In the second instalment of his essay on happiness (read Happiness Is Boring, Part One here), James Gleeson reflects on ageing, loss and creeping cynicism – and why a little more tolerance may be our best chance at happiness.
Previously, in Part One
In Part One, Gleeson argued that happiness has a ceiling – push past it and you find not bliss but boredom – while disquiet, uncertainty and disappointment are bottomless wells of learning. Chasing a frictionless, ‘vanilla’ life, he wrote, is a form of utopianism that robs us of the challenges that shape who we are.
Drawing on Heraclitus, Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi’s Flow, Bertrand Russell and Schopenhauer, he made the case that our best moments come when we are stretched to our limits, that life’s joys stay fresh precisely because life is finite, and that it is the pursuit of happiness – not its fleeting attainment – that makes life worth living. As Schopenhauer put it, “a ship without ballast is unstable and will not go straight”.
Now, some years on, Gleeson returns to the question with the hard-won perspective of age.
I was not prepared for this.
For the first time, I have been forced to confront certain harsh realities of life: the mortality of my parents; the increasing frequency of the deaths of friends; dealing with recalcitrant teenage children (not my own, but from where I sit, this looks absolutely brutal); and my ageing self, with all that this entails. Diminished athleticism. More modest libidinal ambitions (not altogether a bad thing to be let off this merry-go-round). A reflection that looks back at me lamenting what once was. And a general reprioritisation of things I once thought sacrosanct or immutable – from hedonistic consumption to the bottomless well of time, imagined as a series of consecutive moments stretching to a horizon that will never arrive.
How ageing changes what happiness means
Within this melange of melancholy, any notion of “happiness”, even for a fleeting moment, is to be treasured. But the definition of happiness is different now from what it was in my 20s and 30s. Back then, it was imbued with a feeling of expectant excitement that has since been replaced – if not with impending doom, then certainly with an acceptance of fate.
The slow creep of cynicism
“It’s hard not to be cynical when you know the truth,” a learned friend once quipped. Oh, how spot on that is. Dissolving into complete cynicism can happen so incrementally that you are utterly unaware you have become its victim. And a victim you will be, for it is deeply corrosive of the mind and, by extension, the self. To assume the worst about others is to die a slow death long before you pass. Your soul becomes a dark, hermetically sealed canister into which the light of happiness is not permitted entry.
The cesspool of corruption, self-interest, entitlement, careerism, cronyism and opportunism that masquerades as politics as we know it renders a sunny disposition about the future of humankind rather quaint at best, and an absurd farce at worst. It’s all rocket fuel for the cynic inside each of us.
A case for tolerance
The great humourist and social critic George Carlin once asked: “Have you ever noticed that anybody driving slower than you is an idiot, and anyone going faster than you is a maniac?”
Maybe we all need to be a little less judgemental and a little more accepting. Because for there to be hope, there needs to be unity; for there to be unity, there must be tolerance of difference. Only then do any of us have a chance to be happy.