YOU'RE NOT SUPPOSED TO BE SATISFIED WITH YOUR JOB : A RESPONSE TO MALCOLM GLADWELL

AN ESSAY

In Outliers, Malcolm Gladwell analyzes "successful" lives in the United States. In large part, he focuses on work: What draws "successful" people to their work, and why do they enjoy it? In broad outline, he asserts that "satisfaction with work" involves three distinct criteria: (1) Autonomy: You must have control over what you do; (2) Complexity : Your work must involve fresh mental challenges, not mind-numbing repetition; and (3) Connection between Effort and Reward : You must receive compensation in an amount that fairly correlates with the amount of effort you believe you have expended. Gladwell says that all three criteria must be present for a person to "enjoy their job."

I agree with Gladwell that people who have autonomy in their working lives "enjoy" their work far more than people who receive condescending orders all day in a suffocating corporate hierarchy. I also agree that people who face fresh new tasks every day enjoy their jobs more because they do not burn themselves out endlessly doing the same thing day after day. And I agree that people who get paid what they think they deserve obviously feel better about working than people who receive virtually nothing for ceaseless effort.

But who the hell fulfills any of these criteria at a typical American job, let alone all three? Gladwell's formula might be accurate, but it is essentially inapplicable: In America, our employment system is not designed to grant autonomy, complexity or fair rewards. To the contrary, it is designed to suppress autonomy, eliminate complexity and pay the least for the most effort. This is the sad truth. And it is no one individual's fault: It is the fault of private capitalism and its tendency to instrumentalize human beings for private profit. And this is also why no one is really "happy" at their job, at least under the Gladwell criteria.

Gladwell's criteria are antithetical to a private employment system committed to corporate profit. In America, most working people are corporate employees. That means that they serve an incorporeal legal entity that is, in turn, established to enrich those who own it. As such, they are mere pawns in a vast machine that is not working for them; it is working for the shareholders. Indeed, they are not just practically working for the shareholders. They are legally bound to act in their interest. Corporate employees are "fiduciaries." That means they must set aside their own personal interests to serve the corporation. If they put their interests first, they could face a lawsuit for "breach of loyalty."

In this environment, "autonomy" is anathema: Corporate employees must know their place in the hierarchy. They do not control their working lives. They receive orders from supervisors, branch office managers and other "higher-ups." They do as they're told, not as they want. While they might have "illusory" autonomy over a few meager peons in the mail room, in reality they are just pieces in a larger corporate jigsaw puzzle. They have no autonomy. They are instruments. In this light, it is impossible for the vast majority of American employees to meet the "autonomy" prong of Gladwell's analysis. As such, they cannot be "satisfied with their jobs."

Private capitalist employment systems also make "complexity" an impossible goal. In most corporate settings, employees exist for a single reason: To perform a discrete task calculated to maximize corporate earnings. Companies do not expect complicated thinking or novelty from their employees; they expect employees to learn their role and do it every day--forever. After all, companies operate under the so-called "profit principle." They expect a certain profit every month, and they hire employees to carry on the operations necessary to win that profit. If the employee deviates from his expected role, he threatens the profit margin. That is unacceptable. As such, employees cannot rightly insist on "complexity" in their jobs. That would contradict their purpose in the corporate scheme. They exist to do one thing: Process claims; answer phones; file papers; send mail; appear in court; put shoelace in shoe; hammer nails; the list goes on.

Employees are like machine parts. What good is a cog if it insists on being a wheel? Cogs must be cogs and nothing else. That is how our system works. And that is why it is impossible to achieve "complexity" in most American jobs. It would undermine the entire reason why employers hire people: To transform them into single-minded profit generators who do a simple task and no more.

Finally, our private capitalist system also heavily disfavors a "connection between effort and reward." Companies do not employ people to pay them what they think they deserve. Rather, companies exist to generate a particular profit level for their owners. To generate that profit level, managers must examine two factors: Income and expense. Employees are an expense. But they are necessary to generate income, too. Thus, employees represent a "profit balancing act" in the corporate scheme. They must be paid; but never so much that their salaries threaten the expected profit. Employee effort has nothing to do with it. It is all about numbers-crunching to satisfy the shareholders. While a happy employee would certainly like to get money commensurate with his long hours, employee satisfaction is not the goal. Employers don't care whether their employees think they are getting a fair deal. They don't care whether employees feel that they are getting comparatively nothing for their effort. None of that matters. Only the profit margin matters. In that light, almost no American employees--or any employees in a strictly capitalist system--can insist on a "just" connection between their effort and reward. After all, it is not about them. It is about the shareholders.

Considering all these things, it is no wonder that almost no one "likes their job" in the United States. Those who say they like their job are probably just being dishonest with themselves. Perhaps they meet one factor from Gladwell's test and mistake it for true happiness. Maybe they get to perform a novel new task every Thursday and now think their work is "complex." Maybe they have a few college students to supervise and now think they have "autonomy." Or maybe they got a $500 Christmas bonus for working 2500 hours last year, and now think they have a fair "connection between effort and reward." Yet these are all illusory "achievements." They do not change the system. The employee remains firmly under the corporation's control. And he remains instrumentalized: He exists solely to generate profit in exchange for the smallest paycheck possible in the circumstances.

Some will say I am exaggerating how many people cannot meet Gladwell's test for "work happiness." Some will say that only certain job "classes" cannot achieve autonomy, complexity and just reward for effort. But I know from experience that so-called "better jobs" are no more satisfying than "lesser jobs" under Gladwell's standard.

I was a lawyer. People think that lawyers are all rich and have wonderful working lives. They are "professionals," so they must have autonomy. They are highly educated, so they must encounter interesting, new and "complex" work every day. And they obviously must make a lot of money from their effort.

Yet that was not the case: I was a pawn in our law office. I had virtually no autonomy. I had to follow instructions from senior lawyers and the firm's boss. I received harsh criticism and discipline for failing to know my place. I was reprimanded for suggesting novel ways to approach old problems. In short, I was low on the totem pole. I did not control my own destiny. And it felt really bad.

Neither was my work "complex." I did the same things every single day. I filed papers, I made phone calls, I met with clients. Then I consulted with my boss and we discussed how to make the most money from cases. True, the work involved technical expertise that I learned in law school. But it was all dismally formulaic. It was horribly boring and stressful at the same time. It was always the same. There were knee-jerk responses for every type of case. We even sent the same standard questions to opposing counsel in every case. The details may have changed from case to case. But the overall structure was gruelingly banal. There was no "complexity." To the contrary--and applying Gladwell's contrasting term--it was "mind-numbing repetition."

And I certainly did not receive a reward to equal my effort. I made $50,000 a year in the law firm, without regard to the number of hours I worked. I was at my desk every morning before 8. I normally stayed in the office past 6:30 every evening. I even worked weekends. I brought work home. Yet no matter how much I worked or how much I won for the firm, I got the same lousy $50,000. To add insult to injury, I got a $50 bonus for Christmas after breaking my ass all year for more than 60 hours a week. My friend got nothing, so I guess that made me "lucky." In short, there was no connection between my effort and the reward I received.

I mention all this to show that every working person in America faces the same insuperable challenges. Lawyers and Fed Ex deliverymen grumble about the same thing. They are both dissatisfied with their work because they are instruments in the same private capitalist system. The same "profit principle" applies to them. And the "profit principle" does not exist to make workers happy; it exists to enrich owners. That is why Gladwell's test for "work happiness" is hopelessly utopian. Our system does not exist to grant workers autonomy, complexity or fair rewards. It strips away those things because they are inconsistent with the profit principle. If workers suddenly had autonomy, complexity and fair rewards, corporations would start losing money. That would be unacceptable.

In the end, it does not matter whether people are happy with their work. Sigmund Freud wrote in Civilization and its Discontents that human beings have a "natural aversion to work." Strachey, trans., p. 30, fn 5. Additionally, they can never achieve the autonomy, complexity and just rewards they seek from it. People not only just don't like work; they can't get any satisfaction from it once they begin it.

People aren't supposed to be satisfied with their work. Our system is not designed to satisfy workers. And it functions just fine without satisfying them. In fact, it would break down if it did. In that light, Gladwell's criteria for "work satisfaction" are all well and good. It's just that our system works strongly to ensure that no working person ever fulfills them.

No, the only people who enjoy autonomy, complexity and just rewards in their work are the wealthy owners, employers and entrepreneurs. These are the true capitalists. These are the men who instrumentalize others. These are the men who take home the profit after cutting the paychecks. They control their own destinies. They don't listen to anyone but themselves. They get to do different stuff every day. And they set their own salary. They get it all.

There just aren't that many of them. They don't want newcomers in their club, either. So they keep membership low. That leaves more goodies for them.

They might be miserable, wretched, contemptible, exploitive fuckers. But at least they fulfill Gladwell's factors. They are satisfied with their work. Hey, if you had a mountain of money, called all the shots, did whatever you wanted all day and paid yourself a mammoth salary, wouldn't you be satisfied with your work, too? You know you would.

But that's not you. So shut up, get back to your desk and await further instructions from your supervisor.

GAMBLING ON HAPPINESS : LOVE, KNOWLEDGE AND RISK

AN ESSAY

For three years, my close friend Joe Simeone composed an operatic adaptation to the 1952 play "Dial M For Murder." Last week, I attended an opening in which he presented several passages from his work. In brief, the opera follows the same intricate plot as the play: A man named Tony blackmails both his wealthy wife, Margot, and another man named Lesgate; Tony exploits the blackmail to entice Lesgate to murder his wife; the plan goes wrong and Margot kills Lesgate in self-defense; Tony manipulates the evidence to pin the murder on Margot; the police arrest Margot and she is sentenced to death; an enterprising police detective worries about the verdict and discovers that Tony orchestrated the result; Margot goes free and discovers her husband's betrayal.

