Are You Happy?
This photo/painting by my friend Tom Ferris hangs in my living room. It makes me happy.
JERSEY CITY, APRIL 16, 2026. Vicki asks with faux innocence, Are you happy? She means happy with us, our relationship. When I don’t respond immediately, she jumps on me: You’re not happy!
I say, Give me a second to think about it, it’s a big question!
Our exchange isn’t serious, but it’s serious. I’m still thinking about it the next morning while sipping coffee in her living room. Short answer: Yeah, she makes me happy, and she seems to feel the same, which makes me happier. A nice feedback loop.
Do we ever have doubts? Of course! We’re battle-scarred romantic veterans, we know how things can go awry. Experience equals wisdom equals doubt. So old Socrates says. But experience also helps you recognize when you’ve got something good. So yeah, I’m happy.
BUT! I can’t say I’m happy without tacking on qualifiers. First, mortality weighs on me. A decade ago I felt silly filling out a living will, because in my gut I thought, Death? Me? Ha. Now death gazes steadily back at me whenever I look in the mirror. I can’t see my expiration date, I don’t want to see it, but I know it’s stamped somewhere on my aging body.
My awareness of mortality makes happiness bittersweet. I love teaching, hanging with colleagues, being part of a university, but I’ll have to retire one of these days. Unless my school, which like others is undergoing turbulence, lets me go first.
Then there is the mismatch between my microcosm and the macrocosm. Can I be happy, should I be happy, when the world is so fucked up? When so many things are moving in the wrong direction? You know what I’m talking about, I don’t need to spell it out.
Consider what counts as good news these days. Trump bashes the Pope and posts an AI-image of himself as Jesus. This story cheers up some of my friends, who think Trump is finally alienating his Christian fans. But I think, The most powerful man in the world is a vicious clown, and the more vicious and clownish he is, the more his devotees dig him.
I used to throw Pinker-esque stats at my students to persuade them that things are getting better. But positive trends have stalled lately. War-related violence has been ticking upward, and so has extreme poverty.
Let me digress a moment to make a distinction between kinds of problems facing us. The Trump administration no longer gives a shit about two major problems: “human rights” and “climate change.”
If you don’t care about climate change caused by carbon emissions, climate change still exists. Just as an asteroid exists whether or not we know it’s headed our way. Just as nuclear weapons exist whether or not we worry about them.
But if you don’t give a shit about human rights, then arguably human rights cease to exist. Trump-whisperer Stephen Miller told CNN recently that we live a world that “is governed by strength, that is governed by force, that is governed by power… These are the iron laws of the world.”
Forget about human rights, democracy and justice, which Miller mockingly calls “international niceties.” All that matters is power.
Miller is a pretentious jerk, showing off his knowledge of Thucydides, but is he wrong? Has Miller pulled the curtain back and shown us the ugly reality that always lurked behind our moralizing? Has there never been genuine virtue, only virtue-signaling?
Frenemies send me reports on chimp communities slaughtering each other in Uganda. Chimps are our closest genetic relatives, so maybe war has deep evolutionary roots, yada yada.
Normally these claims would rouse me to insist, once again, that war is not innate and hence inevitable. But my faith in humanity’s common sense and decency is wobbling. Believing in the end of war, in moral progress of any kind, is hard to sustain, given what’s happening in the macrocosm. We’re apes who invented nuclear weapons and killer robots.
I still enjoy my microcosm. I lie in bed with Vicki and watch Outlander, which shows how the love of Jamie and Claire helps them endure war and other horrors. We devour stuffed artichokes while arguing about atheism (her position) versus agnosticism (mine). Did I mention she’s a chef?
Contemplating these moments I say, Yeah, I’m happy in spite of everything. I add in spite of everything to acknowledge the misery of others, and the unfairness with which pain and pleasure are sprinkled across the planet.
Does saying I’m happy amidst so much misery make you an asshole? Not necessarily. You’re only an asshole if you discount or look away from others’ pain. Vicki keeps me from doing that. She barrages me with news of atrocities committed by our country.
Back for a moment to my agnosticism. The problem of evil, and especially the unfairness, keep me from believing in the god of my Catholic childhood. But life’s unlikeliness gives me pause.
Take something as humdrum as two oldsters, Vicki and me, hanging out. Each of us is an infinitely improbable creature on an even more infinitely improbable trajectory through spacetime. The odds that our trajectories would intersect and intertwine are--well, not even a quantum computer, I’m guessing, could count that high. Or low.
If a miracle is something infinitely improbable, something good, that somehow happens, then what Vicki and I have is a miracle. She grimaces when I say shit like this, but my corny, grandiose reasoning comforts me as the sky darkens.
Now and then gratitude wells up in me like longing. I want to thank someone, but who? Not the creator, if she/he/they/it exists, of this planet of pain. No, I’ll thank my godless girlfriend, who makes stuffed artichokes for us. I’ve never had stuffed artichokes before. They are tricky to eat but tasty.
She asks, Why are you smiling? I reply, Oh, I’m just happy.
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