And They Lived Happily Ever… …Before: What Love Has to Do with It…Or Not

By Lee Thayer

This book is about the apparent incompatibility of romantic love and conventional marriage. They go together (the popular song has it) like a horse and carriage. But if the horse is ailing or otherwise not up to the task, the carriage will slowly rot away in the carriage house.

It is also about the perverse fact that people bring to such relationships their expectations from the past as they remember them. Typically, they had hopes and dreams for their future together. When these are dashed, it occurs to them that they were better off before they got hitched.

It is also about the fact that when love befalls us, we lose our bearings. Love is blind, and all that. We drift into the conventional fairy tale about living happily ever after. Thats to be desired. But the fairy tale ends with that line. It never tells us what we need to do or be in order to live happily ever after. Under the spell of the fairy tale, which is basic fare in various forms in our culture, we set off happily enough. But how is it possible to maintain the delusion of the love state in the banality of the everyday life that inevitably ensues? Who told us that making a living or keeping a house in order is a far different world than a wedding? Who told us that babies rule the house, unless they are tended by someone else?

Copulate we apparently must. But that has consequences that are not a part of the fairy tale. So people end up on the other side of the mirror. The world is not about lovers, the realization creeps upon us. It is about 40,000 other things. And those have to be dealt with most often before anything else.

Thus the title, And They Lived Happily Ever Before. Imagination and reality are often two very different things. This book answers the question, What Does Love Have to Do with It? The answers may surprise you. But they will make love affairs that end in marriage far better than you might even imagine they could be.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Xlibris US
• Release date: May 31, 2013
• ISBN: 9781483635880

Lee Thayer

Lee Thayer is a scholar and writer known around the world for his many years of research and publications on the human condition. He has taught or lectured at many of the most prestigious universities in the U.S., Canada, Mexico, Europe, Scandinavia, Australia, and China. He has been a Fulbright professor in Finland, a Ford Foundation Fellow at Harvard, and was twice awarded a Danforth Foundation Teacher Award for excellence in his teaching. His background is in music (composing and arranging), the humanities, engineering, and social and clinical psychology. He was one of the founders of the field of communication as a university discipline, and is a Past President of what was at that time the largest association of human communication scholars in the world. He was also the founding editor of the influential journal Communication, which was devoted to pragmatic insights into the human condition by the top thinkers in the world. His early work consisted of 14 books of research on the connection between communication and the human condition. More recently, he has summarized his long life of research into all matters human and social in such books as Communication: A Radically New Approach to Lifes Most Perplexing Problem, two collections of essays, On Communication and Pieces: Toward a Revisioning of Communication/Life. The present Doing Life; A Pragmatist Manifesto is a summary of his innovative perspectives on this subject for past 60 years. There is also his proposed alternative to the reach of biological evolution into the social sciences, Explaining Things: Inventing Ourselves and our Worlds. He lives in Western North Carolina with his artist/wife Kate Thayer. He is also renowned for his current work as a CEO coach of choice.

Book preview

And They Lived

Happily Ever…

Before

What Love Has To Do With It… Or Not

Lee Thayer

Copyright © 2013 by Lee Thayer.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the copyright owner.

Rev. date: 05/31/2013

To order additional copies of this book, contact:

Xlibris Corporation

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www.Xlibris.com

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Contents

Preparing for the Adventures Ahead…

1 Innocence

Interlude: I

2 Imagination

Interlude: II

3 Involvement

Interlude: III

4 Indifference

Interlude: IV

5 Intention

Interlude: V

6 Identity

Interlude: VI

7 Infrastructure

Interlude: VII

8 Interdependence

Interlude: VIII

9 Imitation

Interlude: IX

10 Inference

Interlude: X

11 Incompetence

Interlude: XI

12 Indolence

Interlude: XII

13 Instigation

Interlude: XIII

14 Indulgence

Interlude: XIV

15 Infidelity

Interlude: XV

16 Irrelevance

Interlude: XVI

17 Inspiration: An Afterword

Postlude

About the Author…

PREPARING FOR THE ADVENTURES AHEAD…

Fairy tales have always been cautionary tales—fables. Most are entertaining. They become problematic only when we try to live them. That’s what has happened in many modern Western cultures. We are often frustrated because we can’t make our lives fit our fairy tales of love.

It is those fairy tales that end with, . . . and they lived happily ever after. In real life, we pursue that happy ending. But it doesn’t often happen. The only recipes we have are our fairy tales. And they tell us everything except how to live happily ever after.