Through the operatic form, Joe Simeone tells the story with a keener eye for emotion than plot. He did not compose an "operatic thriller;" he composed an opera. As such, he explores the emotional relationship between Tony and Margot with greater detail than the play. At the outset, Simeone tells us that Tony's and Margot's marriage was "loveless," but that Tony had recently begun to shower affections on his wife. To make that point, the opera begins with a sweeping aria in which Margot reveals that she has "rediscovered" her love for her husband. This is ironic, of course, because Tony has already betrayed her; he is even planning to kill her. During the aria, Margot sings a remarkable line: "It's a risk to believe love is real."

Margot may seem naïve for daring to believe that her devious husband actually loves her. But she is not alone. We all want love in our lives because love is a tantalizing pathway to happiness. Yet love is a troublesome thing because it cuts in two directions. We can love and we can be loved. Real happiness exists only when both elements find expression in a relationship. When only one person loves, the result is unrequited disappointment because the other does not return the feeling. And when only one person receives love, the result is awkward discomfort. Put another way, love only really "works" when there is no disparity between the emotions on both sides.

Sigmund Freud said as much. In Civilization and its Discontents, Freud explained that human beings generally "strive after happiness; they want to become happy and remain so." Civilization and its Discontents (Strachey, trans. p. 25). He went on to explain that happiness has both a "positive and negative aim," namely: "[the] absence of pain and unpleasure and the experiencing of strong feelings of pleasure." Id. Additionally, Freud noted that happiness cannot arise as long as unhappiness exists in a person's life. And unhappiness is "much less difficult to experience" than happiness. Id. at 26.

Freud identified three main sources for unhappiness: (1) our own bodies, which are doomed to aging, pain, discomfort and decay; (2) the external world, which can "rage against us with unimaginable forces of destruction;" and (3) our relations to other men. Civilization and its Discontents at p.26. He went on to say that unhappiness flowing from our "relations to other men" represents the worst possible unhappiness: It is the unhappiness of betrayal, deception, unfaithfulness, personal disappointment, spurned love, heartbreak, frustrated yearning and all the other bitter emotions that arise when our relations with others do not follow the path we wanted.

If so much unhappiness can flow from relationships with others, why do people bother with them? Freud posed the same question. He offered one surefire way to avoid "relationship unhappiness:" "Against the suffering which may come upon one from human relationships the readiest safeguard is voluntary isolation." Civilization and its Discontents at p. 27. He called this the "happiness of quietness." By eliminating a source for unhappiness, a person makes it easier to experience happiness.

But Freud acknowledged that "voluntary isolation" is not very satisfying. After all, mere freedom from unhappiness is nowhere near as fulfilling as experiencing positive happiness. For that reason, Freud explained that human beings constantly gamble on love to satisfy their "passionate striving for a positive fulfillment of happiness." Civilization and its Discontents at p. 32.

Put another way, freedom from unhappiness and pain is not enough. People want the ecstasy and joy that flows from real, positive happiness. And positive happiness flows most strongly from that most dangerous category: Relations with other men. Still, the potential emotional payout from love is so great that people all too willingly take their chances with it. Nonetheless, Freud warned: "The weak side of this technique is easy to see; otherwise no human being would have thought of abandoning this path to happiness for any other. It is that we are never so defenseless against suffering as when we love, never so helplessly unhappy as when we have lost our loved object or its love." Id. at 33.

Against this background, Margot sang more than she knew when she observed: "It's a risk to believe love is real." Love is an extremely dangerous risk. When a person dares to abandon himself to love, he makes himself "defenseless against suffering;" he even risks "helpless unhappiness" if he does not get the emotional payout he expects from the relationship. Worse, these unhappy results depend exclusively on "relations to other men." Specifically, the "love pathway to happiness" depends on how another person acts and feels. We humans are subjective creatures. We know only what we sense. Facts exist only to the extent that we manifest a subjective belief in their reliability. In that light, it is very difficult to gauge whether another person feels any emotion as we do, let alone love.

Beyond risk, love is about knowledge. Freud said that love has two components: Loving and being loved. We only feel love's joy when we know another person feels strongly about us, too. It is not enough to feel strongly about another person. Rather, love's intoxicating pleasure only really arises when we are satisfied that another person feels as strongly about us as we do about them.

But how do we know that? It is hard enough to know what exists in anyone else's mind. Yet when we risk our happiness on love, we force ourselves to decipher what another person feels and thinks. This is extremely difficult; in fact, it is nearly impossible. There is no way to know for certain whether another person loves us, because we cannot literally step into that person's mind. Rather, we must examine secondary facts to make inferences about the other person's beliefs. This is an imperfect method at best, but it is the only one we have. Even direct statements from our love interest are not definitive proof of what he feels. Humans are, after all, infamously dishonest.

In this light, it is easy to see that love is no easy thing. It does not just a risk; it demands some faith, too, because the facts necessary to establish love are unknowable.

Again, the question arises: With these thematic difficulties in mind, why bother with love? Consider just how much is at stake. By daring to love, a person opens himself to boundless unhappiness and pain flowing from "relations to other men." True, if his love pans out, he feels overwhelmingly positive emotions: That is the potential payout from the "risk." But in order to experience love, a person must satisfy himself that another person feels a certain way. It is impossible to certainly know what another person feels, so love actually involves a double risk: (1) Risking the relationship in the first place; and (2) Risking that a person will feel the way you expect. Disappointment can arise from either risk. There is nothing you can really do to stop it; you can't control how another person thinks or feels. In this sense, love is also a risk because a person must entrust his happiness to the subjective whim of another person over whom he has no control. And because human beings are notoriously untrustworthy and inconstant, it almost seems an unreasonable risk.

If love is so unreasonable, then why do so many people pursue it? The fact that human beings--like Margot--blindly risk love is testament to the assertion that reason does not rule us. If human beings were entirely rational, they would probably never love. After all, rational thinking involves balancing risks against benefits. A rational mind analyzes the potential pain that could result from a transaction and queries whether the potential pleasure is worth the chance. As Freud explained, love can yield immeasurable pain. And because that pain flows from forces largely beyond our control (i.e., the whims of others), it really makes no rational sense to take the risk. Although love offers a huge benefit in pleasure, a reasonable man would immediately see that it always presents an intolerable risk in pain. That risk would invariably outweigh the benefit in pleasure.

But we know that human beings live to love. They cast reason aside. They take the risk, even though it is unreasonable. Put simply, love's emotional payout in happiness is so intoxicating that it overwhelms human reason. Love's pleasure is so hypnotic that it submerges all potential pitfalls. Among those pitfalls is the dangerous need to place individual emotional well-being in the hands of another person--and that person is probably not trustworthy. Men ignore those risks when they love because it just feels so, so good. If reason held men in check, they would never allow themselves to remain blind to the dangers. But blind they remain; they dive headlong into the risks because it just feels so damn good.

"It's a risk to believe love is real." In one line, Margot expressed the timeless--yet perilously uncertain-- human quest for love. She hinted at the risks. She knew there was a danger. But love made her feel so good that she willingly blinded herself to it. She suspended her reason. Objectively, that might appear foolish. But we all have done it. And we probably always will. Love is never objective.

In short, we all desperately want positive happiness. We are not content with the "happiness of quietness." No, we crave "relations with other men." We gamble on positive happiness by playing familiar games. Those games are rarely reasonable. In fact, most are extremely dangerous.

Love is probably the most dangerous game of all: Enticing, risky, unknowable, unverifiable, tempestuous, fickle, maddening; yet offering pleasure beyond imagination. It is a recipe for unreasonable risk every time.

UNCONDITIONAL LOVE IS A PRECIOUS COMMODITY--AND PSYCHIATRISTS SELL IT

A REFLECTION

I know a lot of people in therapy. Pretty soon I might join them. In one way or another, everyone deals with emotional disturbance and unhappiness in our society. Life can be incredibly painful. After all, we live in a competitive world. We basically contend with two types of people: (1) Indifferent people who want to outdo us; and (2) people we love who are biologically bound to die one day. It is stressful to cope with high stakes and loss all the time. We suffer defeats, losses and setbacks every day. Freud said that it is "much easier to experience unhappiness than happiness." Civilization and its Discontents, 26 (Strachey trans. 1961). Sometimes unhappiness grinds us into submission, no matter how optimistic we try to be. In brief, life takes a toll, even if you had a relatively stable childhood. And that's a rarity.

Yet for all our vulnerability to unhappiness and emotional pain, we strive for love. See generally Civilization and its Discontents, 33-34. We think that love will counteract our unhappiness, or at least make it more bearable. But we seek a very specific kind of love: Love without conditions or qualifications. We want love without first fulfilling others' demands or acceding to others' conceptions about "what we should be." As simple as it sounds, we want people to love us "for who we are," without manipulation or expectation. Generally speaking, expectations result at least in stress and at most in unhappiness. Expectations create a disparity between our conceptions about the future and reality. When reality does not match the expectation, we feel failure or worse. "Love with expectations" results in serious emotional pain. But love without expectations--simple, unconditional love--results in emotional satisfaction, even euphoria. That is what we want from life--strongly positive emotions--because when we feel that good, nothing else can bring us down.

But this is exactly the problem. After all, it is almost impossible to find unconditional love in society. First, our entire social structure does not really value individual happiness. Rather, it merely expects objective economic productivity and "service." Those two basic goals do not require happiness. Quite the contrary, they typically induce unhappiness. Very few people are ever happy about being "objectively economically productive" for someone else, nor are they ever happy about serving some domineering economic master. Yet "success" in our society flows from "productivity" and "service." It does not matter whether a "successful man" feels happy while he productively serves. It does not affect the bottom line. Subjective, individual feelings, in other words, simply do not matter in this objective social scheme.

