If You Happy And You Know IT

Should I be happy?

I feel like I’ve been asking myself this question almost daily for the last year or so. That fact alone is maddening enough, but to make matters worse, by all accounts the question itself seems, at least on the surface, irrelevant. What does it matter if I should or shouldn’t be happy? And what does that even really mean? And why would I need to use the better part of a year to ask repeatedly ask myself this same question?

My neurotic tendencies aside, to explain exactly how I got here, let’s take a couple of steps back. Before arriving at this peculiar point of self-reflection, I started by asking myself a simpler, seemingly more relevant derivative of the question:

Am I happy?

Now that seems like a fair question, and certainly an important one. At the heart of our human experience, lockstep with (and perhaps a result of) our natural programming for self-preservation, is our desire for happiness. Ideally, every action that we take in life should, in some way or the other, tie directly to either continuing with a series of behaviors that keeps us happy, or course-correcting our path to get us to this magical state known as “happiness”. So based upon my answer to that question, I either need to keep doing what I’m doing in my life, or shake things up a bit. So…am I happy? The answer I come up with, after long, deliberate thought is: “I think so.”

Well that’s depressing. How can I not know if I’m happy? Happiness is simple, right? Either I feel happiness, or I don’t. As far as soul-searching questions go, shouldn’t this one be a no-brainer?

Well…maybe not.

As kids, I think this answer was a lot simpler. Unadulterated joy (or happiness) seemed to be a lot more in supply when we were children – all of our emotions, and our overall state of being, was a lot more singular. Because let’s face it, when things are going well for you when you’re a child, life couldn’t be sweeter. The type of joy a young girl feels while playing in a sandbox, with nothing more than a bucket and her imagination, is about a 9.5 out of 10 on the happiness scale. Of course by the same token, that girl’s entire life can turn to shambles if she falls down and scrapes her knee. But assuming that young girl can just manage to stay upright more often than not, then she’s living the dream. Being a kid is great. I know I vividly remember the unbridled joy that comes from watching Saturday morning cartoons, and pretending the bedroom floor is lava and trying to get from one end of the room to the other without touching the ground (and if you’ve never played that game, I’m not sure if we can be friends). Assuming we were fortunate enough to have at least one responsible guardian in our lives to look out for us, it didn’t take a ton to make us happy. As we get older, however, I feel as if the answer to this question actually gets a lot more complicated. We rarely experience joy for the sake of joy.

Because once you are old enough to begin supporting yourself in life, from a financial standpoint specifically, you realize that it’s hard to derive the same joy you once experienced from watching Ninja Turtles when you have to deal with terms like “economic recession”, “layoffs”, and “mortgage”…or even “second mortgage”. The burdens of grown-up life make it nearly impossible to experience joy and wonder in the same capacity that we did as children. Average working adults are so preoccupied with real life responsibilities they can rarely dismiss their daily encumbrances long enough to fully emotionally invest in something as trivial as, for example, playing with Transformers – although there are definitely times I still wish I had my Optimus Prime action figure with me to this day.

Certainly adulthood will furnish some moments of happiness in its purer forms. There are few feelings sweeter than when your favorite sports team wins a highly-contested game, for example. I know I’ve leapt out of my seat a few times upon watching my Tar Heels pull out a victory against Duke. And of course romantic relationships can yield quite a bit of happiness, as a byproduct of “love”. But “love” in the romantic sense is a much deeper set of emotions (especially once you pass the infatuation phase of a relationship) that encompass far more than the sense of general elation we associate with happiness – while both love and happiness would be considered “good” feelings, I would assert that love is generally “heavier”. Happiness is a summer blockbuster; love is a black and white foreign film with subtitles – and there’s a time and a place for both (but with regard to this blog, we’re only concerned with the former). Overall, though, most of the “happiness” I experience now is usually tied to good news about a promotion at work, or maybe getting a larger than expected tax refund. The criteria for happiness have changed. As adults, our happiness is usually tied to achievement, not wonderment.

This change would seem to make sense. The contrasts between childhood and adulthood require that we reevaluate what it means to be happy as an adult. Now we have to consider all of the responsibilities that go into being a productive member of society, and factor that into the happiness algorithm. The biggest responsibility most young children have is eating graham crackers at snack time without getting too many crumbs on the floor; rarely does the child have to worry about buying the graham crackers, worrying about how much high fructose corn syrup is in the graham crackers, or even cleaning up any mess they would make eating said graham crackers. As an adult, the bigger picture of happiness must consider your overall quality of life, the responsibilities you have, and the degree to which basic needs are able to be met. Conventional wisdom dictates that the less effort you have to exert, and the less anxiety and distress you have to endure to satisfy your basic needs, the better off you are (i.e., “happier” you are). Taking it a step further, if you can go beyond just meeting your basic needs (and your immediate family’s basic needs), and find a way to routinely satiate your wants, you’ve really started cracking the code to happiness.

