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Increasing One’s Enjoyment of Life
Feelings, like thoughts, are facts, even though they’re not material facts. Happiness is a feeling, and therefore happiness is a fact. But pure and unadulterated happiness, happiness in the strict or narrow sense, is a very occasional fact. Indeed it’s so occasional for some people that they lose track of the few times in their lives when they’ve experienced happiness. This may explain why the phrases “happiness is an illusion” and “I don’t believe in happiness” occur online 275,000 times and 79,000 times respectively.
I should say what I mean by happiness “in the strict sense.” The dictionary definition for the noun is not very helpful: the state of being happy. The definition for the adjective “happy” is more substantial: feeling or showing pleasure or contentment. But it, too, is inadequate for the purpose of this analysis. In my opinion the only adequate way to convey the essence of happiness is by giving an example from someone’s experience. The someone I’ve chosen for this purpose is Malcolm Muggeridge, a man not noted for much success in the happiness department. I think this sentence of his is far better at conveying the quality of the feeling than any dictionary definition: “An extraordinary feeling of happiness welled up in me.” Most people, I fancy, could relate to that remark without knowing the contextual circumstances. It will be taken for granted that the circumstances in which happiness manifests itself will be different for each person. In Muggeridge’s case the circumstances were as follows:
With the collapse of Labour in the election of 1931 Muggeridge, who had a socialist upbringing, ‘resolved to go where I thought a new age was coming to pass; to Moscow and the future of mankind.’ After seven months of serving as the Manchester Guardian’s Moscow correspondent, he left Russia in a state of utter disillusionment. But the evening before he left, the head of the Press Department and one of the press censors gave him a farewell dinner, which he found surprising since he knew he had proved himself, in the regime’s terms, unhelpful. Since Oumansky and Nehman were party members, food and drink was plentiful and it was an altogether enjoyable affair. They came to the door to see him off. As he walked unsteadily away he could hear Oumansky say “Good-bye and bonne chance!” and he shouted back over his shoulder. Before returning to his hotel, however, he took a few turns round Red Square. The place was deserted except for soldiers with fixed bayonets outside Lenin’s tomb. “I walked briskly,” he wrote. “Breathing in the icy air cleared my head. Suddenly, I thought I noticed a change in the wind that was blowing against my face. It seemed to be touched with warmth and fragrance, as though spring was already beginning. An extraordinary feeling of happiness welled up in me. Soon the river would thaw and the earth would be green again. Thus it had happened a million times before, thus it would happen a million times again. Nothing could prevent it—the sudden, unexpected coming of spring.”
Wouldn’t most people say “Ah yes, I think I know that feeling, although I’m not sure I can recall any particular occasion.”
Now, nobody can claim to have discovered the secret of happiness, since that belongs only to God (if He exists). But some people have discovered the secret of becoming less unhappy, which I think is logically equivalent to increasing one’s enjoyment of life. The secret is to put clean out of one’s head the notion that there shouldn’t be “briars” in life. “O, how full of briars is this working-day world!,” said Rosalind in As You Like It. In other words, how full of thorny people, thorny things, and thorny situations is this everyday world. Who can deny it?
Fortunately, quite a few briars can be avoided with a bit of attention and foresight. But plenty of briars are unavoidable, endemic to the human condition, and until we face that fact any efforts at increasing our enjoyment of life will produce disappointing results. Marcus Aurelius, a Stoic and the last of the so-called “good” Roman Emperors, has something useful to say on this point:
“Is your cucumber bitter? Throw it away. Are there briars in your path? Turn aside. That is enough. Do not go on and say, ‘Why were things of this sort ever brought into the world.’”
In other words, don’t rail against or deplore or mentally wring your hands over things you’re powerless to change. It’s obviously a waste of time and energy and therefore a foolish attitude, though, in some degree, a universal one—“As a rule, a man’s a fool. . .” But though folly of all kinds is the God-given right of unregenerated human nature, intellect and freedom enable one to become less foolish over time. The trick in this case—so simple that it often eludes even thoughtful, intelligent, educated people—is to first to cultivate a matter-of-fact acceptance of briars; and then to instantly ignore them.