But what are human beings if not feeling creatures? In the final analysis, every man and woman is a unique entity with emotions and thoughts. Emotions and thoughts are entirely subjective. While they might mean nothing to society or the economy, they mean everything to the individual who thinks and feels. Unconditional love is one of the best feelings a person can experience. Society, however, could care less about it. It is not essential either to productivity or service. This is why unhappiness is so rampant, even among people who appear "successful" and "content." They may reach "objective" standards for social success, but miserably fail to satisfy their own "subjective" emotional needs. In a word, there is much more to life than success.

We should not be surprised that it is hard to find unconditional love in our society. After all, everything has conditions attached in the merciless commercial crucible of life. A condition means something that must be fulfilled before something else is given. It is "bargain-like:" "If you cut my grass, I will give you $100." It channels behavior: You don't get the $100 if you don’t cut the grass. No one does anything for anyone else in our society without imposing some condition on performance. Conditions allow people to induce behavior in others. They allow people to tyrannize and manipulate others for their own gain. This might be perfectly appropriate in cutthroat commerce. But conditions attach not just to contracts and business deals. Rather, they attach just as often to human affections.

We want unconditional love because we are accustomed to conditional love. I read an article in the New York Times last week arguing that modern psychiatry can be explained by reference to "selling unconditional love" in a society that rarely loves, and only conditionally when it does. According to the article, living with conditional love cripples us emotionally. It said that even our parents do not often love us unconditionally. Much to the contrary, they typically want to "control our behavior" by baiting us with love. The article claimed that parents could warp their children not just by scolding and criticizing them, but also by excessively praising them. Each case implicates "conditional love." Praise creates an internal urge for conformity in a child, leading him or her to modify behavior in order to win the praise. Parents only give praise when the child acts "as they wish;" that is conditional love. Without fulfilling the condition, the parent does not praise--and does not love. Praise, then, can be just as damaging as critique.

If parents do not love unconditionally, who will? That is a serious question. If our closest relatives do not love us "for who we are," can we expect commercial actors, bosses and clients to do so? Certainly not. In fact, in commerce we never expect unconditional relationships. We always know that someone wants something from us in return for what they give. As fundamental as that "bargain imperative" may be in commerce, it is anathema to our emotional needs. We might steel ourselves to conditional relationships as we move through life. But in the process we deny ourselves the one thing that might bring us happiness. We will never find unconditional love in commerce; we will never find it in our careers. We never even find it within our own families. People always want us to act in some way that benefits them, or at least matches their sentiments. It is never enough to "be who we are." To fulfill conditions, we must always "be someone else." That leads to emotional ruin in the end.

This is the psychiatrist's niche. The psychiatrist, unlike the boss, the parent, the admirer or even the sometime friend, staunchly empathizes with his patient no matter what. He listens attentively. He does not impose his own moral or family-based judgments on the patient's choices or lifestyle. He offers the love that the patient's own parents refused to give without conditions. This is modern therapy. It is a dose of unconditional love in a world without unconditional love. Perplexingly, however, it is also a commercial relationship. Therapists do not support their patients because they genuinely want to give unconditional love; they do it because they are on the clock. In this sense, they offer "unconditional love conditional upon payment," but even that is better than purely conditional love.

Unconditional love is a precious commodity. The fact that so many people turn to therapy testifies to its pricelessness in our emotional lives. No matter how much we cynically harden ourselves to commercial realities and its myriad conditions, we always must attend to our own emotional health. Unconditional love makes us feel really good. It makes us feel better than any hard-won, competitive victory. Nothing can match it because it affirms our own personality without any effort on our part. It feels good to be loved "simply for who we are" without having first performed a song and dance to placate some demanding taskmaster.

Taskmasters surround us in life. They come in many guises. Even our own spouses and parents might force us to act in unappealing ways to win their love. When it comes to love, no one wants to compete. If we compete for love, it is not really love. We want others to love us because we are who we are, not because we do things for them. But this is a hard thing to do in a world that consistently heaps us with conditions and expectations. This society does not make individual happiness a primary goal. So it leaves us to struggle--often vainly--to obtain it.

HAPPINESS, UNHAPPINESS, WORK, CAREERS AND DRINKING

AN ESSAY

When I practiced law, I learned the real meaning of the word “unhappiness.” I have garbled memories about my months in practice. Impressions flitter back to me without warning. No matter how they reappear, they put a bitter taste in my mouth. They confirm to me that I made the right decision to abandon the legal profession. They remind me just how awful I felt every day in a law office.

Before I practiced law, I never thought much about the concepts “happiness” and “unhappiness.” In my young mind, happiness was uncomplicated; it simply meant that you generally “felt good” in your circumstances and that “nothing was wrong.” Applying that definition, “unhappiness,” too, was easy to understand. It was just the “opposite of feeling good.” “Unhappiness” depended on “happiness.” If I knew one, I could abstractly imagine the other. I never considered that “unhappiness” could have an independent meaning.

It does. The mere fact that the word “unhappiness” contains the word “happiness” does not mean that “unhappiness” depends on “happiness.” To the contrary, “unhappiness” is a unique, pervasive, all-consuming feeling of malaise that darkens your entire outlook on life. It is not merely the absence of happiness; it is much more. It is a poisonous, enervating, hopeless mental condition. When you are unhappy, life appears bleak and pointless. Days pass slowly, even torturously. You just want to lie down and go to sleep. You expect bad news at every turn. When you are unhappy, you do not think to yourself: “I am not happy.” You think: “I am unhappy; and unhappiness has nothing to do with happiness.”

Practicing law made me unhappy. I could not bear to get up in the morning. I would lie in bed and pray that the minutes on the clock would not pass. From the moment I walked into the office, difficulties arose. My supervisor would yell at me for failing to make a phone call or fax something. She would reject my explanations with vague advice, such as: “You need to do better, remember more and move faster.” Of course, she never told me how to make people answer the phone or return calls. Nor could she tell me how to make the U.S. Mail move more quickly. Whenever I mustered the effort to fulfill her requests, she had a fresh rebuke for me. She called me names and told me she would dock my pay if I kept “fucking things up.” I tried to emphasize that no one had trained me. She told me to train myself by reading a 900-page “best practices manual.”

I felt disillusioned. I entered law practice after a very successful law school career. I thought my academic success would carry over into practice. It did not. Whenever I talked about legal theory, I was told to be quiet and do “case management” instead. That meant making phone calls and setting up appointments with doctors and engineers. Law had nothing to do with my practice. It was an elaborate horse-trading game that happened to revolve around a courthouse. All the while, intimidating people besieged me from all sides. My own supervisor told me I was incompetent. My adversaries called our lawsuits “baseless, stupid and worthy of sanction.” I even made judges angry because my supervisor instructed me to file idiotic motions in court. In short, I was castigated for following orders as often I was for failing to follow them. It was classic Catch-22 material.

My life degenerated into pure negativity. Nothing ever felt right. No matter what I did, I expected to be insulted, censured or criticized. I never received even one encouraging word from anyone. I remember losing interest in everything, even things I really liked. My libido vanished. Lawyers in my firm sympathized with me. But they, too, endured the same hardships I did; they had little time to worry about me.

And I could not escape. I stayed in the office for 11 hours or more for six days a week. I had no vacation time. I received cell phone calls before and after I left the office. The bad news and mean-spirited criticism never ended. Six months into my law practice experience, goodness seemed to have evaporated from my existence. It had become one grim, emasculating failure after another with no end in sight. My boss even reneged on a promise to increase my salary after six months, explaining: “You haven’t earned it yet.”

That’s when I learned what “unhappiness” really meant. I quit. It was one of the best decisions I have ever made. Since then, life has dealt me more tough cards. But at least I do not face ridicule, scorn and criticism every hour. I happier now than I was when I practiced law. In any event, I know I am not “unhappy” anymore.

Could anyone be happy in such circumstances? I remember something my supervisor said to me one Friday evening. It was about 6 PM. I was working on something that had to be done on Monday; there was still a long way to go. I knew I was going to be back in the office on Saturday, but I wanted to knock some work out before the weekend. Everyone else had gone home except my supervisor. She wanted to leave, too. So she came into my office and said: “Would you wrap it up? You’re cutting into my drinking time.”

I will never forget that. It made me seriously think about life, careers, happiness and success. Here was a successful law firm manager who divided life between “work time,” namely, Monday morning through Friday afternoon, and “drinking time,” namely, Friday afternoon through Sunday evening. When she said “I was cutting into her drinking time,” she implied that she drank at any moment she wasn’t working. For her, life was binary: Working and drinking. She must have liked drinking, because she did not like the fact that I was keeping her at work during her drinking time. If she had liked working, she would not have minded staying at work for a few more hours. But she was upset because I was encroaching on “her time,” and in “her time,” she liked drinking.

I am sure this is a common sentiment. But what does it really say about happiness and success in America? People are so proud of their jobs, especially people—like my supervisor—who achieve prominence and wealth. Yet despite this pride, they always yearn for days off so they can go get drunk. People say they love their work. But if they would prefer drinking to work, are they really being honest with themselves? Sigmund Freud wrote that intoxication is the “purest, most effective method” by which to ward off unhappiness. Civilization and its Discontents, S. 44 (Fischer Verlag, 10th Ed. 2007). Drinking “drowns cares.” If my supervisor loved drinking, she must have had “cares” she wanted to “drown.” This showed me that, beneath the collected exterior, she was somehow unhappy, too. She may not have been abjectly unhappy, but she must have been unhappy enough to want to drink as soon as she got home on Friday night. My unhappiness sprang both from my ill treatment and my disillusionment with a profession that cared nothing for the principles I struggled so long to master. My supervisor’s unhappiness came from some other source. I do not know what made her unhappy. She was powerful and had much more money than I did. She commanded people around the office and owned three apartments. Yet she was upset with me because I delayed her weekly rendezvous with the bottle.