That might be useful. But then they would no longer be tales of fanciful love. Living happily ever after would at best require a lot of hard work, dedication, and smarts. Why does it look so easy but turn out to be so hard? Why does it seem to be so beautiful, so refreshing, so inspirational, but our own lives turn out so often to be merely banal?

That’s because the tale ends where you are just getting started. Falling in love is easy. Living happily ever after is not.

The fairy tale ends before the going gets tough. Daily life in the modern world is a long way from a fairy tale. Such a long way, in fact, that the fairy tale could not be replicated as the tale of your life in today’s world. The one has less and less to do with the other.

Still, we cling to our sentimental myths—our fairy tales—of perfect love. They are no longer told by the fire. They are in our books, our magazines, and on television—especially television commercials. There, Prince Charming and Cinderella appear in disguise time after time. The tales are buried deep in our psyche. We know that real life is not like the images and stories we consume. But today they could be (we are told repeatedly) if we would only buy the magic potions, lotions, or notions being offered as the recipe for living happily ever after.

In terms of people’s attitudes and actions, beliefs almost always trump the facts. If you believe something to be true, it is true—for you. If you think you’re in love, who could successfully contradict you? If you believe you’re unhappy, you probably will be. If you believe you are happy, you probably are.

Our experiences of things are always private and personal. You’re the only one who has any access to them. Others have to rely on what you say—or someone else authoritatively says—about them. The same goes for feelings. How you feel about this or that is how you feel, and how you express your feelings to yourself and to others. No one else has access to your feelings. They do not exist in any real world except yours.

If you want to be seen by others as happy, you have to perform your happiness—in words or deeds. Otherwise you can only privately enjoy your happiness—or whatever its opposite may be.

The famous French essayist Montaigne (1533-1592) put it this way (paraphrased here):

The person who is happy is not the one who is believed to be so but the one who believes he or she is so.

Like any other form of deception, this suggests that people can believe you’re happy when you’re not. They can also believe you are unhappy when you are not. Your deception may be intentional, in the same way that orgasms can be faked. But it also means that people are going to deduce from your performance whether they believe you are happy or not. If that is necessary, turn in a better performance.

In the world outside yourself it is others who judge your condition. You cannot be perceived as being happy unless others judge you so, based on the clues you offer in your performance of your condition.

The beliefs that others hold and express about your inner feelings can affect the feelings you experience—including happiness and love, sickness and health. Pick your auditors carefully. And understand that how you perform yourself before others will bear upon you in two ways:

• That how you express yourself to yourself or others will directly affect the feelings you can have; and

• That how others interpret your statements or your performance of your feelings will affect how you can and will actually experience them.

How you express and perform yourself in private or in public will determine what your feelings about happiness, for example, can be. You are your primary auditor. Others refract your feelings as they have interpreted them. They are guessing. You don’t have to.

There are those who attempt to reduce your private experiences to activities in the brain. Thus they assume they have explained your feelings. But a snapshot of brain activity is not what you actually experience.

It is altogether likely that the brain supports your consciousness and your feelings in the same way that your legs and lungs support your running. But your anticipation of running and your exhilaration of doing so are not in your legs. They are in your mind. And your mind is not in your brain.

There is no science of love. There is no science of happiness. You either experience such feelings or you don’t. And how you experience them depends upon the social context in which you do so.

It seems altogether unlikely that an isolated physiological human being would ever have the experience of happiness or of love. Those are social constructions. They are not genetic. A lover requires an accomplice. A happy person requires the endorsement of others to know what it is.

Happiness and unhappiness are contagious. They are contagious in the sense that most people yearn to be acceptable to those around them. If happiness is modal, the people in that context will be happy. If unhappiness is modal, then people in that context will express and experience unhappiness. Such feelings—and the experiences that attend them—are no less real because they originated in the need to appear to be acceptable to others, in some specific culture.

Epictetus was a freed slave turned teacher and philosopher in early second-century Greece. His thinking has come down to us in fragments. His insights remain with us after all these centuries. He said,

"Let not that which in another is contrary to nature be an evil to you: for you are not formed by nature to be depressed by others nor to be unhappy with others . . . If [you] are unhappy, remember that [your] unhappiness is your own fault . . . ."

Given the perspective Epictetus wants us to adopt, that’s because we can control our inner lives but not the outer world. We always have a choice about the contents and character of our inner lives, he insisted.

"Some things are within our control, and some things are not . . . it is only when you have learned to distinguish between what you can and can’t control that inner tranquility and outer effectiveness become possible."