Here’s where it gets tricky.

When we were children, happiness didn’t lie prostrate with wealth creation and material possessions. But as adults, we often associate happiness with man-made metrics of “success”. The man with the most money, or the biggest home, or the most beautiful woman is typically regarded as not just having his needs met, but his wants as well…therefore, he is considered “successful”, and thusly, “happy”. So if success is the key to happiness, the next logical question becomes: how can I become successful?

For many people, especially those of working age that reside in the United States, being “successful” involves surrendering to a preconceived notion of success that has been ingrained into the collective psyches of the parents, teachers, and high school guidance counselors of Generation X: go to school, get good grades, and get your diploma. If you did really well in high school, then go on to college, and maybe even grad school. Then, at the end of your educational journey, you get yourself a “good job” (i.e. become a doctor, lawyer, banker, etc.)…work hard, move up the ranks at work, somewhere along the way find a spouse, buy a home, have a couple of kids…and after about 30 years of toiling at your “good job”, you retire to Florida, and spend your “golden years” playing Bingo, and enjoying visits from your grandchildren.

 And there it is, laid out on a silver platter. There’s the blueprint to being successful, and ultimately, to being a happy person.

It didn’t seem like too bad of a deal. This path was certainly more promising than some of the other options our parents and grandparents had before them, like joining the Army, for example. The generations before ours knew all too well the horrors of war, as they were almost invariably influenced in some way by World War II, or the Korean War, or the Vietnam War, or perhaps a combination of all three. And if you managed to slip through the cracks of the public school system and become a dropout, you may be left to do jobs that were among the most dangerous, and potentially least rewarding in society, such as coal mining, lumberjacking, longshore fishing, or construction. To anyone paying attention, it was clear that finishing school and establishing a career was the least dangerous, most rewarding way to go.

So given this notional criteria for happiness, it would seem as if I could empirically determine whether or not I am happy given the state of my life up until this point, which is somewhere in between being a kid playing in the sandbox, and being a grandparent playing Bingo with the homies in Florida. Alright then: let’s take a few minutes to assess exactly where I am in life, and how I got to where I am on the “success” (a.k.a. “happiness”) spectrum.

Both of my parents worked in education (dad was a public schools social worker, mother was a college professor), so doing well in school was a prerequisite to living a long, healthy life in my household. I got good grades in elementary school and middle school, and I did well enough in high school to be offered an academic scholarship to college (turn up!). While I matriculated in undergrad, my parents’ admonishments about the importance of academic success still resonated deeply with me, and I could still hear their forceful, sobering words about the highly competitive workforce, and how being laid up at home eating Doritos and playing Nintendo 64 was not a long-term prospect for me. As such, even though I enjoyed my fair share of late night Spades games and house parties in college, my scholastic focus did not waiver, and I earned a scholarship and stipend to graduate school to pursue my MBA (turn up again). By the age of 23, I had both a B.S. in Finance and an MBA from two highly respected schools, and I didn’t have a mountain of debt to pay off – so let’s count that as an extra bonus. A week after earning my MBA, I started working at a Fortune 100 company (a company which I still work for). I got what a lot my aunts and uncles from Lumberton, NC would call a “good job”. While working at my “good job”, I was fortunate enough to meet a young lady that could tolerate my presence for reasonable stretches of time. As such, I decided to put a ring on it, and three years later, I’m happily married – so score another point for the “happiness” scale. And not that “happily married” where I’m actually dead inside, and force a contrived smile every time someone asks “How is married life?” or “How’s the wife?” Like, I not only love, but actually like my wife. In my past life, prior to meeting my beautiful wife, I didn’t spawn any outside kids, so I’ll definitely take that as a win. Along those same lines, I haven’t had any ex-lady friends slander me on Facebook, Instagram, or Twitter – I certainly feel good about that. And I have managed to stay out of jail and prison. May seem like a pretty low bar for gauging happiness, but I’ll definitely take it. To put this in a greater context, I’m a black male from the South (or, South-ish – some folks think North Carolina is southern, some don’t, but that’s a discussion for another day), so when compared to my own demographic, on the surface, I’d appear to “successful”. I’m probably a year or so away from buying a home, and I even have a kid on the way.