Can we ever really find happiness in employment? It seems that every working person “lives for the weekend.” I know I do whenever I work a “traditional job.” I do not delude myself by saying “I love my job.” I do not like being a servant. I do not like sacrificing my time for a few dollars. Sure, in many cases it is necessary to sacrifice time for money. But that does not mean I like it. That is why I meticulously count the days toward Friday. During the week, a part of my mind always resents the idea that I am stuck doing someone else’s bidding for a shekel or two. Friday, however, represents a liberation from service. Working people divide their mental lives between weekdays and weekends. Weekdays are boring, stressful and unsatisfying. Weekends are exciting, free and fun-filled. The human brain does not like stress, obligation and constraint. Yet it loves freedom and fun. If it came between weekdays and weekends—and if money were not an issue—everyone would choose the weekend: Who would willingly face stress and obligation if there were no compensation for the pain? That is just the way our minds work. It is easier to be happy when you do not face stress, ridicule and failure. Even if you do not face extreme pressure at work, you still have to show up and sit in one place for over eight hours a day. Your brain would much rather be doing other things during that time, like drinking, sunbathing, shopping or surfing. That’s just the way we are, no matter how much guilt-ridden social programming we’ve absorbed to the contrary. We are trained to say “we love to work at traditional jobs.” But this is self-delusion.

Ironically, traditional jobs tend strongly to induce unhappiness. They consume time, leaving only limited opportunities for personal satisfactions. The fact that so many people—even wildly successful people—yearn to drink on Friday night is compelling evidence that people would “rather not be working” if they had the choice. More to the point, the persistent mental distinction between “workday drab” and “weekend fun” vibrantly illustrates that employment makes people unhappy. Workdays are “unhappy time” and weekends are “happy time.” It is childishly simple, yet accurate. “Weekend fun” makes us “happy.” “Weekday drab” runs us down, then thirst for “fun.” Without sufficient “fun” in our lives, we are not “happy.” We may not be truly “unhappy,” but we set ourselves up for unhappiness.

All this makes me wonder whether our entire social program even cares whether people achieve happiness. We learn to work at traditional jobs. We hear rhetoric about it all the time. It is “good” to have a stable job. It is “good” to know your place in the workplace hierarchy. It is “good” to spend your best years serving some company’s economic interests. And it is “good” to make money in the process. We hear that it is important to “be happy.” But how can we be happy if we spend 72% of our lives (ie, 5 days from every 7) wishing it were the weekend? Is it “good” to be happy only 28% of the time? Against this background, it almost seems revolutionary to want happiness 100% of the time. No offense to office workers, but if you say you are “100% happy” at your job copying papers, answering phones, staring at spreadsheets, delivering coffee and cataloging documents, I don’t believe you. I know that every Wednesday morning you secretly say to yourself: “Only two more days to go….only two more days to go.”

Happiness should not be a revolutionary sentiment. I made it my goal in life. I have experienced unhappiness. It is deeply unsettling. It makes you doubt life altogether. It makes you just want to give up. Still, avoiding unhappiness is more difficult than it seems. In our society, we learn to serve. We learn to spend our time to benefit others in order to win some monetary reward. Only a few have the freedom to spend their time as they please. But happiness lies in the power to say: “I will do what I want to do.” On weekends, working people say: “I will do what I want to do,” and they do what they want. On weekdays, they say: “I must” and they do not do what they want to do.

This is not a good recipe for happiness. Yet this is the program we’ve received from day one. When we sit in an office dreaming about the weekend, we understand just how little time we have to be happy in this world. Freud put it best when he said: “Our chances for happiness are already limited by our constitution as living organisms. But it is much less difficult to experience unhappiness.” Civilization and its Discontents, S. 43 (my translation) (Fischer Verlag, 10th ed. 2007).

When we divide our time between “work days” and “drinking days,” we obviously don’t like the work days as much as the drinking days. Yet we work much more often than we drink. Where does that leave us? Or do we drink because we work? If we do, what does that say about work? Should we defend it so proudly?

NEW IDEAS

I have been having some adventures lately. Sometimes I blame myself for not writing more. But when I don't write, I inevitably get out and start experiencing things. It's incredible how much you can experience in life when you actually have time to just go with the flow. There is comfort and advantage in stable routines. But there is occasional value in breaking them. I never shy from that option, even if it scares me at first.

I am grateful for my life. My obligations are not tremendously burdensome. I do not worry about money too much. I complain about as much as any rational human being does. Complaining is human; humans rarely actually feel satisfied, even when they should be satisfied. I have time to write and to experience new things at the same time. I'm not overflowing with good fortune, but my health is good, I have been in a loving relationship for 10 years and no major disaster has befallen me since 2007. No one demeans me, commands me or orders me to fulfill obligations. In this sense, I am enjoying relative "freedom from unhappiness inflicted by the outside world" as Freud called it.

Most importantly, I am getting new ideas. Time off means time to reflect and time to resettle things in your mind. That is exactly what I have been doing. In the next few weeks, I will explore new issues and offer some new perspectives based on things I have perceived lately. Put simply, I am assembling new memories. It is too easy to forget things in life. Holding onto experience and details is a craft. In some sense, it is intensely self-conscious. There are some things we cannot avoid remembering. But there are myriad others that slip away from us almost instantly. We can't get them back. That's why it's important to take memory seriously. After all, memory begets inspiration. So I take it seriously.

Thanks for reading. Stay tuned for more Reason, Commerce, Justice & Free Beer!

"LIVE YOUR LIFE"... EXCUSE ME, BUT WHAT DOES THAT MEAN?

OESTERHOUDT STRIKES

Advertising nauseates me for several reasons. I don't like it because it twists and omits information in order to induce people to enrich the speaker. I don't like it because it plays to weak human sense. And I don't like it because it presumes to impose "acceptable values," when in fact it merely wants its listeners to go buy things. Advertisers could care less whether listeners "Just Do It," "Are Who they Are" or "Get Down with Dr. Scholl." They just want people to associate sounds, images and words with their product so that a listener will go buy the product when he remembers it. It is fundamentally childish: "Look. Listen. Remember. Go. Buy." Advertising speaks to commercial urges; and commercial urges are not complicated. They are as simple as human sense.

Yet advertisers act in very subtle ways. It is easy to forget just how simple and base they are because they wear disguises. They try to fool listeners into thinking they stand for something other than commercial gain. Today, for example, I was riding the subway and I saw a man carrying an "American Eagle" shopping bag. There was a new advertising slogan on the bag: "LIVE YOUR LIFE." It was not enough to just show pictures of shirts, pants and youthful sunbathers. American Eagle wants people to remember the phrase "Live Your Life" when they think about buying hip beachwear.

Why, exactly? What does "living my life" have to do with buying American Eagle clothing? More to the point, what does "live your life" mean, anyway? And why is American Eagle commanding me to "live my life?" Does American Eagle have some authority to recommend whether I live, or how I live? Should I be willing to listen to their advice about my life? After all, who can say what my life--or anyone's life--means? Aren't we living precisely to figure out why we're here? If anyone commands me to "live my life," I would like to issue the orders, not American Eagle or some advertiser bent upon wreaking commercial gain from my existence on this planet.

American Eagle's slogan made me angry. Not only did it bring to mind why I detest advertising, but it made clear to me an important reason why I detest it. American Eagle's slogan fits into a particular advertising category: The "values" pitch. In my view, advertising really pushes its legitimacy when it ventures down the "values path." As mentioned, advertising has a simple goal: To implant sensory impressions that mature into memories and inducements to buy. It provides targeted information in just such a way that a listener forms a favorable memory about a particular product or service. In this way, advertisers increase awareness about their products or services, which in turn increases the probability that someone will buy them. It is all about numbers: If more people know about something, there is a greater chance that someone will act on the knowledge and spend their money. Advertising solicits a commercial transaction between the speaker and the listener. If the transaction materializes, advertising has done its job. It does not matter whether the listener and the speaker share values or even agree on anything other than the price. Advertising does not aim to sway your conscience or alter your life philosophy. It just wants you to spend your money and make the advertiser rich. That is your purpose in the advertising scheme.

Why, then, do advertisers go further? Why must they also espouse a particular value perspective when suggesting that people go buy their products? Is it merely to woo a target audience? When American Eagle commands you to "Live Your Life," are they appealing to those individually-minded rebels who want to ignore convention and make their own way? Or are they commanding you to "Live Your Life" in the "American Eagle way?" If they are, they are commanding you to get young, get tan, put on your damn flip-flops, angle up that polo shirt collar, frost that hair, throw on a shell necklace and start getting it on with some hot white chicks on a private beach somewhere near the prep school. In other words, you need to start "living your life," man! You aren't doing it now, so you'd better start. You need to start having fun "AE style;" that's an order. Note that "Live Your Life" is not a recommendation. It is an imperative.

Yet life is not fun, nor is it all about having fun. Anyone who succumbs to the delusion that life is fun will not last long once the "external world" falls upon him with what Freud called "merciless forces of destruction." See Civilization and its Discontents, p. 25. I will choose what is valuable to me in my own life. I resent the notion that a superficially-minded advertiser dares to suggest how I should live my life, let alone command me. Yet advertisers often do this. Are people really so weak that they need commercial actors to tell them what is valuable in their lives? We only get one shot at existence. It conceals a great mystery for all of us. If anyone can answer why we live, or how we should live, we should look no further than ourselves. Perhaps we can trust a few close friends or loved ones to help us find our way. But we certainly should not entrust that duty to an advertiser who just wants our money.

For advertisers, our life purpose is amazingly simple: "Stay Alive and Buy My Product." Any suggestion beyond that is facetious. Advertisers do not really care about me as long as I survive to buy their product. As long as I buy the product, it does not matter whether I agree with the advertiser's abstract life philosophy. That is why I do not listen to advertisers' disingenuous invitations to "live my life" or otherwise adopt particular values. I might live in a commercial world and I might need to buy things. But when it comes to "living life," I will choose my own path.

