This modern definition is, according to this article from The New Yorker, in direct contradiction to the etymology of the word, which means "luck." Happy, happenstance, happens all derive from the same root indicating things that happen (there it is again) for no discernable reason. According to our forebears, happiness happens. Or it doesn't. Pursuing it, chasing it to the ground and wringing its neck, was futile; you'd either get it or you wouldn't.

We find this bleak, but at least they had some compassion and sensitivity. At least when someone was sad this was taken as a valid emotion to which they were entitled, and not a failure of their ability to properly manage their lives or emotions. At least when they suffered a loss they could count on being consoled and supported instead of scolded, as my Aunt was at the funeral of her five-year-old daughter by an elderly man who stopped by to say, "What are you crying for? You still have two beautiful children!"

You've gasped. I'm not there listening to you as you read this; but I know you read that and gasped. But how uncommon is his attitude? And does it come from the sort of people that a rational and caring person ought to listen to? I remember once a woman telling me that she would like me except that I was just "so negative" about motherhood; but considering the source I found it impossible to be concerned, as the woman in question had felt it was immoral and improperly grateful to grieve the loss of one of her twins in utero. Note that it's not that she didn't grieve or feel unhappy, but that she felt it was wrong to grieve or feel unhappy, and so castigated herself for this unfortunate lapse in her character.

Joan Didion explores this in her book The Year of Magical Thinking, in which she documents her experience of grief in the year after she lost her husband. In part, she recounts how our reactions to grief and our expectations of the bereaved have changed in the past hundred years. Previously, the bereaved were enfolded; people brought them food, cleaned their houses, and expected them to wear black for a year. It was ok to be devastated. Now? You have three days off, and go back to work after the funeral. Wearing black for a year would simply be strange. Happiness is a choice! Don't you know that there are billions of people worse off than you are?

Since when has guilt ever made anyone feel better? No; don't answer that question. Here's a better one: Don't you know that circumstances make no difference in happiness once the necessities of life are met? Studies have shown frequently that once a person has enough material resources to be adequately fed and sheltered and be relatively healthy and free of coercion or abuse, they are as happy as they are ever going to be. Getting more money and spending a portion of it on self-help books is simply not going to make a difference. One study found that while lottery winners showed a temporary gain in happiness and victims of serious accidents who ended up as quadriplegics showed a temporary loss in happiness, after about a year both groups had returned to their approximate baseline levels of happiness. In What is Going On In There, a book on infant brain development, it was shown that the temperament of infants and how much time they spent happy as opposed to unhappy was directly correlated to the relative levels of activity in the right and left frontal lobes, a characteristic that seems to be genetically based:

She explains that, of course, by ten months of age, child-rearing may have had enough of an impact to explain these differences, and so describes experiments that look at babies even younger than ten months of age:

Happiness, by and large, is not a choice: as the New Yorker article above also summarizes, one's level of happiness can be predicted by adding together one's baseline happiness tendency, one's immediate life circumstances and one's volunteer work (understood by some to indicate social connections or connectedness--and probably a major reason, IMO, why new mothers often undergo such a devastating period of unhappiness after the baby comes home). But you'll notice that "personal determination to be happy," "pursuit of happiness," and "constant comparison of one's own situation with that of the suffering hordes" are not accounted for--and for good reason. They don't make a difference.

Surely most people understand this. It's like those scientific studies you read about every so often, "study determines that ice cream sales go up in July!" or "darkness correlated with depression, scientists say," that make you scratch your head and wonder that someone actually got money to study the thing. Temperament + life circumstances + relationships = happiness. Put that in your headline and smoke it.

Someone who responds to your unhappiness with an imperative statement to cheer up, or smile, or remind yourself of everything you have to be grateful for, is simply not on your side. Their exhortations have nothing to do with improving your mental state; they only wish you to appear happier so that you no longer cause them discomfort. Being around unhappy people is hard work; it's hard work to be sensitive and caring and supportive, especially when their problems don't seem all that monumental. But, of course, that's exactly what a friend would do. Be there. Listen. Support. Offer advice when asked for, commisseration when not. Under no circumstances to say, "But don't you know there are starving children in Darfur?"

Where does such a comment leave us, anyway? Is there then only one person on this planet, one soul who has such a tragic story that no one is quantitatively worse off, who is entitled to be unhappy? If you respond to the person who missed their bus with, "But what if there was no bus?" And then found a place with no bus, and there's someone who doesn't have a job. "But it could be worse! You have your health!" Then you find someone with no bus, no job, who is also sick. "But at least you're not dying! Did you think of that?" OK, so then we find someone with no bus, no job, who is dying: "Yes, but you have your family! You have love. Isn't that worth something?" Now we're off to find someone with no bus, no job, dying, with no family: "Well at least you've got friends! It could be worse." Then you find the one person on earth who has no bus, no job, is dying, and is dying utterly alone in the wilderness, and? "At least it isn't raining! Be grateful for the sunshine."