You can’t control what happens. Epictetus urged us to see things for what they are. It is not happenings that disturb us. It is our interpretations of them, our attitudes toward them.

The crux of Epictetus’s teaching is simple:

First, say to yourself what you would be; then do what you have to do.

We have no control over what happens to us. What we do have control over is how we interpret what happens to us. If you feel sorry for yourself and you want your feelings validated by others, then you will have to perform feeling sorry for yourself in a way they can validate. Then you have earned the right to experience the feelings that go along with feeling sorry for yourself. It will fizzle out if you are the only person in the world who wonders about such feelings.

In our modern culture, we unfortunately have it the other way around. We assume that happiness and unhappiness are caused by what happens to us. To be fully rational—i.e., scientific—about such things, we assume that what justifies our feelings inheres in the happening and not in our reaction or interpretation of it.

So we have a cluster of algorithms about when we are justified in being happy or unhappy. We try to eliminate any choice about how we as individuals could control our feelings about the things that happen. To be scientific about it, we have to have a theory about how people across the board are or are not justified in how we interpret things.

People learn what feelings are appropriate in what circumstances. They do not learn that they have a choice in the matter. We perform ourselves to be justified in others’ eyes. When it comes to happiness or unhappiness, sickness or health, we are the puppets of our cultural beliefs about what causes what. The norm outlaws any choice.

The perversity here is that when unhappiness or sickness have more social utility (relevance) than does happiness or health, we will endow more of the former and less of the latter. We crossed that line with the medicalization of society.

When unhappiness (or depression, etc.) became a disease to be treated by therapy or drugs, we effectively tossed out choice as a cause. This is poignantly revealed when addiction (to smoking, for example) was labeled a disease to be treated by the medical industry.

When talking about your illnesses or infirmities has more social currency than talking about your robust good health—which is the case in our society in general these days—then there will be more illnesses and less good health. Good health doesn’t pay off. Having a fashionable illness or disability does—both socially and sometimes even financially.

From our very modern perspective, you cannot be considered to choose ways of living that make you sick. There has to be a plausible etiology which is in the physician’s or therapist’s reference sources. And you do not—can not—control what befalls you, no matter your complicity.

Happy people are modern-day pariahs. They live in the fringes of what matters socially and economically. It is all of the others who turn the wheels on which our society progresses. Even the GNP depends more on incompetence than on competence.

You have to work hard at being healthy in our society—including exercising and dieting. It is the ill and incompetent who stand to inherit the earth, to paraphrase a Biblical injunction.

So, here is the dilemma we have created for ourselves:

If you can’t choose to be unhappy, then of course you can’t choose to be happy.

Or, if you do, you are the oddball. There is no such thing as half a paradigm. If you are a victim of the hegemonic paradigms of the day, you will in all likelihood acquiesce involuntarily to the way they work.

Doctoring is second only to shopping as the way Americans in general invest their time. Having someone to take care of whatever befalls you is a way of life undreamt of in even our recent past. To keep up with the Joneses requires you to forfeit your prerogative to be either healthy or happy. Far more attention is given to ill health and to unhappiness of one sort or another.

There is economic welfare. But far more influential are psychological welfare, spiritual welfare, and band-aids of every sort for helping you simply get through life. Being dependent on society for caretaking you through life is not a formula for happiness.

Most people are about as happy as they make up their minds to be, said Abraham Lincoln. He should know, given the strife and failures that befell him during his lifetime. In case you had forgotten, he was not only opposed to the extent of serious talk about impeachment. He was assassinated for carrying out his role successfully.

For those who might imagine that happiness depends upon the fairness of life, there is something to think about here. Bad things happen to good people. Good things happen to bad people.

It was ancient Stoicism that argued along the lines that happiness depends upon being a virtuous person. Some people might think that happiness depends upon being free—free of constraints on one’s choices and behavior, even being free of the need to work at becoming more virtuous (roughly translated as more competent in the roles one is called upon to perform).

Is what you think or do good for you? For others? For the society? For humankind?

The most radical freedom-seekers would have us believe that serving one’s own immediate interests is the only thing that is important. But these are not happy people. They don’t understand that it is difficult if not impossible to be happy in an unhappy society.

They don’t understand that it is individual consciences that comprise the collective conscience of a culture or a people. If they do not have a disciplined conscience, neither will the society to which they belong. You cannot mutilate mother (your conscience or your culture) and expect it to serve your interests.