If anyone tells me to "Live My Life," it will be me, not American Eagle. American Eagle sells baggy shorts, pink shirts, cargo pants and sunglasses. It does not order people how to live their lives. It is a seller with a stock exchange marker, not a sovereign deity with power over individual destiny. Commerce does not grant authority to instruct others how to live their lives. It does many other things, but it does not have authority to control others' most intimate life values. Despite its theoretical limitations, however, advertising submerges us in sensory detritus every day. It is difficult to separate the legitimate from the illegitimate. It is hard to ignore things that constantly barrage the senses. And commercial speakers appear to have power because they are constantly talking. In fact, they speak so much that we have to consciously avoid listening to them. They have things we want. They constantly recommend what we should want. Yet they have no strict power to tell us who we are. "Being" is our task. Commerce plays solely to our urges to "have." It even encourages us to confuse whether "having" actually translates into "being."

Having said that, some are content to "have" in order to find satisfaction in life. I'm not. Perhaps that is why I hate advertising. In response to American Eagle's command to "Live my Life," I respond: "You are not competent to give that order."

LUCKY OR HAPPY? WHAT'S THE DIFFERENCE?

AN ESSAY

I often write about happiness and unhappiness. In my view, human beings long to experience good, positive feelings as much as they can in life. Freud thought the same: “What do [men] demand of life and wish to achieve in it? They strive after happiness; they want to become happy and remain so.” Civilization and its Discontents, p. 25. Yet people say they want to be “happy” without really knowing what it means. All they know is that they want to feel good more than they feel bad—or at least more than they feel physical pain. Still, “feeling happy” is complex, especially in American life. Many people cannot feel happy unless they first achieve some “subsidiary aims,” such as making money, owning property or obtaining the “right life mate.” They exhaust themselves seeking these “subsidiary aims” to such an extent that they lose sight of the end goal: Happiness. Instead, they endless obsess over the “subsidiary aims.” In short, “a means” to happiness replaces the “end.”

Money is the best example. Money is a medium; it is a means to obtain other things, things that will ostensibly bring happiness. Yet many people forget this when they set out upon “the money-making life.” Even Aristotle recognized this 2500 years ago. Interestingly, both Freud and Aristotle agree that men seek happiness in life: “…[What] is it that we say…is the highest of all goods achievable by action? Verbally there is very general agreement; for both the general run of men and people of superior refinement say that it is happiness, and identify living well and doing well with being happy.” Ethics, Book I, Ch. 4. But Aristotle expressly ruled out “money-making” as a pathway to true happiness: “The life of money-making is one undertaken under compulsion, and wealth is evidently not the good we are seeking; for it is merely useful and for the sake of something else.” Ethics, Book I, Ch. 5. In other words, Aristotle understood that money is a “subsidiary aim” that is “merely useful…for the sake of something else,” namely, “happiness.” Despite Aristotle’s warning, however, many Americans live their lives for money. They think it will categorically bring them happiness. In so doing, they are “barking up the wrong tree.” Perhaps that explains why so few Americans think they are happy. If “living for money” categorically cannot win happiness, then there is no way a true “money-maker” will ever find happiness.

If money does not bring happiness, what does? In truth, we can forgive many Americans for their error. After all, we are merely sensory creatures. We believe what we see and hear. Our senses tell us that money appears to make wealthy people happy. They appear to want for nothing. They do not worry about their rent or their bills. They drive beautiful cars, go on exotic vacations and do what they want every day. This stands in stark contrast to our own lives, in which money is a constant worry. When money is a worry, it dominates our outlook. It provides too many opportunities for suffering. In these circumstances, we cannot feel the “strongly positive emotions” that mark happiness. Freud said that the “presence of unpleasure” makes happiness impossible. Cf. Freud, Civilization and its Discontents, p. 34. To paraphrase Bobby McFerrin: When we worry, we cannot be happy. Nonetheless, we believe that if we only cast off the “money yoke,” our worries would disappear, leaving our minds free to finally experience “strongly positive emotions.” From our perspective, the rich have that freedom. That is why we think they must be happy. And that is why we think that money will automatically make us happy, too.

But this is a delusion. One must merely pick up a tabloid newspaper to see that even mega-rich superstars are not happy, either. They might not worry about bills and health care, but they find other sources for “unpleasure” in their lives: Cheating boyfriends, bitter divorces, cancer, lost contracts, sagging boobs, wrinkles, potbellies, baldness, betrayals, Oscar snubs, humiliations, criminal prosecutions for disorderly conduct, drunk driving or domestic abuse… the list goes on. Money did not cause pain here. These unhappy stars have plenty of money. Yet they clearly are not happy, either. They simply experience unpleasure from a different source than the rest.

Where are the happy people, then? If wealth does not bring happiness, what does? In America, commerce is King. This is not just left-wing rhetoric: We really think we can buy anything. Why can’t we buy happiness, too? It seems like a cruel joke. If we seek happiness but we can’t buy it, what is all this chatter about “becoming successful” and “working hard?” If neither success, nor hard work, nor money can categorically create happiness, what is the point? We work hard and attempt to become successful because we want the power to buy things. But if we can’t buy happiness, what do we have? Aristotle and Freud say that we all want happiness. At the same time, American life tells us we need to be successful. Yet the two are not consistent. Success and money do not automatically create happiness. They may provide a means to it, but they are not replacements for happiness. Happiness comes from somewhere else, somewhere within ourselves.

Or does it? Can we fool ourselves into happiness no matter our external circumstances? Can we manipulate our attitudes so that we always feel “strongly positive emotions?” To answer that question, we must examine language. While we colloquially understand that “happiness” means a prevalence of “strongly positive emotions” over “negative feelings, stress and pain,” does that mean that external circumstances play no role in the analysis? Or can we become happy by sheer force of will, despite all the ills that fate throws upon us? In other words, are happy people simply “lucky?” If they are, what does that say about all our frantic efforts to “become happy” in life? If happiness is basically just a crapshoot, why bother even trying to “find happiness” in the first place?

This is not a small concern. In English, there is a very close relationship between the concepts “happiness” and “luck.” “Happy” is an ancient English word. It derives from the root “hap,” which in turn stems from the Old English “haep” and Old Norse “happ,” meaning “convenient” or “suitable.” Webster’s New World College Dictionary, 4th Ed. “Hap” means “chance, luck or lot,” or at least an “occurrence or happening.” “Hap” gives rise not only to “happy,” but also to “happen” and “happenstance.” All these words imply purely random, chance occurrences over which human will appears to have little influence. Looking more closely at “happy,” the dictionary tells us that the word means: “1. favored by circumstances; lucky; fortunate; 2. having, showing or causing a feeling of great pleasure, contentment, joy, etc., joyous, glad, pleased; 3. exactly appropriate to the occasion.” Id. A “happy person,” then, appears to have made little effort in life. Rather, he is merely “favored by circumstances” and “fortunate” to feel the way he does. He feels “great pleasure, contentment and joy” because circumstances favor him. But why do circumstances favor him? Because he is simply “lucky?” If he is “just lucky,” does that mean he played a role in his own happiness? Or did “fate” just randomly bless him? Here, we can already see the trouble brewing. To be “happy,” our “circumstances” must “favor us.” We must be “lucky” and “fortunate.” We must benefit from “chance occurrences” and “happenstance” to be “happy.” Our own efforts seem irrelevant to the task. Put simply, “happiness” requires “luckiness.”

So what does “lucky” mean? According to Webster, “lucky” means “having good luck; fortunate.” Webster’s New World Dictionary, 4th Ed. Again, we see “fortune” at work in these concepts. Fortune involves random chance, not purposeful action. And what about “good luck?” “Luck,” like “hap,” is an ancient English word. It derives from the Indo-European root “leuk,” meaning “what bends together” or “what occurs.” That root evolved into the Middle Dutch “luk” and the German “Glück.” In German, “Glück” translates not only to “luck,” but also to “happiness.” Bertelsmann’s Deutsches Wörterbuch tells us that “Glück” means: “1. favorable, fortunate circumstances or a turn of events; a coincidence; 2. the success that comes from that turn of events; 3. a feeling of inner satisfaction and joy, especially after accomplishing sought-after wishes; 4. favorable chance (my translations).” In English, Webster says that “luck” means: “1. the seemingly chance happening of events that affect someone; fortune; fate; 2. good fortune; success; prosperity; advantage.” Webster’s New World College Dictionary, 4th Ed.

In all these words, we see an undeniable link between “chance,” “luck” and “happiness.” In German, the link is intrinsic; “Glück” means both “luck” and “happiness.” It describes not only “chance events” and “favorable occurrences,” but also the “feeling of inner satisfaction and joy” that springs from them. It is no coincidence that the English “luck” relates to “Glück.” Although the English definition for “luck” does not list “the feeling of inner satisfaction and joy” that springs from chance events, the word “happy” directly implies “luckiness.” See “happy” definition, supra. And both words relate back to the Indo-European notion that “luck” merely means that things “bend together” for a person’s benefit. Put another way, luck is random. Human will does not affect it. It blesses its beneficiaries without regard to their efforts, intentions, wishes or merits.

In this etymological light, does it make any sense to “pursue happiness?” It appears not. After all, it seems that happiness depends on luck. Luck blesses at random; it does not favor those who “really want to be happy” or who “work really hard” at it. Without “chance occurrences,” “fortune,” “coincidence,” “turns of events,” “fate” and “favorable circumstances,” we will never truly fit the “happy” definition. The word “pursue” implies purposeful action directed toward a particular object. Yet when we “pursue happiness,” we attempt to secure something that eludes human intention altogether. We cannot really “pursue” something that will happen by chance. Our best and most intensive efforts will not cause something to occur at random. At the most, we can “hope” for such events; we do not “pursue” them. We can boldly struggle to mold our circumstances by effort and toil. But if chance stands against us, it seems that we will never find happiness. Ironically, however, a person may be happy even if he makes no effort at all. As long as “fortune” and “luck” meet on his side, he will experience the “joy and contentment” that arise from his “lucky circumstances.” On some level, we all know this. We have seen examples. This is why we contemptuously dismiss some “happy people” as “lucky bastards.” It just doesn’t seem fair that circumstances “bent together for them,” but not for us. After all, we think we did more, earned more and worked more than they did. Yet they became happy because they got lucky, while we slave away without fortune’s blessings. And we certainly do not experience “great contentment or joy,” because our circumstances are not “favorable.”

