2020 felt like a bad year. I was definitely less happy than normal. Yet every day, I tried to be happy.
You could question the realism of the goal. “Be happy during a pandemic? When over a million human beings are dying? When the global economy crashes? When billions lose their freedom? When immigration restrictions go from draconian to suffocating? When police murder innocents in broad daylight? When fanatics riot in the streets? When friends lose their minds? When they lose touch with friendship itself? Not possible.”
A totally different reaction, however, is to question the propriety of the goal. You’re not supposed to be happy when the world is in tatters. Only a vicious person could be happy when fellow citizens are dying of the plague, when whole populations live under house arrest, when their friends are acting like Martians. Just because you can be happy in 2020 doesn’t mean you should.
Emotionally speaking, this is a powerful point. Logically speaking, however, the implications are absurd. Fellow citizens die every day. Without fail! When you hear that total 2020 mortality is 15% above normal for the U.S., this means that last year death claimed about 7 times as many Americans as COVID took this year. The upshot: If you can’t be happy now because your fellow citizens are dying, you can’t be happy ever.
And even if your own country was doing great, what about the suffering masses in every other country on Earth? If your country is perfectly free, should you be sad because North Korea exists? Should Norwegians be gloomy because of American police brutality? As I’ve said before, any non-oblivious person has to choose between (a) daily misery, or (b) personal happiness in a world of woe.
When you put it that way, (b) is the only rational choice. Social Desirability Bias notwithstanding, each of us has the right – nay, the duty – to try to be happy despite the shortcomings of society and the universe. The key question then becomes: How?
I ponder this key question regularly. Here are the main steps I’ve taken to pursue happiness in 2020.
1. Continue ignoring the news unless it affects you personally. Dry statistics are OK, but avoid any information source that tries to engage your emotions.
2. Break bad but weakly enforced rules that get in your way. Never be Lawful Neutral.
4. Don’t give up on your friends, but lower your expectations to rock bottom.
5. Living Dale Carnegie I: Try extra hard to make new friends.
6. Living Dale Carnegie II: Help your kids make new friends.
7. If schools won’t even provide daycare, cut the cord and homeschool.
8. Start new projects that you enjoy.
10. General rule: Ask “what options are left,” not “what options are lost.” And make your Bubble beautiful!
Confession: My hardest realization of 2020 is that even most seemingly reasonable people go crazy in the face of a rather minor crisis. Biologically speaking, this pandemic could have easily have killed ten times as many people – or people we’d miss ten times as much. Never mind World War III. Taking a far view, I expect a lifetime median of two additional global events worse than COVID.
But I’m not going to let that bother me on a typical day, any more than I’m going to fret about my own mortality. Instead, I’m going to remember how lucky I am to be alive at all. As I wrote long ago:
If you read Woody Allen very charitably, he seems to have a perfectly reasonable desire to live longer. But his real complaint is that the time he has is meaningless because he only has a finite amount. And his conclusion resonates with a lot of people, and has for a long time.
I’ve never understood the appeal of this argument. If a finite quantity of life is worthless, how can an infinite quantity be desirable? Sure, you could trot out mathematical structures with this property, but come on. If an infinite span of days is so great, what’s stopping you from enjoying today?
I suspect that many readers are telling themselves, “This is going to be a great year once the vaccine brings us to herd immunity.” Wrong. This is going to be a great year starting today if you choose to make it great. And if you postpone happiness until society gets its act together, you’ll be waiting for a lifetime.
Happy New Year now!
READER COMMENTS
LEB
Jan 1 2021 at 2:42am
Thank you Bryan, this made my day. In spite of everything, I still found a lot of happiness this past year. By taking this tips to heart, I hope to have even more in the next!
Jg
Jan 1 2021 at 2:40pm
You can’t break happiness down to accounting ledger. The source of perfection is infinite good that cannot exist in a finite world. That good or happiness is God. If one wants to understand a sign of union with God, I would say that it is an ongoing peacefulness in one’s soul. Holy people can experience such tranquility even in the midst of great suffering. I am Catholic , and the Saints are real life examples of this union with God. This is a very incomplete and elementary description, but I gave it a try.
Bacon Wrapped
Jan 1 2021 at 5:09pm
In 2020 got to spend more time with my wife and daughter than I ever would have without Covid. The extra time felt like a gift.
Student of Liberty
Jan 3 2021 at 8:02am
I loved it until I read:
and fell back into depression, assuming you meant “reaction to covid” (otherwise, there should be way more than two).
I suspect I need to read it again and stop when I read “confession”…
RPLong
Jan 4 2021 at 8:52am
Great post. The closing paragraph was particularly beautiful to me. Thanks.
Niko Davor
Jan 4 2021 at 3:32pm
I was very happy in 2020. It helped to have such an inspirational President.
“police murder innocents in broad daylight” strikes me as a very anti-Caplanian comment:
Statistically, more innocent people were killed by the homicide spike due to reductions in policing than by police. In NYC, as just one example, annual homicides rose by 40%. Many of those victims were more sympathetic than the victims of police killings.
Statistically, police kill fewer people and use less violence than they did at any point in the past. The big differences are: 1) today we have video footage of everything. 2) there is a powerful, well funded and well coordinated political movement promoting outrage on this issue and trying to tug on our emotions.
The virus deaths are natural causes that affect primarily unhealthy older people. That’s still bad, I am saddened when I lose a loved one due to cancer or heart disease, but natural cause deaths of the old and sick has always been a part of life, and is not some new or unique tragedy.
I find traffic deaths more tragic in that they often kill or maim people that are either completely innocent or guilty of a simple traffic mistake and this impacts healthy people in the prime of life. On the bright side, there is work on computer controlled cars that will drastically reduce this type of suffering.
Steve Horwitz
Jan 28 2021 at 3:13pm
People ask how I can maintain my optimism in the face of both my own health issues and the state of the world. You pretty much nailed. You can be happy every day if you choose to be.
“Wake up every morning as if it’s your last day on earth. Go to sleep every night as if you’ll live forever.”
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