“But,” you reply, “mere intellectual acceptance won’t change the habits of a lifetime.” Very true. Something has to be done, not merely thought, to acquire a new habit. Therefore I propose the following technique; every night before going to bed say to yourself (preferably out loud):
“Unless I’m very lucky, tomorrow will bring its usual share of briars, for experience teaches that often in life things are not the way we would like them to be. Therefore I resolve to accept these briars totally and unconditionally as the price of living in this world. And not only will I not regret them or give them a second thought, but I’ll turn the speed at which I’m oblivious to them (say, by substituting something interesting or pleasant) into a game or challenge by keeping a daily tally of my failures to dismiss briars almost as soon as they arise.”
The idea here is to nip the negative impact of the briar in the bud, so to speak.
To acquire this habit in record time, repeat those three sentences every morning the moment you wake up. (Once you notice briars becoming more and more like water off a duck’s back, you may find it possible to dispense with the morning reminder.) The only thing now is to make a list of the most common briars (not for everyone but for most people) in everyday life. Forewarned is forearmed. Here’s a list to prepare you to meet the day’s briars without any of them catching you off guard; and I should emphasize that not all of these “briars” are trivial in themselves, but trivial in the sense that for most of us they don’t affect us directly as facts, but only indirectly as ideas. (NB: if some of the items on the list seem to be aimed at individuals, that’s only because, human nature being what it is, they involve failings that are all but universal):
Instinctive dislikes with respect to persons, things and situations
Other people’s annoying mannerisms
Other people’s bad manners and lack of courtesy
Other people’s messiness
Other people’s habitual lateness
Fear of being late oneself or feeling bad at having been late
Other people telling you how to do something better than you’re already doing it (even if it is better)
Other people not being open to suggestion
Other people’s neuroses and negativity
Fear of saying or doing the wrong thing and feeling shame or remorse for having said or done the wrong thing
Other people’s critical spirit or pessimistic outlook
Other people’s bad conversational habits: talking too much, interrupting, lecturing, giving unsolicited advice, insisting on one’s opinion
Other people’s bad language or profanity in reaction to briars
People who are hard to please
People who don’t know what they want
People not liking what we like or not disliking what we dislike
People not doing what you would reasonably expect them to do
Boring conversation, repetitious conversation, incessant small talk
Tedious social gatherings and tiring outings
Loud annoying noises caused by babies, horns, sirens and motorcycles
Rap “music” and other kinds of disagreeable music in cafes, restaurants, public places, etc.
Disappointing meals in restaurants and uninspiring food at home
Looking into the refrigerator to see if there’s anything interesting there and not finding anything
Dropping and breaking plates, jars, cups or glasses—especially with their contents
Things not going according to plan or turning out as well as we had hoped
Impertinent behaviour on the part of machines and gadgets, especially cars and computers
Displeasing or inappropriate weather
Automated answering machines that say, “We are experiencing an unusually high volume of calls, etc., etc. . . Your call is important to us, etc., etc. . .”
Absurdly long wait times at hospitals followed by occasional visits by nurses and doctors assuring you that you haven’t fallen off their radar
In church: bad hymns or too many hymns, dry-as-dust homilies that are rich in platitudes and poor in practical advice, irritating liturgies
People wearing outrageous or immodest outfits, or sporting too many tattoos
Unreliable contractors and sloppy workmanship
Too much traffic and too much road construction
Inconsiderate motorists and uncooperative traffic lights and traffic flow
Hard-to-find parking and bad luck with parking tickets
The vulgarities and indecencies of popular culture
Architorture and criminal urban development
Bad automotive design and a general indifference to aesthetics
The insincerity, hypocrisy, and ignorance of politicians
The stupidity, short-sightedness and recklessness of national leaders
Government corruption and incompetence
Bureaucratic and institutional stupidity
State and mainstream media propaganda
An endless torrent of inane advertising and absurd slogans
Systemic economic injustice and inequality
Oppression and exploitation by the rich and powerful
A waste economy and a polluted environment
The greed, selfishness and narrowness of average human nature
The apparent collapse of Western civilization and the actual collapse of public education
The possibility of one’s person, house and city being vapourized by a thermonuclear warhead
(With respect to the last item, nuclear weapons have almost certainly been a force for peace because mechanized warfare, which requires the civilian population to produce the artillery, tanks and aircraft to fight it, logically leads to “total war”—as we saw unmistakenly in the Second World War. Because politicians are divided into rival groups, they typically operate by creating divisions within nations or between nations, that being the customary way to power. The only thing that can restrain the recklessness and folly of national leaders is the imminent prospect of annihilation. “What about errors in judgement or equipment failures,” you may ask. Well, there have been so many of these since the dawn of the atomic age that it is not unreasonable to suppose that God—if He exists—has prevented our accidental destruction. In any case, nothing happens unless God—if He exists—allows it, including the partial or total destruction of the human race in nuclear war. If that’s any consolation.)
