“If you think you’d be happier with a new car, skip the car and just be happier”

Great advice from author/teacher Joan Tollifson, but is it really that simple? For me, happiness is too elusive a target to just “be.” I appreciate the fact that the Republic’s Declaration doesn’t say that our inalienable right is to be happy, only to pursue it.

Good thing too. Like the pot o’ gold at the end of the rainbow, happiness recedes as I chase it. I don’t usually quote Jiddu Krishnamurti (his personal morality just being too out of whack with his teaching), but I find his observation, “To have a cause for joy is no longer joy,” to be spot on: I’m happy until I notice I’m happy. And then? And then one of several things happens:

• Damn, this ice cream tastes good. Too bad it’s going to be over soon.
• I spent so much on getting here, shouldn’t I be feeling happier than I am?
• This feels so great, too bad I didn’t do it before!
• Wow, what a sunset…not as good as yesterday’s, though.

—and etc.

I don’t believe we’re built to experience chronic happiness. Our brains and bodies evolved in the rough and tumble of the Pleistocene, where a healthy dose of anxiety got our genes through to the next generation.

Here’s the scenario, one million BCE: Ug wakes up, walks out of the cave filled with joy—oh what a beautiful morning! He goes down to the clearing and sits down, zoned out his skull with utter contentment. Man it’s good to be alive! Life just couldn’t be better, utter bliss…right before he gets eaten by a passing sabertooth.

Ig, meanwhile, and the rest of the gang, are worried about where they should hunt so the whole tribe (less Ug) can eat. And with the waterhole drying up, where’s the nearest water source? Anxiety is the order of the day. They’re worried, and the worry prompts them to do something about it: they decide where to go hunting, they send a couple of youngsters out to scout for water. They’re the ones—the worriers—who, the the greater scheme of things, survived and reproduced. Fifty thousand generations later, here we are.

We’re not designed to be content—we inherited Ig’s anxiety genes (Ug having died before he got the opportunity to pass his on). We worry and we’re unhappy because our genes tell us to be.

All of which is a great relief. Of course I worry: I’m supposed to!

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Barry Evans gave the best years of his life to civil engineering, and what thanks did he get? In his dotage, he travels, kayaks, meditates and writes for the Journal and the Humboldt Historian. He sucks at 8 Ball. Buy his Field Notes anthologies at any local bookstore. Please.