The Giants won! I say that in gleeful disregard of all Patriots fans. It's not that I don't love you, I'm just really enjoying your pain. Is that really so bad?

On another note--Newsweek has a really interesting story on happiness today here http://www.newsweek.com/id/107569/page/1 I rather enjoyed what they had to say. I would like to point out as a disclaimer, however, that Van Gough might not be the best example of depression as a good thing. He wasn't so much a brooder as an ear cutter-offer.

That being said, for those of you who have read Brave New World, where's the soma? I remember after reading that book carefully for the first time two years ago feeling sick to my stomach as I got to the end. The soma was just the means, but the power was given over by the people so long before. They just wanted to be happy. They just wanted to be safe. I look around at modern society and tremble in fear of where things may go.

I also like that Newsweek comments on the problems with stigmatizing normal reactions and trying to suppress them. I know of at least one instance where a couple broke because after one partner's daughter had been murdered the other partner didn't understand why she couldn't just "get over it." For myself I chiefly hate funerals because everyone is just so darn sad. It wouldn't be so bad if everyone weren't so sad.

I think that we have an emotionally castrated society; I honestly do. We all want to be happy, healthy, and good citizens. Kids are raised with a sense of entitlement to such happiness--if you prevent them from attaining that it's unfair, unAmerican. To be grief-stricken is more than simply not fun, it's downright rude. I won't lie, I generally hate being around melancholy people. I myself hate anyone knowing I'm melancholy. But having been around genuine depression there is definite difference between actual depression and heartbreak. And worse than either, I would say, is the systematic repression of negative feelings.

I see a lot of this as the culmination of the "self-esteem" rhetoric of the mid-late 90's. Suddenly kids were supposed to only have positive feedback and sports weren't supposed to be competitive. It was more important that our teenagers liked themselves than that they deserved to be liked or liked themselves. When combined with the natural self-centeredism of adolescent you end up with a person who thinks that their opinion is as valid as any other opinion because it's theirs. Obviously everyone gets to believe what they wish, but that doesn't make you right. What's more, judgments and ideologies were reclassified under the umbrella of opinion and so free of scrutiny. If thoughts were criticized or challenged it might hurt the student's feelings. Now we have a bunch of feel-good adolescents who are all concerned with personal happiness, even at the cost of someone else's.

I exaggerate, but not very much. Along with the loss of manners in society I feel like this feel good rhetoric, this drive to make kids happy, is all part of this drive to be "happy". The humorous side to all of this is that people are meaner and more confrontational then they have been in the past (it seems to me without data to quote at the moment) and suicide is still a big problem. Our constant pressure on appearance causes unhappiness while the industry continually profits from our purchasing of items to "fix" ourselves and so find "happiness". Meanwhile our appetite for schadenfraude, happiness in the misery of others, continues to grow. What does it say about our happiness when it comes at someone else's expense?

But that's the result of working towards being happy all the time. Of forgetting the natural rhythms of emotion and, more than that, repressing the societally taboo ones. I'm not sure this all makes as much sense as I wanted it to. Hopefully my train of thought hasn't been too difficult to follow.

I'm off to read Spenser. That makes me very unhappy, but I guess that's how I know it's good for me.