It is one of the paradoxes of modern societies. What you depend upon from your society is the kind of discipline and conscience that permits whatever degree of freedom you need to fulfill yourself in life. If that depends in turn on how you comport yourself—and it does—the freedom from constraint that more and more seek is like shooting yourself in the foot. Or the heart. We can be hobbled in more ways than one.

While it rings true, Lincoln’s comment leaves something unsaid. It is that the only people who are capable of making up their own minds to be happy are people who have grown up. Adolescents obviously cannot do that in this world. As the center of the universe, they see themselves as victimized. Why should they try to be happy? What’s in it for them?

Adolescents cannot see the answer to those questions. They are incapable of making up their minds to be happy, except for a binge or a party in which they can behave with abandon.

Our larger culture is peopled more and more by those who have never outgrown their adolescence. They remember certain times when they were happy in the past. But only those in which they got wasted or otherwise went out of control.

So in that sense they did live happily ever… before. In their recollections of when they had fun. But then Lincoln lived in a different time. Or did he?

The serious social observer/satirist Ambrose Bierce (best known for his The Devil’s Dictionary begun in 1881) defined fidelity as

". . . a virtue peculiar to those who are about to be betrayed."

Lincoln, who would surely have been seen as virtuous, attended the theater with no body guards, no secret service protection. This made it possible for someone to shoot him and escape. If he had been less humble and more skeptical of the potential for being betrayed, he might not have been shot.

But what might have been is always in the past. We have to understand the world looking backwards, but we have to live life going forward, as the philosopher Kierkegaard once observed.

Lincoln may have been happy before he was shot. But he had no way of being happy about having died of the wound. At least not that we are aware of.

We always judge our present by our past and our imagined future. Since most people seem to have no particular purpose in life (the future), this leaves them only with their recollections of their past. And those recollections are as creative as our imaginations of our future.

So in this sense as well, we begin to see that most people live happily ever… before. It would be nice, as our fairy tale illusions have it, to be able to live happily ever after. But how can we do this? We have never faced our actual future before.

Shunning responsibility for your own future sucks the life out of living it. And with it, whatever happiness might have attended the fulfillment of that responsibility. Responsibility—or duty—seems to be closely related to happiness. Booth must have had moments of sheer elation when his bullet struck its mark. He was fulfilling his destiny—not Lincoln’s.

The world is in no way obligated to be the way we wish it to be, or the way in which we see it. Does this make happiness a zero-sum game? Or are we simply entangled in our own mistaken beliefs about it?

When happiness is a destination, and you achieve that destination before you die, then you are sentenced to relive the journey and its culmination, sometimes over and over again.

Ours is more of a noun and less of a verb culture. We dwell on the object of our desires. It is difficult for us to consider the possibility that happiness, for example, is in the anticipation of it and not in the achievement of it.

To want something launches some sort of endeavor to acquire it. It isn’t the acquisition of what we want that turns us on. It is the anticipation of getting it that turns us on. Once we have it, we begin to wonder what the fuss was all about. Watch young children and their reactions to their presents once there are no more to be opened: "Is that all?"

Newly minted wives often spout the cliché It was the happiest day of my life. That’s because they intended for it to be the happiest day of their lives. So what happens the next day? It begins to settle in slowly and imperceptibly that there is no living happily ever after. That was not given much attention in all of the preparations for the happiest day.

Now the happiest day is in the past. There are attempts to keep it alive with a photo album. But the photo album is about something in the past. Little attention has been paid to the day after, or the day after that or the day after that. We got what we wanted. We just didn’t understand we had to go on paying for that.

Oscar Wilde wanted to take any ambiguity out of this dilemma when he wrote:

In this world there are only two tragedies. One is not getting what one wants, and the other is getting it. The last is much the worst; the last is a real tragedy!

It may seem to be an injustice not to get what one wants. But being guaranteed to get what one wants ends up being a greater injustice.

Sex used to be full of wonder and curiosity and anticipation. Now that it is come by so easily (as is dramatized in the movie Friends—With Benefits) it seems no more than an entitlement. Entitlements take the life out of life. How much familiar sex does one need?

If it is always there tomorrow, what does one have to strive for—or anticipate, desire—today?

A bride is a woman with a fine prospect of happiness behind her.

This is also from Ambrose Bierce’s Dictionary. What can that mean?—except that she probably lived more happily ever… before she became merely the wife. Think how much different our lives would be if we thought about and wanted what came long after the marriage.

We are being done in by our own cultural illusions. Is it enough to build a gratifying life on simply to try to live out our fairy tales? Or does it require something beyond that—something closer to the realities of life?

