Gooseberries

Some combination of fatigue and hormones means that I am spending U.S. Thanksgiving this year feeling depressed and moody. So far I have fluctuated between resentment, self-pity, and resignation. At least no black despair? Lately, I've dwelled on the following train of thought over and over, so hopefully writing it down will exorcise it.

In high school, we wrapped our textbooks with paper covers to help them last longer, and I developed a habit of writing down favorite quotes to “decorate” them. One came from a Chekhov short story, “Gooseberries”:

And this order of things is evidently necessary; evidently the happy man only feels at ease because the unhappy bear their burdens in silence, and without that silence happiness would be impossible. It's a case of general hypnotism. There ought to be behind the door of every happy, contented man some one standing with a hammer continually reminding him with a tap that there are unhappy people; that however happy he may be, life will show him her laws sooner or later, trouble will come for him—disease, poverty, losses, and no one will see or hear, just as now he neither sees nor hears others. But there is no man with a hammer; the happy man lives at his ease, and trivial daily cares faintly agitate him like the wind in the aspen-tree—and all goes well.

(So as not to raise expectations: I'm not going to do a critical analysis of “Gooseberries” or comment on how systems of privilege depend on ignorance, possibly even willful ignorance. No, it'll be much less interesting and mostly self-absorbed navelgazing as usual.)

Years later, in grad school, I shared this quote on Google Reader, and a friend of mine, C—, commented that she disagreed with the quote because it took her a long time to believe that she deserved to be happy. In the context of the story, that's not really what the quote is about, but her comment stuck with me over the years because…well, because I don't believe that I deserve to be happy.

I mean, I don't believe that I deserve to be unhappy either. But when I think of what I do deserve, what any human being deserves, happiness doesn't enter into the equation. I don't know whether that comes from being raised Korean… certainly, it's not a very Western way of thinking. The right to the pursuit of happiness, explicitly named in the Declaration of Independence. Even utilitarianism speaks in terms of maximizing happiness! But there's an alien quality to those ideas; I don't find them self-explanatory or intuitive.

Generally, thinking about making a change to make myself happier usually leads to the thought: but do I even have a right to be happy? Happiness doesn't work for me as justification or an end in itself. It's acceptable as a side effect, a bonus from an action or decision that makes me function better. Of course, constantly reframing everything in terms of worth or self-improvement or usefulness mostly leads to self-loathing. I don't think this approach is particularly healthy.

But I also find that I can't get around the fact that that's what I believe. I've seen many people live not particularly happy lives, and they get through it somehow, my parents being the most obvious examples. So the prospect of being unhappy doesn't daunt me or bring on despair. One can endure in dull misery for decades and still not lose the will to keep on living. Weirdly, that is consolation. They do say that most distorted thinking originally had a protective function; perhaps the reason that I can't reframe happiness is because I need that reassurance.