Facts and Imaginary Happiness

I have done a lot of personal research on how to increase happiness and one thing that coming up in every book I read is that depressed people have a MUCH more realistic view of their futures than normal, undepressed people do. Depressed people are depressed mostly because they refuse to inflate their view of the future to align with the unrealistic optimism that normal people have. In essence, what I have learned is that happy people are happy because they are delusional. If you focus too much on the facts, you are bound to be unhappy.

I struggle with this reality, which is something that I spent most of my life rejecting as reality. That is, I believed that my optimism for the future was well-grounded in real facts, in my own abilities, and my sheer determination to work hard and make my future what I wanted it to be. Maybe it’s sad that I’m no longer so optimistic most of the time, but I admit, I tend to think of it as me no longer being delusional. I used to joke about “giving up on your dreams” unless you couldn’t give up on them. For most of my life, my dream of being a writer was something I couldn’t give up on. It was so ingrained in my identity that it was necessary for me to continue.

And now, suddenly, it isn’t anymore. I still like writing. I write most days. But I don’t write with the same delusional sense that my writing *matters.* Maybe you know what I mean. I suspect if you do that you’re over age fifty and you’ve been to a few high school reunions where you looked around and thought with some chagrin—weren’t we supposed to be the people who changed the world—who maybe even saved it? But no, you weren’t. None of you were. And yet you all seem to have gone on, working your jobs and raising kids and generally accepting that your dreams actually weren’t realistic and you weren’t that superhuman. This can feel like a let down or it can feel like relief, or possibly a combination of both. For me, it has been painful until recently, and now I’m learning to lean into it more.

One of the problems of being raised Mormon and taking it all very literally is that I spent most of my life believing that I was important, that I had a special mission from God, and that one day I was going to REALLY MATTER. My name was, according to my patriarchal blessing, “to be known among all nations.” Who knows what the man who gave me that blessing meant. Probably he thought I should go on a mission for the church. I never did, but I did spend a good portion of my adult life trying to be a poster child for Mormonism, writing about Mormonism in explicit and less explicit ways and in general trying to convince other people outside of Mormonism that no, we weren’t sexist AT ALL and no, no cultlike stuff here.

It turns out that I was wrong on such a wildly delusional level that I’ve come to accept that lots of people live perfectly happy delusional lives and mostly, that’s the only way to be happy. I wish all the time that I could go back and be as happy as I was as a Mormon. Other times I wonder if I was really happy or if I just lied to myself about being happy. If there’s a difference between these two, I can’t find it, at least not in retrospect. I suppose the difference is that the fall is pretty hard when it’s a delusional happiness, but then again, it may well be that there’s no way to stop this fall. I might call this fall “adulthood” and it isn’t just Mormons that experience it. I suspect almost everyone does. Well, no, not everyone.

I see a group of people over age fifty who are still as delusional and happy as I used to be. Some part of me envies them. I know that the Mormons among them think that I could just flip a switch in my brain and believe again. I tried that. I was also the poster child for trying to engage in a religion I’d lost faith in, and I tried very hard to make this work. But without the delusional part of the happiness, it didn’t work ultimately and now I regret the years that I spent trying not to fall or not to fall as hard. Falling is unavoidable and as much as I’d like to reassure myself that now I’ve fallen that one big time, there won’t be any more falls like that left, or at least not big falls, I’m pretty sure that in another twenty years I’d laugh over that.

Humans are not capable of seeing reality. The closer we get to it, the less happy we are. That doesn’t mean that we can’t get a little bit closer to it than we are right now. But it’s not necessarily a thing to desire. As a religious person, I think I read the Bible as saying that no human could see God with their “natural eyes,” that they had to be transformed in order to encounter God. This is what I now think of our ability to see reality. We can bump up against it, but it will destroy us with its powerful light, and it will change us in ways we cannot predict. I wish I could go back, but also I know that I can’t. I seem to be one of those people who is destined to be unhappy and to keep reaching for that powerful light. It’s stupid, at least if you want to be happy, but I keep doing it anyway. It’s just who I seem to built to be. It’s not particularly comfortable, to be the kind of person who keeps trying to see the truth and keeps realizing how deluded I still am, but that, too, is who I seem to be.

Is this what writers really do? Is that what it means to be a creative soul? I could make some grand statements about this. Ten years ago, I’d have written a book about this. Maybe I still will. But I have found that my writerly ambitions are smaller now. I like writing. I write books that matter, but I acknowledge that it’s possible they only matter to me. I no longer write essays like this with the idea that some day in the future, some college student will study my words and find them profound. OK, being real here, I sometimes have that old version of myself intrude and she insists that it could still happen. But mostly, I shrug and tell her to fuck off because she isn’t in charge anymore. This is my life now, and I get to be unhappy and real when I want to be. Some days I am a little happy, but it’s a humbler kind of happy. It is, as it turns out, exactly the kind of happy that I saw at the last high school reunion I went to, the happiness of the poor slobs who figured out they weren’t going to change the world or even themselves very much and laughed about it.