Many people seem to believe that what is required for happiness must be delivered by a significant other (or several significant others). The belief is that we need those others to fulfill us. That is what’s implicit in the fairy tale that ends… and they lived happily ever after.

"They" is the operant term in this saying. The premise is that you can’t live happily ever after unless and until there are two of you. Most stories are about star-crossed lovers who become separated for one reason or another. Then there are the difficulties and escapades involved in trying to get back together. When they are successful, it is the end of the story because they were now going to live happily ever after.

The dramatic likelihood that they may not get back together at all is the source of the belief that if they do, they will certainly live happily ever after. It’s a formula that works in film and novels and other stories. But it doesn’t much work in real life.

Real life is not formulaic. The idealized happiness is in the formula. Real life intervenes. The would-be lovers get together easily, but often fall apart hard. Some stick it out, justifying their unhappiness by claiming a higher aspiration. Some abuse their spouse. Some just turn off.

There are always more ways of being unhappy than there are of being happy. The culture unintentionally encourages the unhappiness. They make for better stories—or at least enhance the distance between happily ever after and happily ever… before.

Diane Ackerman is one of the editors of The Book of Love. In the Introduction, she wrote:

"But what dream state is love? Frantic and serene, vigilant and calm, wrung-out and fortified, explosive and sedate—love commands a vast army of moods . . . ‘What is the most dangerous thing you have ever done?’ someone recently asked a well-known actress, to which she replied: ‘Date.’"

To paraphrase Sigmund Freud, the endeavor in any form of psychotherapy is simply to turn people’s utter misery into normal human unhappiness. It is most often people who have achieved the happiness destination they wanted who turn to psychotherapy (or analysis). They got what they wanted, but it didn’t turn out to be what they expected. Rather than living happily ever after, they began to consider that maybe they were better off before. They bought the fairy tale without taking into consideration the vicissitudes of the real life ahead.

It is not surprising that the myths of love and happiness got intertwined.

The Old and Middle English word for happy has become in modern English what we would call silly. It is losing oneself in the feelings of the moment. It is a derivative of the noun hap (chance or luck), which were the source of happen. When that was coined in the 14th century, it meant lucky, fortunate, or prosperous. It was not until the 16th century that it began to mean highly pleased or contented.

The word love has had a long and many-splendored career. But the idea of romantic love (of being out of one’s mind, of being temporarily insane—as in the French folie à deux—the madness of two) does not really appear until about the same time as happy in the period from the 12th to the 14th centuries. And romantic love began to flower with that connotation from the 16th century onward.

So they were sort of siblings. To fall in love was to be happy, and to be happy required being in love. Hector is the protagonist in French psychiatrist Francois Lelord’s novel, Hector and the Search for Happiness.

Hector became dissatisfied with his own life, because he could see perfectly well that he couldn’t make people happy.

He couldn’t make his patients happy with either drugs or counseling. So he set off in a research trip around the world to find the causes of happiness. Lelord’s next novel was Hector and the Secrets of Love, which follows Hector on another research tour of the world. It must have occurred to him that the two conditions are so entwined in modern thinking that you can’t understand the one without understanding the other.

For that reason they will be dealt with as virtual twins in this book. It is certainly possible to be happy without being in love. And it is certainly even more possible to be in love without being happy. But there is something about the dual need people seem to have that creates most of the problems that modern people have with the one or the other.

Derivatively love also harbors the notion of libido. This refers to desire or lust. Thus sex gets into the mix in our modern conception of happiness/love. It seems to be always lurking in the shadows one way or the other.

There are thus three dragons involved in the happily ever… after syndrome. We will want to adventure into each of them separately and as a complex concept.

There is yet another aspect of happiness that is widely ignored. The basic thesis of the 1970s bestseller How to Be Your Own Best Friend (by Mildred Newman and Bernard Berkowitz) is that happiness is about knowing how to enjoy one’s own company:

Someone who cannot tolerate aloneness is someone who doesn’t know he’s grown up. It takes courage to let go of that fantasy of childhood safety.

We might better understand this as one’s refusal to grow up—preferring instead to remain a lifetime adolescent. This requires dependence, of course. Much of the distress and unhappiness between parents and their adolescent children occurs because the adolescent wants to be independent and at the same time to be dependent upon his or her parents for everything that grown-ups have to provide for themselves.

This Momma magic carries over into their adult years. Such adolescents want complete freedom but they want (or need) someone to pay for their independence. Much of the distress and unhappiness that comes from arguments about entitlement spending—which drives the deficits up even further) come from this orientation.