But fairness and happiness do not go hand in hand. To use a cliché, life is not fair, just as random events, chance occurrences and “fortune” do not reward us all equally. This perplexes us. We learn that hard work, determination and rational behavior will bring us success, then happiness. We think we have rational control over our feelings and our destinies. We think we should be rewarded for “making all the right moves” and “paying our dues.” Yet “circumstances favor” certain people over others without regard to their merit, effort, ability or zeal. It is no answer to say that some “really hard working people” generate their own circumstances. To some extent, life unfolds without regard to human choice or will. Certain people benefit from totally random occurrences. They meet the right people at the right times. They have the right idea in the right decade. Or they simply happen to please the right person, who happened to live at the right moment in history. Others are simply born with great advantages. No calculation can presage these “chance” occurrences. Yet “luck” bestows them on some, and not others. Blessed with luck, they relish the “feeling of inner satisfaction and joy” that flows from their circumstances: They are “happy.” But they were “lucky” first.

Where does this leave us? In a word, it leaves us with the disheartening impression that we do not have total control over our lives. Benjamin Franklin and other enterprising Americans throughout our history disparaged luck, claiming that hard work and “good decisions” “manufactured” luck for them. They said: “Anyone can make it as long as they work hard.” But this, I fear, is propaganda. In my view, men like Benjamin Franklin benefited from luck and chance, no matter how hard they worked. Lord knows how many hard working people have lived on this planet who never benefited from “lucky chances.” They never became successful, famous or even happy. The lucky ones will always say: “This is how I did it… and you can do it, too!” That statement defies the very nature of luck. Luck only chooses some, not all. And it has nothing to do with talent or merit. Talent does not even increase the chances that “luck will strike.” Random means random. There is no way to influence it.

At this point, I cannot avoid discussing destiny as opposed to pure reason. I must confess that I believe in destiny, at least to the degree than I cannot rationally account for certain chance events in life. I cannot verify with my senses why I met certain people in life, why certain people lived, and others died. Quite simply, luck plays a huge role in life. And grammatically speaking, it is a prerequisite for happiness. Thus, it is a matter of chance and coincidence whether we become happy, since nothing can control the “random events” that will generate the circumstances necessary to experience the “strongly positive emotions” that flow from those lucky circumstances. Or perhaps it is destiny that determines who benefits from “chance events,” if they are even “chance events” at all. What do I know? If destiny chooses the people who benefit from chance events—and thus become happy—does that not sound like quasi-religion? There are chosen ones and there are the damned.

We all want happiness. We all want to feel good more than we feel bad. We listen to philosophers and heroes who offer us ways to find it. Yet we cannot escape grammar. Happiness turns largely on luck. Lucky people are happy. Unlucky people are not. Think about it. If some truly unlucky event befalls you, are you happy? Definitely not. Chance did not favor you. But if a lucky event befalls you, are you happy? Absolutely. You benefited from chance. It changed your circumstances and you feel great about it. Did you influence the chance events? Probably not. They would not be “chance events” if you did.

I suppose the only way to cope with luck is to cultivate a healthy respect for uncertainty in life. Maybe we will be happy. Perhaps we won’t. Yet we can spare ourselves heartbreak if we refrain from pursuing it. After all, we cannot pursue luck. And without luck, there is no true happiness. In America, this is a hard way to live. We learn that we can control our lives and we can buy anything. Yet no store sells luck or happiness. Luck can give us money, but money can’t give us luck. By the same token, money can’t give us happiness. You need luck for that.

PLEASURE MEANS GETTING ENOUGH : DO WE EVER GET ENOUGH?

AN ESSAY

In a satire yesterday, I criticized the human fixation on earthly success. Although satires generally do not “argue,” they proceed on certain “argument-like” premises. Satire works best when there is a visible tension between the text and a principle that everyone knows; the text need not mention it. My main premise yesterday was that human beings really seek “good feelings” in life, but rarely achieve them. We are sensory creatures. We feel good emotions and bad emotions. Our life ebbs and flows over events, which in turn generate good, bad or neutral emotions. We get older every day. Eventually, we die. When that happens, our bodies no longer have the capacity to experience anything. When the body is dead, the senses are dead, too. At some level, human beings know this. That is why they live their lives in order to experience as many “good emotions” as possible before their senses shut down and they die.

Nonetheless, many people forget that they really seek to “feel good emotions” in life. Instead, as my satire pointed out, they pursue the means to feel good emotions rather than the emotions themselves. The dead man in my satire laughed at his living counterparts for “chasing bronzed women” and lusting after high salaries. In other words, he criticized people for wasting their days following a “traditional life program” imposed from without. For most people, the “life program” requires “getting a good job,” “getting a good salary” and “living comfortably” by “having nice things.” In essence, all these things are merely a means to experiencing “good emotions.” When we get a lot of money, for instance, we feel inwardly good. Yet the fact that we got a lot of money one day does not change the fact that we will die in the future. It merely assures us that we will experience good feelings longer during our time here. Similarly, when we achieve romantic success with a person we find attractive, we “feel good;” and it is better to feel good for one more day in our lives than bad or neutral. Still, many people fixate on the means to “good feelings” rather than the feelings themselves. That is why people obsess about money, career, family, spouses and “success.” They forget that all these things merely provide an opportunity for “good emotions” or “happiness.” Rather, they believe that the things themselves are the goals, rather than the means. This leads to disappointment, bitterness and a sense of “failure” when they do not achieve their intended goals.

But what does it mean to “feel good?” Thankfully I made the discovery relatively early in life that it is better to feel generally good every day than to pursue impossible goals that will only marginally make me feel better. After all, there is competition to achieve “popular goals,” such as obtaining high-dollar jobs and other commercial success. Competition implies that others want the same things as you, and they are prepared to fight you for them. Fighting does not make you feel good. In fact, it can make you feel terrible. It causes physical and emotional injury. Worse, if you lose the fight, you “fail” to achieve your goal, and that leads to even more negative emotions. And every day you spend feeling bad is another day you lose on your ultimate journey toward “sensory shutdown.”

We are sensory creatures. To feel good, we must stimulate our senses and trigger chemical reactions in our brains. In essence, “feeling good” means to “feel pleasure.” This does not necessarily mean sexual pleasure or bacchanalian euphoria. Rather, it means that we experience a “full” or “satisfied” sensation. I often make interesting discoveries about ideas by investigating language. The English word “pleasure” does not really reveal much about humans’ quest for good feelings. “Pleasure” is a bland, unremarkable word. It simply means that an individual personally finds something appealing. I suppose it could shed some light on “good feelings” to the extent that “feeling good” is essentially a subjective enterprise. But this does not go far enough for me. What is it about “pleasure” and “feeling good” that implies “fullness” or “satisfaction?”

“Satisfaction” lends better insights on this point. “Satisfaction” derives from the Latin “satis,” meaning “enough.” That reveals a more compelling linguistic complex. When we feel good, in other words, we have “enough” of something. Going further, “enough” is a core, old English word. It derives from the German “genug.” As all so often happens in my etymological investigations, our German ancestry provides more revealing insights into the conceptual complexes embedded in English words. In German, the word for “pleasure” is “die Vergnügung,” which in turn relates to “genug.” That means that “pleasure,” or “feeling good” depends upon “getting enough.” Another German word for “pleasure” or “satisfaction” is “die Genugtuung.” Literally, this means “Doing Enough.” This concept, too, shows that experiencing “good feelings” means that a person individually gets “enough” of something. Typically this has a sexual connotation, but sex alone does not truly express the concept. We can satisfy ourselves with anything, not just sex. We feel “satisfaction” when we eat enough, dance enough, talk enough, earn enough, laugh enough, work enough, love enough, think enough and drink enough. We do not feel “satisfaction” if we fail to eat enough, dance enough, talk enough, earn enough, laugh enough, work enough, love enough, think enough and drink enough. Generally, we say a person is “happy” when he is “satisfied with life.” Etymologically, that means he has “had enough” to make him feel more positive emotions than negative ones in life.

But very few people claim to be happy. In fact, most people complain about their lives. They are not getting “enough” of what they want. They are not “satisfying” their individual desires. Why is this true? I venture that people are unhappy because they confuse the means to happiness with happiness itself. Rather than focusing on their individual desire to experience “enough,” they constantly remind themselves that they are not doing “enough” to reach an external goal. They are not getting “enough” money, and because they do not have “enough,” they are not “satisfied.” Or perhaps they are not getting “enough” attention from the people they love, so they are not “satisfied” emotionally. Perhaps they did not score “highly enough” on a test, and that prohibits them from reaching an academic goal. Because they are not “satisfied” they are not feeling positive emotions. They feel incomplete, insufficient and unsuccessful. Yet this is exactly what happens when people set external goals for themselves. They put themselves in competition with others, and if they cannot reach the standard, they “fall short,” “fail” and “do not do well enough.” From an etymological perspective, that is a recipe for unhappiness. If we do not feel that we have done “enough,” we will not be happy.

