ON-THE-LOOSE: Cheer Full

If the point is to get the most we can out of life in our short time on earth, it’s great that the United Nations has placed happiness on the global agenda and its pursuit to our hearts’ content, a fundamental human right. But one can’t help but wonder if our generation’s constant preoccupation with happiness makes it even more elusive and if chasing it so determinedly, doesn’t cast it further out of our grasp. Every day, my Facebook feed propagates more navel gazing with posts on good cheer and glad tidings. The attitude of eternal sunniness hardly masks the fact that if you need to ask yourself whether you’re happy on a daily basis, you’re not. But that’s ok. This constant zest for being ecstatic has always struck me as a bit false. A better way to approach the question of contentment is to seriously consider the inevitable truths that befall us all: we grow old (if we’re lucky), fall ill, and die. As soon as you accept life is mostly out of control, you can settle into a grumpy but much more real sort of happiness. Something like the Homer quote, “Everything is more beautiful because we are doomed.”

This unwavering and shallow focus on existential happiness has made its opposite, depression, which is by far more prevalent, an even more appalling condition to have. The stigma around it flourishes while not enough credit is given to the melancholic among us. Alas, the greatest art is almost never produced by the deliriously lighthearted. The late Leonard Cohen, when he was well into his 60s, said that for the first time in his life he wasn’t depressed. His last album released last year, notedly, is called You Want It Darker. Out of his anguish came an incredible body of work, haunting, because his music amplifies all our emotions, of loss, regret and desolation. Conversely, after Will.i.am produced Happy, the song that became a universal chant for the joy of living, he hasn’t really been heard again. The greatest artists address the eternal questions with the wisdom that there’s so much about living we don’t know. At least for those fleeting minutes, the secret, of what does bring happiness, feels closer.

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