So, taking a completely objective look at where I am in my life, it looks like I’ve checked all the boxes on the happiness checklist…I appear to be well on my way to competing for…who am I kidding…well on my way to winning the Bingo jackpot down in Boca Raton. By this logic, it would seem as if I am successful, and therefore, happy. But before I declare victory, let me offer another perspective:

I think part of me is dead inside.

Now I know as an adult, I can’t do something as silly as considering “how I feel” to be the sole metric that determines how happy I am! I have to let my level of success, and what I’ve achieved in life count for something, right? But the reality is that I’ve spent the last 10 years now working at a “good job” that on great days is “pretty cool”, on bad days I loathe, and on most days is just tolerable. These are some of the best years of my life, and I’m spending them chasing somebody else’s idea of “happiness”. I have no strong interest in the industry I work in, the clients I serve, or the type of work that I do. Every day I wake up, I wish there was something else that I was doing, something that got me excited about getting out of bed, something that made me want to attack the day, and push myself beyond my comfort zone…but, 10 years later, I’m still here. I’m still here because, at the end of the day, the pay is “good enough”, and it fits the narrative of what I’ve been told to do. Not only that, but I have underlying fears that the economy is still not great out here, and I’ve got bills to pay, and as a man I have to be a provider; I can still hear my dad’s words about “responsibility” echoing in my brain…so I continue to hang around this gig. And if I did switch jobs, I’d just be going to a place almost exactly like the one I’d be leaving, except this one would pay just a little bit more, even though I’d probably have more responsibility at the new job. On top of that, I’d be “the new guy”, and I’d have to learn to be fake around an entirely new group of people, and ultimately I would be more disgruntled than I am currently. So, even though I’ve “checked the boxes”, I seem to be in a perpetual state of either melancholy or misery…not so much gainfully employed by a great company, but rather chained to the corporate grind by the shackles of fear and complacency.

Choosing this career path had nothing to do with doing a job I loved, but rather one that “checked the boxes”. When I was in college, I didn’t concern myself with picking a field of study, such as music or English, that would ignite something inside of me every time I played a sax solo, or composed a piece of poetry. My concern was picking a major that would yield the most opportunities for gainful employment, and would pay the most money. I picked achievement over wonderment. From that moment on, it would seem as if I had sealed my fate. I was a sell-out…I traded passion for pragmatism. On the one hand, I did nothing more than merely follow the advice my parents had given me ever since I was a young child. On the other hand, I dismissed what I felt in my heart…and I’ve been slowly suffering ever since.

But let’s take yet another step back (isn’t it exhausting being in my brain?): my biggest fear in life coming out of college (and probably still to this day) wasn’t ignoring the reverberations of my spirit and letting my dreams slowly die, one meaningless, soul devouring conference call at a time…my biggest fear was that I might not get a good paying job. I was afraid my peers would judge me, and I would have wasted my educational experience (i.e., mom and dad’s time and money), as well as my potential. My parents would be disappointed in me, and I’d be a loser for the rest of my life “trying to find myself” from the comfort of mom and dad’s basement. And the dating scene would be terrible. No self-respecting woman would want anything to do with some loser who was dead broke, lived with his parents, and whose asset sheet included a frozen pizza and a few X-Men comic books. Ultimately, this job that I complain so much about is keeping me from suffering that fate.

And for that, I am absolutely grateful.

So in summation, I feel a sense accomplishment, accompanied by a bit of misery and complacency, mixed in with some tremendous gratitude, sprinkled with a dash of anxiety about not living in my passion. Am I happy? I’m still not sure. Given everything I’m feeling, and where I am in life, this brings me back to my original question: should I be happy?

There are additional iterations of this internal dialogue that, ultimately, are just as futile in actually providing an answer to my original question. Some of the more common themes are:

“Hey, don’t complain, you should be happy, some people don’t even have a job.” That’s typically met with “You can’t determine your happiness by comparing yourself to other people.”

Another instance is: “Life is hard out here, be grateful for what you have”…that gets countered with “I can be grateful for what I have but still want the desires of my heart to be satisfied”….

At the end of this back and forth, after countless times wracking my brain over this, I’m still not certain what the answer is…I have no idea if I should be dancing on the rooftops or ready to jump from them.

In order to truly get to the heart of this matter, I am going to need to redefine the parameters of happiness. Having my base needs met is certainly an important part of happiness…

….But there are two other factors missing from this happiness formula…two other factors that our parents, teachers, and guidance counselors didn’t share with us, that are indispensable to the happiness equation: passion, and freedom.

Bill