Happiness does not come from without. It comes from within. The English word “pleasure” reminds us that feeling good is an individual concern. True, the external world can create circumstances that affect how we feel. Cf. Freud, Civilization and Its Discontents, p. 26 (“…[T]he external world, which may rage against us with overwhelming and merciless forces of destruction.”). But we remain subjective, sensory creatures. Only we can experience our emotions. We are the only ones who can determine whether we experience “enough” good things to feel “happy.” In life, this is an extremely difficult task. After all, we hear so many external messages that attempt to mold how we perceive the world. We are told how to live. We are told that we can make ourselves happy as long as we fulfill criteria X, Y and Z. Yet when embark on our quest to fulfill those criteria, we slowly realize that we are never getting “enough” of what we really want. Fulfilling external criteria necessarily implies that we suppress our subjective desires in order to satisfy the external standard. Happiness can only thrive when we answer our own call, not an external one. To that extent, the “traditional life program” sets us on the wrong foot. When we spend our entire lives seeking to fulfill criteria imposed from without, we neglect what lies within. And if we do not get “enough” to satisfy what lies within, we will not feel good. There will always be something missing. We will always be “incomplete.” We never have “enough.”

Happiness is elusive. In this world, we rarely get a chance to reflect on our own desires. In fact, it can even be difficult to discern our own desires as we sift through the external messages that deluge our senses every day about “achieving success.” Nonetheless, it is worth the effort to separate our own desires from artificial expectations. Why do we seek things? To fulfill an external standard or to satisfy ourselves? Are we really seeking to make ourselves happy, or are we merely engaging in competition to reach an external goal? Are we getting “enough?” That is the question to ask. If we can truly say we have “enough,” we are happy.

But even that can be difficult.

WHAT DRIVES PROSECUTORS?

AN ESSAY

Cynicism explains motivations. As I have pointed out in many other essays, cynicism provides a realistic method to judge people’s intentions before they hurt you. Cynicism assumes that people, groups or organizations have only selfish motives in any transaction, and those selfish motives shed light on how they will act. In most logical discourse, it is not wise to assume because assumptions are “beliefs” with no grounding in actual knowledge. In other words, a cynic assumes: “He’s only doing it for the money” without knowing whether that is actually true. On the other hand, we make assumptions all the time because it is not always possible to acquire knowledge before making a judgment. And if we do not take a guiding approach to an issue, we lose focus and cohesion when we address it. To that extent, assumptions help direct us. We cautiously approach issues under a few reasonable assumptions. Then we assemble knowledge in an effort to put sensory “meat” on the assumptions. Sometimes we confirm our assumptions. Other times, we do not.

Cynicism equips us with realistic assumptions about human behavior. In our “real world,” commerce is all. Without commerce, people could not pay their rent, feed their children or heat their homes. Additionally, human beings are naturally acquisitive creatures. They like to compete with one another for limited resources and they like to win. Sigmund Freud observed that men “are not gentle creatures who want to be loved, and who at the most can defend themselves if attacked; they are, on the contrary, creatures among whose instinctual endowments is to be reckoned a powerful share of aggressiveness.” Civilization and its Discontents, p. 68. Commerce provides an excellent forum in which to give vent to these competitive impulses. Freud recognized as much when he wrote: “In abolishing private property we deprive the human love of aggression of one of its instruments.” Id. at 69. In this light, we understand why human beings strive, battle and jockey for money and land. They are naturally aggressive, and in the “race for success,” they have a chance to unleash their aggressions. In aggressive commerce, men have only one goal: To enrich themselves. The focus is selfish. They exploit others for personal gain. On man’s relationship with other men, Freud concurs. He says: “[Aggression] also manifests itself spontaneously and reveals man as a savage beast to whom consideration towards his own kind is something alien.” Id. In short, commerce provides a “civilized substitute” for man’s natural inclination to aggressively conquer others.

Cynical values echo Freud’s assessment. When confronting any commercial situation, a cynic assumes that a person has only one motivation: To enrich himself by whatever means possible, even if it requires gross unfairness or even violence. The law exerts a partial check on commercial aggressiveness by threatening punishment for certain “excessive” measures intended to win profits. But cynics assume that commercial men will do anything that the law does not forbid. After all, it would be costlier to break the law and go to prison—even if it brings in a marginal profit—than to comply with the law and face no additional costs. After all, the focus is selfish. If violating the law results in greater loss than gain, then it makes sense to comply: You can’t enjoy your money if you are sitting in prison. In either event, cynicism explains commercial behavior. And in either event, principle has nothing to do with it: The question is merely whether an action brings maximal profit for minimal personal risk.

Cynicism applies when analyzing any commercial activity, including law practice. Even common laymen know that “lawyers are all about the money.” There is a sort of “popular cynicism” about lawyers. Colloquially, people talk about “lawyer-liars” who say anything to get paid. They call 500 lawyers on the bottom of the sea “a good start.” And they talk about getting “fucked over” by their lawyers, as if that is what lawyers naturally do. But there is nothing unique about lawyers; they are simply men in commerce venting their naturally aggressive instinct for profit. To win, they resort to any methods, as long as those methods do not greatly diminish the value of victory.

Yet there is a conceptual problem with lawyers’ commercial aspirations. After all, lawyers supposedly embody the law, which most people think should rise above mere commercial gain. In popular understanding, the law is more majestic than commerce. It stands for “justice, truth, fairness and equality” under neutral, reasonable rules that apply to everyone. This is very different from commerce, in which money and property determine status and power, not abstract rules. Theoretically, everyone is equal before the law. That is thematically appealing. And that is why there is tension between a lawyer’s craft and his commercial inclinations.

Sadly, law finds a happy place in commerce. Despite the theoretical contrast between noble legal principles and self-serving commercial hungers, law and commerce go hand in hand. Commercial men make the laws by influencing legislation. Even English common law judges gave voice to “sensible, commercial concerns” in their classic commercial rulings. Lawyers fit right into this “commercialized” legal climate. The law not only serves commerce in theory, but it is also commercially valuable to practice law. To that extent, cynicism easily unravels lawyers’ motivations. Like other commercial men, they are out for themselves. They may say that they “represent clients” in order to “solve their legal worries.” But a cynic penetrates all such pretense. He knows bullshit when he smells it. Most lawyers simply want to know how much money they have billed at month’s end, not how many “client worries” they have allayed. A cynic assumes that lawyers tailor their behavior for personal gain. And because lawyers are essentially commercial actors, this is a reasonable assumption.

But there is a perplexing exception here. While most lawyers merely ply their trade for personal profit, there are some lawyers who fanatically pursue cases for no reward at all: Prosecutors. Prosecutors are State actors. They do not bill fees, nor do they represent wealthy private clients. They defend public ideals by punishing “wrongdoing” and providing “justice” to victims. One may rightly ask: “What do they gain for themselves?” So far, we have seen that lawyers only truly act in their own interest. Do prosecutors, then, represent a “cynical exception” from the usual commercial assumptions about lawyers? What drives a prosecutor? It cannot be monetary gain. They receive a flat salary from the government no matter how many clients they handle. In many cases, they prosecute impecunious individuals for activities that have no commercial value at all. While a private personal injury attorney stands to gain from suing a person for negligently running over an old woman in a crosswalk, a public prosecutor stands to gain nothing from criminally prosecuting the same person for the same conduct. Something else motivates the prosecutor. It is not personal money profit.

Our analysis does not end here. If money does not answer a cynic’s questions, other things can. After all, a cynic assumes that all human motivations are selfish. In most cases, monetary gain is the most basic “selfish end.” But is not the only one. Sometimes people seek sexual pleasure from others. That is a selfish end even if it does not involve money. When a cynic observes a man flirting with a woman at a bar, he does not explain the behavior by reference to financial gain; he explains the behavior by reference to sex. In both cases, selfish gain motivates the behavior; the difference lies in the form of gain.

This helps us understand what motivates prosecutors. Neither money nor sexual satisfaction drives a prosecutor to zealously pursue economically worthless legal cases. What is it, then? I would venture that a heightened, judgmental moral sense drives prosecutors. By pursuing “criminals,” prosecutors feel that they are “doing right.” They have so much moral conviction that they willingly invest countless hours fighting to imprison “bad people.” This may sound noble, but I actually find it a little disturbing. After all, it implies that a prosecutor knows—with absolute certainty—what is “right;” and it also implies that he is willing to go to any legal length to prove it. That requires singular, unswerving moral focus. Prosecutors can have no doubt. They cannot equivocate. They must label their targets “wrongdoers” and muster every argument and every proof against them. While we can all agree that dangerous killers, rapists and robbers “do wrong,” what about hobos, drunkards, innocent trespassers and people who forget to pay for something in their grocery cart? How about a man who unknowingly violates the speed limit? Or some guy who gets caught playing with himself in a public toilet? Do we have the dogged moral clarity to declare that these people are “wrongdoers” who deserve criminal sanction? Do we have the courage to invest countless hours proving these “crimes” and rhetorically lambasting their “perpetrators?” I know I don’t. Yet as a cynic, I have an explanation for prosecutors who do: They get a euphoric, righteous charge from using the law to punish so-called “lawbreakers” because it vindicates hypersensitive, personal moral convictions. This is personal gain. If prosecutors feel inwardly good about sending an indiscreet masturbator to prison for 15 years, they have acted to fulfill their own personal desires. They have acted for personal gain, even if they do not receive a nickel for it.

This may seem a bit abstract. But there are other, more pragmatically cynical explanations for prosecutors’ motivations. Prosecutors are well-known public officials. They are executive officers. As such, they receive both praise and criticism for exercising their political powers. While the law embodies principles, political power knows only expediency. This places prosecutors in an awkward position. After all, they do not prosecute every single legal violation. It would be neither fair nor practical to do so. In principle, they should prosecute every violation in order to show that the law never flinches when someone violates it. But they only prosecute crimes when they feel it would have some collateral effect beyond the defendant. This lends itself to numerous selfish motivations, including: the desire to win re-election; the desire to appear “tough on crime” in order to seek higher political office; and the desire to curry favor with more influential political figures. Quite simply, prosecutors charge crimes in order to advance their own careers. Perhaps one day a prosecutor hopes to take a high-paying job as corporate counsel. To fulfill his ambition, he waits to prosecute “high-profile” cases so he can use them as bargaining tools in his employment hunt. Perhaps a prosecutor may wish to make a person’s life difficult because he does not like him. That may sound petty, but it is still a plausible, selfish motivation for selectively prosecuting a crime. If an action appears to bring some benefit to the actor, a cynic rules nothing out. Prosecutors have immense power; and they have many opportunities to benefit themselves by using it. In such circumstances, cynical analysis applies.

