The Happiness Project: The avian flu.

The Happiness Project

I’m working on a book, THE HAPPINESS PROJECT, a memoir of the year I spent test-driving the wisdom of the ages, the current scientific studies, and the lessons from popular culture about how to be happy--from Aristotle to Martin Seligman to Thoreau to Oprah. On this daily blog, I recount my adventures as I grapple with the challenge of being happier. THE HAPPINESS PROJECT will hit the shelves in December 2009 (Harper).

What Started Me Thinking

"Whoever is happy will make others happy, too." Mark Twain.
“There is no duty we so much underrate as the duty of being happy.” Robert Louis Stevenson
"Martha, Martha, thou art careful and troubled about many things: But one thing is needful: and Mary hath chosen that good part, which shall not be taken away from her." Luke 10:41-42
“Imaginary evil is romantic and varied; real evil is gloomy, monotonous, barren, boring. Imaginary good is boring; real good is always new, marvelous, intoxicating.” Simone Weil
“What a wonderful life I’ve had! I only wish I’d realized it sooner.” Colette
“It is easy to be heavy: hard to be light.” G. K. Chesterton
“A man’s first care should be to avoid the reproaches of his own heart.” Joseph Addison
“Best is good. Better is best.” Lisa Grunwald
“Order is Heaven’s first law.” Alexander Pope

Happiness Theories I Reject

Flaubert: "To be stupid, and selfish, and to have good health are the three requirements for happiness; though if stupidity is lacking, the others are useless."
Vauvenargues: “There are men who are happy without knowing it.”
Eric Hoffer: “The search for happiness is one of the chief sources of unhappiness.”
Sartre: "Hell is other people."
Willa Cather: “One cannot divine nor forecast the conditions that will make happiness; one only stumbles upon them…”
Alexander Smith: “We are never happy; we can only remember that we were so once.”
John Stuart Mill: “Ask yourself whether you are happy, and you cease to be so.”

The avian flu…I keep hearing about it. This morning I came across an article about an Indonesian family that lost at least six members to avian flu.

Will the avian flu alarm die away, as with killer bees and Y2K? Or will the situation be as bad as some experts warn? I remember the first time I read an article about AIDS and my thought, “Zoikes, this sounds like it could really be a bad thing.”

Living in New York City heightens the natural fear of contagion. We’re packed tightly together, and we're very dependent on other people like bus-drivers and subway operators. Also, apartments are small, so a family doesn’t have natural stockpiles of supplies the way a family with a big basement who shops at Wal-Mart does. I haven’t even stashed away the recommended twelve gallons of emergency water (one gallon per person for three days).

Reading about the avian flu is a warning about the fragility of security and happiness. How trivial my happiness exercises would seem in the face of real catastrophe—a new Black Death or Influenza Epidemic of 1918. But then of course a bad diagnosis, a car crash, a moment’s distraction that somehow led to disaster, would do the same. The lesson? Be happy now.

Comments

Without threats like bird flu, overblown though it is, and asteroids crashing and terror attacks, how could we enjoy surviving and thriving? If nothing could ever threaten us, survival and prosperity would taste like dust.

Posted by: Robert Speirs | May 25, 2006 at 11:15 AM

The real lesson is not to listen to media whose purpose is not to inform but to evoke irrational emotion. Forget the networks, CNN and especially NPR. Go for a walk and see the world for yourself. Form your own opinions.

Posted by: Bill Parkes | May 25, 2006 at 04:33 PM

as bill parkes said, dont expose yourself to news media. u only need to know about avian flu when your neigbour's got it. until then have fun.

Posted by: bloke | May 26, 2006 at 12:16 PM

Happiness strengthens the immune system, so your "trivial" exercises in happiness may save your life!

Posted by: Voclo | May 30, 2006 at 02:07 AM

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