Naked and Afraid

Back when I was in the classroom, I would wonder aloud if people were happier now than in the past.  The answers always surprised me.  Now, however, I wonder myself.  How does one measure happiness?  Somebody seems to do it.  I read every year about the "Happiest Country" or "Happiest Places" in the world.  Surprising to me is that Finland is always high on the list.  I watched a 60 Minutes episode many, many years ago about the Finns.  Apparently, their language does not inspire jokes.  There are really, it seemed, no jokes in Finland.  If all of this reporting is accurate, then jokes may not make us happy.  

What does?  

I'm guessing that maybe it is, in the footsteps of Einstein, relative.  

I have enjoyed camping in my life.  In the wilderness.  I would not enjoy camping, however, on a resort island next to the Four Seasons Hotel.  The joy camping brings to me, I guess, is relative.  

For the majority of my adult life, I have held fast to the belief that you learn nothing from "happy."  "Happy" is a mindless state.  There were states of being that encompassed far more profundity than happiness.  

So I have come back to the old question, "are we happier now than were people in the past?"

Everywhere I look, I see images of "happiness."  Social media, of course.  Everyone, it seems, is eating at a fabulous restaurant with beautiful friends or are sailing on huge yachts in Miami drinking champagne and laughing with skinny girls in barely bikinis.  Everyone seems ecstatic.  

Even watching television at my mother's house, people with every known disease to man from erectile disfunction to liver disease are enjoying dinners, playing golf, romping with the grandkids, because they are taking some pharmaceutical concoction.  I watch and think I should get a disease so that I can be happy, too.  

So, in the past, in a time before photography, before media other than newspapers sold on street corners, or, perhaps, longer ago, when word of the world was carried by mouth. . . were people happier?  

I've often complained here about all one is expected to do in a day to have a long and healthy life.  I've been thinking about my old heroes lately, and the way they lived.  The famous explorer, Sir Richard Burton, for instance.  When he went into the blank sections of the map on the African continent, did he tale along everything he needed for a long and happy life?  Did he follow a healthy diet, make sure he did his stretching and got in his steps?  Did he get enough fermented food?  

I don't think so.  Deprivation was more the rule.  

He died at the age of 69.  

Hemingway, of course, didn't make it so long.  But he wasn't happy.  Neither was Burton at the end of his life.  

I think my parent's generation was more content than happy, but I can't decipher the correlation between the two, really.  They are both abstract concepts to me.  

Were Boomers a Happy Generation?  Gen Z is supposedly not.  I remember lecturing about Gen X, having fallen upon the idea early on on my own that, being the first generation in America who would do worse economically than their parents, they had donned the garb of prisoners--sheared locks and baggy, chain gang pants and decorative chains.  Even band names--Alice In Chains. 

Millenials are now the new Boomers.  They are getting richer and will be the target of Gen Z's ire.  Millenials will be cock blocking Z from all the good things in life.  

I, personally, don't believer in "generations."  It is a form of intellectual capitalism as far as I am concerned, serving the needs of inferior minds for pat generalizations.  

Still. . . who is happier?  

It is relative, I think.  

I am wrestling with the problem just now.  Would it be possible for my mother to be happy now?  I am suddenly in favor of happiness over any sort of profundity.  Is there a path for me to happiness now?  If so. . . what is it?  Where is it?  

Are the residents of retirement communities like The Villages happier for being there?  Would my mother be happier around people who cannot hear well, cannot see, people who are not ambulatory?  

Maybe.  I think it is relative.  

Thank you Mr. Einstein.  

I believe that most people I know now are happier than I.  There are many factors.  

"Money will never make you happy," the old saw goes.  And then there is Marx, not Karl, who said, "and happy will never make you money."  Are poor people happy?  Are rich people happier?  

I DO think my mother would feel better in a room full of people who suffer equal maladies.  Right now she is camping in a little tent on the beach among the sand flies next to the Four Seasons Hotel.  

I had one moment of. . . of what?  Levity?  Is that akin to happy?  Well, I laughed for a few moments.  I watched a comedy special that someone I will not name for fear of implicating him sent to me with the note, "I think you'll enjoy this."

I'm often skeptical.  But right now, I am fairly desperate, so I clicked on the trailer.  H-O-L-Y S-H-I-T!  You click on it, too.  You'll know right away if you want to watch this thing or not.  I did.  I laughed a lot.  I think I wrote about 80% of his jokes.  The glee it brought me, I'm certain, is not for most people.  I'm sure he is hated and reviled.  

Again. . . relative.  

I guess.