In sum, prosecutors appear to represent an exception to the usual cynicism surrounding lawyers’ motivations. After all, private lawyers are unashamed commercial actors who have little desire beyond winning money, while prosecutors are public officials who stand to win no money from their legal successes. But upon closer inspection, we see that prosecutors, too, have selfish motives. They prosecute crimes not just to “serve the public” or “protect justice,” but also to placate innately hypersensitive moral sensibilities and to advance their own careers. These are personal motives. As such, they fit nicely within the cynical analytic framework. Lawyers and prosecutors may truly have selfless motives. But cynicism protects us from disappointment by reference to common experience: All too often we find out that superficially noble actions are mere ploys for personal gain. That holds as much for lawyers as it does for prosecutors, even if they measure personal gain in different terms.

ARE YOU IN LOVE? GOOD FOR YOU - I DON'T GIVE A SHIT

OESTERHOUDT STRIKES

Valentine’s Day approaches. You can go down to the pharmacy, pick out a heart-shaped plush figurine and give it to a person who “means something to you.” You can buy a box of candy or even some flowers for that “special someone.” You can even buy a little card and write how much that “special someone” means to you. In short, you can profess your love for another person, even if it is someone you just met.

Go ahead. Show your love. I don’t give a shit.

What the hell difference does it make whether some horny teenager claims to love a girl? It is a matter of utter indifference to me whether he feels insistent emotions swirling in his stomach. I do not care whether he scores or whether he “truly cares” about the girl. What do his feelings do for me? What does it matter whether the girl says she loves him, too, or whether they go on a date? No matter how important it may be for little Romeo to get it on with the object of his desire, I really could care less. It doesn’t pay my bills, nor does it get me hired at a job with benefits.

“People do everything for love.” Oh, really? Personally, I think that love is highly overrated. If it came between love and money, do you really think a poor man would rather take love from a poor woman? Or would he rather take the money? You tell me. It is simply not true that people do everything for love. People do most things for economic reasons. They go to graduate school to learn arcane details that will later land them an interview. Their education will provide a basis to write resumes and respond to employers’ questions in a semi-intelligent manner. Their job will allow them to receive a paycheck, which in turn will allow them to pay taxes and buy real estate and groceries. What does love have to do with this? Nothing. If they fall in love sometime during their economic odyssey from graduation to death, it means nothing in the end. They still owe money, they still have creditors and they still need to eat.

If love does not matter, why do so many people obsess about it? Sigmund Freud said that love represents a “path to happiness.” Civilization and its Discontents, pp. 32-33. No matter how irrational or immaterial love may be in our economic existence, countless people follow “the way of life that makes love the center of everything, which looks for all satisfaction in loving and being loved…What is more natural than that we should persist in looking for happiness along the path on which we first encountered it?” Id. Love, then, allows people to forget their worries and experience strongly positive emotional sensations. Freud links the search for love to the search for sex, since sexual pleasure is the body’s natural way to entice human beings to be intimate with one another: “A psychical attitude of this sort comes naturally enough to all of us; one of the forms in which love manifests itself—sexual love—has given us our most intense experience of an overwhelming pleasure and has thus furnished us with a pattern for our search for happiness.” Id. at 33.

So this is why we hear so many stupid songs about love on the radio. This is why we read so many dumpy novellas about corny liaisons and secret trysts. There is a cynical explanation after all: A person seeks love because he wants to make himself happy; the other person is just an instrument to that end. A man wants to feel good; he wants to experience “strongly positive emotions.” He wants to free himself from worry and unhappiness. True, love requires an object, but that does not mean a person must respect the object. Many people assume that love involves mutual trust and caring. According to this fallacy, people who “love each other” must care about each other. If one partner suffers pain, so does the other. But this is not necessarily the case. According to Freud, people seek love for themselves, not for others. And he explains why heartbreak is so devastating: “The weak side of this technique of living is easy to see; otherwise no human being would have thought of abandoning this path to happiness for any other. It is that we are never so defenseless against suffering as when we love, never so helplessly unhappy as when we have lost our loved object or its love.” Civilization and its Discontents, p. 33 (emphasis added). In this light, we see that a person who loves does not suffer for another’s pain; he suffers individual pain because he loses an object that “belonged” to him.

In this context, I repeat: Who gives a shit whether you are in love? I do not care how much money you make, nor do I care whether you are in love with Mary Horvath. In both cases, you are attempting to make yourself happy in order to experience “strongly positive emotions.” Money makes you feel good because you ward off inexorable creditors who threaten you with homelessness and ruin. Love makes you feel good because someone you think is pretty tells you that you are special and might even give you an orgasm. Who the hell cares? I certainly don’t. Whether you love Mary Horvath—and whether Mary Horvath loves you—does nothing at all for me. Therefore, please do not write sappy songs about how much you care about Mary Horvath, or how special you feel when you hold hands. I just don’t care. And frankly I would rather not hear about how happy you are, especially if I am feeling like shit. You see, when you sing about love and how good you feel, you are really just talking about yourself. How selfish. And if you believe you are singing to show how much you care about someone else, may I say: How insincere. In the end, it’s all about you, isn’t it, lover boy?

This is why I want to barf when I hear songs like “Hey There, Delilah©.” Listen to this gibberish: “Hey there Delilah/ What's it like in New York City?/ I'm a thousand miles away/ But girl, tonight you look so pretty/ Yes you do/ Times Square can't shine as bright as you/ I swear it's true.” Here we have some lovesick adolescent whining about the fact that his “girl” is far away. He compares his love object to Times Square lights—a pathetic overstatement if ever one were made. He is simply telling us that he wants the “strong positive emotions” that his “girl” brings him when they are “close together.” What does that mean? That means he misses his own good feelings; his love object gave him those feelings in the past, and now he is upset and sad because the object is beyond his grasp. There is nothing noble about this. He only cares about the girl because she is no longer physically available to make him feel good. You selfish prick.

Here is some more selfish garbage: “Hey there Delilah/ I know times are getting hard/ But just believe me, girl/ Someday I'll pay the bills with this guitar/ We'll have it good/ We'll have the life we knew we would/ My word is good.” So now he’s talking about commitment. A postpubescent boy talking about “having a life” with another human being. What the fuck does this bourgeois white punk know about life? He’s just sitting there feeling sorry for himself because his love object can’t give him orgasms in Omaha, Nebraska from Manhattan. It’s not about Delilah; it’s about him. He doesn’t like the fact that he doesn’t feel “strong positive emotions” the way he did when his love object was physically available. He probably also doesn’t like the fact that he is stuck in Omaha with a guitar and his hand. Finally, our lovestruck balladeer says: “My word is good.” Commitment? From a 19-year-old? What am I, an idiot? You cannot possibly believe that I trust this punk to stay true to his word. What’s more, I have news for him: Delilah is probably not holding to her “word,” either. After all, she is New York City. There are plenty of available horny fellows right around the corner. If he thinks she is going to wait two years for him to satisfy her feminine urges, he has another thing coming (no pun intended).

Our starry-eyed friend voices hope in a later verse: A thousand miles seems pretty far/ But they've got planes and trains and cars/ I'd walk to you if I had no other way/ Our friends would all make fun of us/ and we'll just laugh along because we know/ That none of them have felt this way/ Delilah I can promise you/ That by the time we get through/ The world will never ever be the same/ And you're to blame.” Here, we see that love has completely overturned this young man’s reason. He is so upset about losing his love object that he makes ridiculous statements, such as volunteering to walk one thousand miles to New York. Of course he won’t; he is simply not thinking rationally anymore. He is willing to say anything, even if it makes no sense whatsoever. He even engages in delusions of grandeur, telling us that the “world will never be the same” when they get back together. Wait a minute; your world may never be the same because you get to have sex for a couple weeks. But my world will remain the same. I never knew you or Delilah. Whether you two fuck again will not determine whether I get a job, whether I pay my bills or whether I enjoy my life. Thus, it is sheer nonsense to say that “the world will never be the same” when you squawking lovebirds reunite. How dare you compare your delayed lovemaking to a world event? “The world will never ever be the same…” Are we talking about World War I or something? Player, please.

I mention all this because I really do not care whether people fall in love. That is their business. I simply observe that, in most cases, love is not selfless. Rather, love is an individual pathway to happiness in which another person serves as an instrument. I do not doubt that people feel intensely positive emotions when they are in love. I have felt love in the past and it is wonderful. But I do not need to declare how good I feel to everyone else. In my view, too many people misunderstand love. It is not always altruistic or even good. In most cases, as in the Delilah song, it embodies pure selfishness. Nonetheless, I understand that love exerts a remarkably powerful influence on people. Freud correctly theorized that people pursue it recklessly because it yields so much pleasure when it works. I can accept that. I just do not want to hear about it. I do not care whether someone is in love. It is no different than hearing that someone is happy because they got a job, an inheritance or a promotion. It is all about them and how good they feel.

Of course, this is hopeless dreaming on my part. People will always talk about love. Authors from Homer to Virgil to Shakespeare to Danielle Steele have written about it for centuries. Whether they were ever in love does not really matter. What matters is that love is important to human beings. It offers a path to happiness in a desperately unhappy world. It feels wonderful to love and be loved. But there is nothing noble about it. It is just another way to “get yours” during our brief sojourn on this planet.

To that extent, go ahead and love. It won’t change my life, so please stop gesticulating about it.