In conclusion, if you have doubts that the proposed method for increasing your enjoyment of life won’t work, making a serious attempt to put it into practice for a few days will probably lay them to rest.
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In the event that you’re a keen student of the Gospels or some kind of mystic, you may find it helpful to remind yourself that all these briars could very well be there for a benevolent reason. Here are some aphorisms, theories, and ways of thinking that I believe provide support for such a view:
It is impossible that hurt should never be done to men’s consciences; but woe betide the man who is the cause of it.
Luke 17:1
In everything, no matter what it may be, uniformity is undesirable. Leaving something incomplete makes it interesting, and gives one the feeling that there is room for growth.
Yoshida Kenko
I defy anyone to imagine an environment more exquisitely designed to provide us with opportunities for spiritual growth than this life of ours.
M. Scott Peck
Do you not see how a world of pains and troubles is to school an intelligence and make it a soul?
John Keats
If there were no suffering man would not know his limitations, would not know himself.
Tolstoy
Except the sickly, few people ever feel themselves existing. Those who are well, even if they be philosophers, are too busy enjoying life to investigate what it is. The sentiment of their own existence does not astonish them. Health impels us towards the outside world, sickness brings us home to ourselves.
Maine de Biran
What is easy and obvious is never valued; and even what is in itself difficult, if we come to the knowledge of it without difficulty, and without any stretch of thought or judgement, is but little regarded.
David Hume
PARAPHRASE: What is easy and obvious is never valued; and even what is in itself difficult, if we achieve it or come to the knowledge of it without a struggle is felt to be unimportant and is soon forgotten.
The value of a thing sometimes lies not in what one attains with it, but in what one pays for it—what it costs us.
Nietzsche
One day, in retrospect, the years of struggle will strike you as the most beautiful.
Freud (from a 1907 letter to Carl Jung)
What was hard to endure is sweet to recall.
French Proverb
The greater the difficulty, the more glory in surmounting it.
Epicurus
Many things cause pain which would cause pleasure if you paid attention to their advantages.
Gracian
We are condemned to rub shoulders with injustice all our lives, and we are often judged by our acceptance of this fact. The spirit in which we manage it can even be said to be a measure of our maturity.
Peter Ustinov
The perfection of man consists not in being perfect but in trying to be; and that trying implies, of course, continual failures.
Michael Mason
It’s a sign of maturity not to be scandalized.
Flannery O’Connor
A vulgar philosophy laments the wickedness of the world, but when we come to think of it we realise that the confusion of life, the doubt and turmoil and bewildering responsibility of life, largely arises from the enormous amount of good in the world. There is much to be said for everybody; there are too many points of view; too many truths that contradict each other, too many loves which hate each other. . . The eternal glory of Don Quixote in the literary world is that it holds perfectly even the two scales of the mysticism of the Knight and the rationalism of the Squire. Deep underneath all the superficial wit and palpable gaiety of the story there runs a far deeper kind of irony. . . that the battle of existence has always been like King Arthur’s last battle in the mist, one in which “friend slew friend not knowing whom he slew.”
G. K. Chesterton
What a queer thing life is! So unlike anything else, if you see what I mean.
P. G. Wodehouse (Bertie Wooster)
Nothing lasts forever. Everything collapses. The longer the collapse is postponed, the larger and more catastrophic it will be.
St Teresa of Avila
The tragedy of life is not so much what men suffer, but rather what they miss.
Thomas Carlyle
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