The entire premise of boiling down the right to be unhappy to one achieved a state where no one is quantitatively less fortunate than you is a denial of the right to be unhappy, period, because such a state will never be obtained (or at least not by more than one person). It is also a misplaced belief in the objectivity of emotions: emotions are subjective. They do not make sense. They are rooted in biological responses that can be modified but not controlled by thought. Cognitive behaviourists would note that changes to thought patterns can modify emotions, and that is true; but such modifications are not meant to eliminate appropriate negative emotions nor are they meant to be birch switches used to chasten the unhappy.

There is room in the world for more than one unhappy person, and more than one kind of unhappiness. If you have a job that I love, what does it cost me if you are unhappy about the house that you hate? If you are single and I am married, and you want to be married, am I obliged to never have a complaint about my husband? It doesn't make sense. I have many, many non-diabetic friends and relatives and I have no problem listening to them complain about food and diets. It doesn't make me more diabetic to hear it, it doesn't increase my workload if they are struggling with food, I don't think they are unappreciative of their good fortune in having a working pancreas. It would make no sense for me to judge them for their issues with food simply because their issues strike me as less serious than mine.

Similarly, I have a friend who has suffered through infertility for more than three agonizing years. She sent me a shower present for Frances, and has never been anything but supportive through all my difficulties with her, and for the difficulties other mother friends of ours have had with their children. She's never said, "Cheer up! At least you HAVE a baby!" Not once. And now she's pregnant with triplets and we all couldn't be happier. (She was not, of course, my first resource for such discussions. That would have been insensitive.)

Maybe one lesson to be drawn is that it's easier to be happy at someone else's happiness when they don't scorn your unhappiness.

When I was first diagnosed with diabetes, I took it well. It was only after several months that I began to be angry. My response was irrational but sincere: I was angry that I was not to die. I was angry that insulin had been discovered, and I was expected to use it. It was too much work. It was too hard. I had no support and I was burning out and I was already being blamed for my difficulties by my parents. I wrote a short story about going back in time to kill Banting and Best. I have never forgiven the aquaintance who greeted my diagnosis and the life expectancy I'd been given at the time (55) who said cheerfully, "You can do everything you want to do by then!"

I am a Type A personality by nature: I like to be able to control my environment. Anyone with diabetes reading this will know that it is both a blessing and a curse. It is easier to do all the things you need to do to manage the illness, but harder to take it when it doesn't work. I alternated between periods of denial or avoidance and periods of hyper-vigillance; during the latter, if my blood sugars would not behave, I would become angry. Unreasonably so.

One day, after Erik and I had been together for a while, we were in the car about to drive home from my university, and I tested my sugars. It was high; I can't remember the number but it was high, very high. I hurled my meter and all of its paraphernalia at the parking lot. Very quietly, Erik picked it up again and put it in the car, and we drove home. He didn't say anything. If he had chosen that moment to tell me that I ought to be grateful for the advance of blood sugar meters because they enabled a longer and healthier life for me, we would not be together today. It would have been such a failure of compassion that I could never have respected him.

Yet people like that exist; and their concerns have nothing to do with the well-being of others. No. If they wanted others to be happy or better off, they would actually do something. They would volunteer somewhere, give some money away, write a letter, give a gift, make a casserole. Something. Instead they only lecture. "You ought to already be happy, and if you are not, it is your fault."

~~~~~

Essentially, this adds up to one indisputable fact:

You do not have to meet a certain criteria on the suffering scale to earn the right to be unhappy. Your feelings do not have to make sense or be justifiable to anyone but yourself. Unhappiness just is. If you feel your unhappiness is unreasonable or is interfering in your life in intolerable ways, there are certainly many ways of approaching this and many known therapies for alleviating it, but having a stranger or aquaintance tell you to "just cheer up" has never, to my knowledge, helped someone to end a depression. And being sad--even for what might seem to others to be insignificant causes--is not depression.

Some people are capable of carrying immense burdens with a smile on their face. Such a trait is deserving of admiration. But it should not be the standard to which everyone else is compared, just as we should not all be compared to the person who can run a four-minute-mile or the person who needs only four hours of sleep per night. Humans are different, we have different strengths and capabilities, and for some of us, our unique strength or capability is to look on the bright side and remain positive in dark circumstances.

Others don't have that, and never will. They deserve the same love and support that any other human does. It is not a moral failing; it is not even a mental health problem. It is just normal human variation.

~~~~~

(This took me about halfway to where I wanted to ultimately get to, but it's already so long I think I'd better leave the second half for another day.)