Freedom without responsibility will not work in families, in organizations, or in democratic societies, as the Founding Fathers took great pains to make clear.

Much of the constant contact afforded by cell phones, I-Pads and the like comes from the fear of feeling out of touch. By a grown up, it is to be assumed that the authors meant people who can tolerate aloneness.

People who do not know what they want to be when they grow up usually take the option of not growing up. This is a recipe for unhappiness, which in turn is assumed to be ameliorated by having fun on weekends—usually facilitated by alcohol or drugs (or both) and casual sex when out of control.

In other words, the unhappiness is a symptom of a deeper problem. No amount of treating the symptoms will remove the underlying problem.

Both unhappiness and happiness affect the larger society in profound ways. So we are dealing here with a great deal more than individual feelings.

The English philosopher and social reformer John Stuart Mill is best known for his work, On Liberty. He made this contribution to our thinking:

"Those only are happy . . . who have their minds fixed on some object other than their own happiness; on the happiness of others, on the improvement of mankind, even on some art or pursuit followed not as a means, but as itself an ideal end.

Aiming at something else, they find happiness by the way."

In other words, the pursuit of one’s own happiness doesn’t work. That’s a pervasive problem in our society. It cannot be fixed by underwriting those who have refused to grow up.

The old monk in Hector’s . . . Search for Happiness says to him, after remonstrating about our culture’s fixation on goals:

". . . happiness is a different thing altogether. If you try to achieve it, you have every chance of failing."

So you can’t live happily ever after by the direct pursuit of trying to do so, no matter the fable. Unless the two people involved dedicate themselves to some worthier ideal, their happiness will be short-lived and treacherous. Unless we do so as a people, we will continue to live more or less dissatisfied lives.

The famous American writer Willa Cather wrote in Le Lavandou (1902):

"One cannot divine nor forecast the condition that will make happiness; one only stumbles upon them by chance . . . ."

While in the pursuit of some worthy or ideal end, as Mill said?

If Cather is right, and the facts seem to agree, then not only could you not divine or forecast the condition that would make for your happiness, you could not as well engineer it. There is no strategy that will work every time.

And if Mill is right—and again the facts seem to support his position—you have to be in the pursuit of some worthier end than happiness for yourself in order to have happiness befall you.

For all these reasons, we can conclude that people in general will not live happily ever after, but happily ever before—in the sense that the direct pursuit of happiness offers every chance of failure. Thus you would almost always be happier before you set off than sometime later when you began to be disillusioned.

The fairy tale is entertaining. And it gives us all hope of gaining some measure of happiness through love. But the real world just doesn’t work that way.

The 17th-century French aphorist Francois, Duc de La Rochefoucauld (sometimes accused of cynicism) wrote:

We are never as unhappy as we think, nor as happy as we had hoped.

This is an interesting twist on our subject. We are never anything—but thinking makes it so. As you think about happiness or any other subject, so will it appear to be… to you. Thinking is always in virtual space. In actuality, you may never be as unhappy as you might sometimes think you are.

At the same time, you may not—virtually or in actuality—be as happy as you may have hoped. Fairy tales, whether prepared by others or a figment of your own imagination, are always about hope. So the happiness you may have hoped for is always in that imaginary space.

Since you more often fail to achieve your dreams than exceed them, it will seem to you that you were, indeed, happier ever… before. Should you therefore avoid hoping for a happier life? No. You should not blame your hoping. There is no blame. Just be more realistic about what you are actually capable of, and then fantasize about how to get there.

Having a worthy purpose and sticking to it generates not so much happiness in the silly sense. It generates feelings of accomplishment, of gratification at having achieved something that you dreamt of. It provides you with a feeling of control over your life—which is a precondition of those feelings of satisfaction and contentment.

There is one more way of actually getting there. That is to make others happy—to contribute to the positive aspects of others’ lives, and thereby to the life of the community, to the lives of those around you.

Some of the American Indian tribes had it right. They considered happiness to be a duty that one owes to others. It was not something that happened to self-centered people. It was a way around that. If it is your duty to be happy, no one else needs to wait for it to happen. Neither would you in those circumstances.

We have this, from the 18th-century aphorist known simply as Chamfort:

Happiness, said M 20124.png , is not easily come by. It is very hard to find within ourselves, and impossible to find anywhere else.

This provides a sharp contrast between the Western and American Indian cultures. What may be implicit in the American Indian cultural philosophy is