Happiness Is Bad for You

Early last fall, I had the happiest two days of my entire life. Less than six months later, I've never regretted anything as bitterly or as deeply as that weekend.

Happiness is a habit-forming drug -- the more of it you have, the more of it you want, and a sudden cessation of it sends you into withdrawal, making it impossible to eat or sleep or think. Like many habit-forming drugs (caffeine, alcohol, codeine, &c.), happiness is fine, even beneficial, in small amounts; even I'm not so cynical as to suggest that a baseline level of happiness isn't necessary for making the daily decision not to take a razor blade to the cephalic vein. But for proper functioning as a productive adult human being, happiness has to be carefully managed, monitored, regulated.

The biggest reason for this is that happiness is a shitty motivator. Happiness is a necessary component of satisfaction, and satisfaction is the gateway to complacency. When we are happy, we are less inclined to improve ourselves, our circumstances, or the world around us. The world has rarely been changed, for good or for long, by happy people.

It's a well-known law school truism that 3Ls are lazy good-for-nothings who don't read for, or go to, class with any kind of regularity. I promised myself when I came into law school that I wouldn't let that happen; to some extent, it's inevitable, but I was doing a fairly good job of it early in this school year.

And then I spent most of the month of October, which began with that sublime and damning weekend, happier than I'd been in a long, long time. I was one of the lucky few 3Ls with a job after graduation -- a well-respected job with good pay in my favorite city on Earth. I felt, for the first time in law school, that I had made some true friends -- not many friends, but good ones. I was in the process of falling in love with someone who (I thought at the time) might eventually love me.

So I absolutely stopped giving a shit about anything besides my own happiness. And everything else fell to pieces.

My grades suffered because, on the rare occasion that I went to a lecture, I wasn't paying attention -- why would I, when I already knew I was going to graduate and become a hot-shit lawyer? My relationships with my professors and colleagues suffered -- why would I want to do work, when I could go drinking with friends or stay up late into the night exchanging sweet nothings on the phone? I became so self-centered and hedonistic (yes, even more so than usual) that I began to alienate those few friends I had cultivated, and even my own family. I'd never before experienced the sort of bright, conspicuous happiness I was feeling for those few extraordinary weeks, and I was going to milk it for all it was worth, to the exclusion of all else.

This is all my own fault, of course, and if I derived happiness from my work to nearly the extent that I claim to do, maybe none of this would have happened. But the feeling of being connected to people, places, and concepts I love was insidious, and I was not strong or vigilant enough to keep it at bay.

In November the merry-go-round came to a grinding halt, as merry-go-rounds tend to do. There were romantic rejection, and serious consequences for my lack of work ethic, and fallings-out with good friends, and second thoughts about whether my choice of profession and locale were really the right ones. But with the end of the ride came the return of my drive to succeed -- not quite as keen as it had been before, partly because the months since October have been as awful as October was miraculous (don't get me wrong, misery is just as bad, and probably even worse, than happiness), but strong enough to push me to become more than I am.

I know happy people who are nonetheless productive. I don't know how they do it, although they are surely more mature and self-aware than I (for it would be hard not to be). I also know others who have been debilitated by happiness. Most of them are good, decent people who, in a universe where happiness doesn't come with strings attached, would deserve to be happy.

Nearly sixty years ago, Allen Ginsberg, referring to a different kind of drug, opened one of the magna opera of American poetry with the words "I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness." I am not one of the best minds of my generation, but for a month, I was blissfully and unconsciously destroyed by the effects of this drug of happiness, and I still haven't fully recovered. It seems incongruous, maybe even cruel, for me to wish that happiness never visits my friends and colleagues. But we will all be better for it if it does not.