choosing happiness (published ~early 2012)

a post from my 2012 blog: exact publication date unknown

I met an old friend the other day, and she told me that if I run into serious financial problems next year, then I will inevitably be unhappy and depressed.

It’s true, as she pointed out, that I’ve never experienced a true lack of money – certainly not to the point where I’ve had trouble paying rent or buying food or having a reliable Internet connection. My parents are wealthy and have always chosen to keep me from genuinely facing that kind of stress.

Next year, this could change. I’m not likely to have a job that pays very well. And I have 80,000 dollars of student debt. I will almost definitely be much more financially constrained and limited than I ever have been, with much larger chunks of my income going to paying off loans, writing checks for my landlord, buying food, and so forth. This will be even more stressful if I am underemployed for a while because of the economy – working at a grocery store, or taking orders at a restaurant, or ringing up customers at Target.

My friend told me that the main reason she was so depressed one year when we were students at Michigan State was that she had almost no money left over at all after paying rent and buying groceries. There were months when it wasn’t even clear that she would be able to pay her bills.

That could constrain happiness in numerous ways (and mine, too, if I experienced this). She wouldn’t have enough money to go to the bar on the weekends with her friends. She couldn’t always afford to go out to dinner if someone she hadn’t seen in a while asked her to come along. Not a day would go by where something wouldn’t remind her of her frustrating financial circumstance – not an hour would pass without the opportunity presenting itself for her to dwell on the fact that somehow by the end of the month she needed enough money to keep sleeping in that house.

“Have you ever really not had money?” she asked me. “It’s horrible. If you don’t have money next year, you’re not going to be happy.”

Should I submit to this? This view sounds compelling in a way, but is it correct and constructive? Or is it incorrect and destructive?

I don’t deny that a shortage of funds would threaten my happiness. The temptation to think about that condition by the hour would certainly present itself.

But I do deny that my current level of happiness depends on my present financial security, and that it would necessarily go away with my money. And I don’t believe I am required in the possibly approaching situation to give in to that temptation, to think only of the bad, to hand myself over to depression and anxiety and stress.

Because no matter what the overall circumstances that I’ve experienced in my life, the inputs, senses, connections, perceptions, and experiences that generate happiness in my mind when I focus on them and allow them to fully enter into my consciousness have always been present all around me. I just need to dwell more on them – to let them fill my consciousness rather than to ignore them and dwell instead on the negative inputs. Sometimes, of course, I decide not to look at those things, to ignore them instead, and while disregarding them I focus rather on the impending exam, I fret night and day about that research paper, I worry about whether I am going to be accepted into graduate school or end up unemployed, I wonder how in the world I am going to pay off my loans and succeed in writing and make a difference. When I do that, stress necessarily overcomes my consciousness, because I have driven my thoughts to be focused exclusively on the bad.

But there are sources of happiness that will be all around me next year regardless of whether I am employed or unemployed, struggling financially or raking in six figures, working in a field I love or cleaning the floor in a grocery store, enjoying the company of a girlfriend or going on awkward dates. They do not depend on money.

So, yes, I can choose to focus on the bad things. I can think all day long about money.

Or I can choose to remember the inputs that for me can always nurture a positive, wholesome, and emotionally productive state of mind – if I focus on them.

I can pick up a pen and I can write for half an hour. I can grab my cell phone and call Jess or Chockley or Nico or Marisa or Jeff (and so on and so on) and we can keep each other company for a while and fill each other’s lives with love. I can open a book that I enjoy and I can read my favorite passages, or I can start reading a new book (from the library if I have no money) and let myself become immersed in the story and moved by the characters and themes. I can walk outside and listen to the river or watch the sun set in the distance and fill the sky with orange and pink and purple. I can go for a three-mile run and feel the stress leaving my body while the health of my heart is reinforced. I can invite a friend over and we can make dinner together to save money. I can listen to one of my favorite songs, a song that makes me happy and soothes me, or I can find an album by a band I don’t know very well and discover something new.

I can direct my thinking to these things. I can let them dominate my consciousness.

There are beautiful things all around you. You can choose to ignore them and think only of the negative, or you can live in a way that recognizes them and savors them.

It’s not always easy to focus on the good when the bad seems so overwhelming and ubiquitous. It can be damn hard. But the many wonders of life surround you always, and you can enjoy them if you actively seek them.