears Yes from anyone. But that is a different kind of misery, a crushed to earth sadness. Whereas the plentiful smorgasbord of Do Whatever You Want produces the misery of anger.

Why is this?

Because people, even little tiny children, aren’t good. I know this is a shocking thing to say and impossible to see. Everyone is Good. Let me name some good people. Of course, me, I am good, and Mr. Trump, and Secretary Clinton, and all the people in Government at all the different levels, and all the children of the wold. All Good.

Except, obviously, not. All these people I just named are not good. They are bad. Humanity is bad. Not irredeemably bad (otherwise God wouldn’t have bothered to redeem us) but nevertheless bad enough that not everything that each human person wants to do should be blessed and celebrated. What happens to you when you are told that it’s fine to do something that is actually bad?

Well, look at the child. If you have a child who is steeped in the selfish consideration of himself–and he would be wouldn’t he, because he’s a child–and you give him a cookie, you cement him in his badness. You bless his selfishness. You confirm his idolatry of himself and rebellion against God. And, poor little guy, at the core of his being he knows something is wrong. He isn’t actually happy being selfish, but he doesn’t have any other way of being, because he, as a human person, is fundamentally turned in towards himself. He needs to be turned out, towards God, towards others. And a parent, kind of in the manner of Jesus, could rescue that child out of all his trouble and sorrow and selfishness and sin by naming it for what it is. By saying, “Dear Sweet Johnnie, I love you, but no, you can’t have a cookie, because you are in a bad way right now, you have just been very disrespectful and unkind to everyone around you, and you need to repent and turn from yourself and cling to Jesus. You are Wrong, and you Cannot Have This Cookie. And if you ask again you will experience some kind of pain, though it breaks my heart.” Thus, in kindness and humility, the parent works to restore the child to God and the world, by not letting him sit in his own sin stewing in bitter sadness.

So also with the average grown person. True happiness comes when we are delivered out of the deep darkness of sin. Have you ever gone along, off kilter, angry for a reason you knew not of, but then you saw that you had done something, or that you had been thinking something wrong and foolish, and you gave that thing up, and you went along unburdened and much happier after? I mean, this should happen regularly in human society, especially the church.

If someone says, “I haven’t done anything wrong. I’m doing fine,” a very appropriate and kind thing to say is, “That’s not true.” This, for me, is the great tragedy of so many prominent evangelical leaders saying that Trump is fine, that his crude exploitation of other people is not that big of a deal. Because Hillary, who also would benefit from this simple easy solution to all her problems. It is horrid in a political sense, but it is also very unkind to Mr. Trump himself.

It’s hard to say no to anyone. I hate saying no, least of all to myself. But without the no, without the rejection of bad, wrong, ugly attitudes and behavior, there can’t be rejoicing over the good that is able to grow when the ugliness has been removed. And what greater happiness, true happiness, there is when you are comfortable with yourself, comfortable in the presence of God, able to concentrate on the person in front of you without being troubled by the interior burden of sin? There isn’t any greater happiness.