Retroactive Happiness
I was once asked to tell of a time when I was happy. Very quickly, I flashed to a period of time when I had a great group of friends, I had more money than I needed and a job where I was respected. I reminisced fondly about those carefree days when everything seemed possible. However, as I began to examine my memory a little more carefully, I realized that during those days, I was deeply dissatisfied and spent most of my time yearning for some other things I did not have. Ironically, in retrospect, I was pretty sad during the happiest and most carefree time of my life.
We all have stories about the good old days. As the cliche goes, money went further, streets were safer, children more respectful, and fun was just more gosh darn fun! There is something about the passage of time that sands down the pain of the past and elevates the pleasures. We recall easily the fun times but not so much the anxieties probably because the fears we dreaded either did not happen or they did but we came to terms with them and incorporated them into our baseline of reality. This is a jedi mind trick we play on ourselves to convince ourselves that the past was a warm, comfortable place while the future is cold and uncertain.
Another factor at play is that we ourselves change over time. We can derive immense pleasure from things in the past that no longer evince near the same level of joy. When I was a kid, there was a series of books I loved. They were an anthology of stories involving jaded, intrepid detectives, down on their luck criminals and jilted or unrequited lovers. I spent hours with my nose buried in those pages, my mind painting vivid pictures of adventures in exciting locations. A couple years ago, I was thrilled to discover those same books on Amazon. I ordered a couple of them and settled in for a lazy weekend wading in nostalgia. I was shocked to find how bad those books were. The plots were threadbare, the characters shallow and the writing was stilted. I could barely get through a couple of chapters before putting them down. I still remember how much I enjoyed reading those books as a kid but my memory is tainted now that I know they are rooted in drivel. I am now more careful of my memories. The past is a great museum to visit but a terrible place to live.
As a practical matter, one effect of observing the fickleness of my emotions is recognizing that I am very bad at being the arbiter of my own happiness. For all I know, I could be happy right now. In fact, I could, perhaps, be having the time of my life but I just don’t know it! Maybe if I wait a couple of years, I would be retroactively happy about where I am right now. If this is the case, why could I not just choose to live like that today? The issue, of course, is that the obstacles I face right now loom large and take up a lot of my mindspace. I spend a lot of time thinking about what could go wrong tomorrow. But whenever calamities have occurred in my life, I have simply adjusted and moved on. There is no reason to believe any new troubles would be different. The key, it seems, is to accept that I can hope and strive for good things but I can also deal with the bad when it happens. Then, maybe, I can fast-forward my happiness to today.