Happiness is Getting Weirder

In a world when lots of people are unhappy, being happy will require you to do things that most people don’t do.

Unhappiness in developed nations is rising around the world.

Unless we’ve all been infected by some misery-causing bacteria, the causes must be — at least in part — environmental and behavioral. The way we live is making us unhappy. Research appears to bear this out, connecting rises in depression, anxiety, and psychological distress to corresponding rises in social media use and isolation.

Now let’s follow this logic backwards. If more people are unhappy, that means more people are doing things that make them unhappy. This, in turn, means that behaviors which cause unhappiness are more widespread and socially accepted.

The more widespread a behavior or societal convention, the greater “status risk” is associated with breaking that convention. Basically: the more people do something, the more strange you will seem to them if you don’t do that thing.

So, to put this all together:

In a world when lots of people are unhappy, being happy will require you to do things that most people don’t do.

Happiness is becoming a radical act.

I want to be clear here. It would be very easy for this essay to be interpreted as a grossly saccharine dose of oversimplified inspiration-porn.

Revolt against depression and anxiety! Be happy and show your sad, mopey brain who’s boss!

That’s not what I’m here for — though I’ve surely been known to offer some oversimplified inspiration-porn in my day.

No, I’m writing to point out a basic logical conclusion.

If global unhappiness continues to rise, that means the behaviors causing it (whatever they may be) will continue to be more widely accepted conventions — which means you’ll need to be more comfortable falling outside the mainstream by rejecting them.

I’m not here to pinpoint exactly what those behaviors are. As I’ve said time and time again, I am not a scientist.

But as an example, let’s imagine that playing pickleball is bad for your mental state.

Twenty years ago, rejecting pickleball in order to look out for your psychological wellbeing wouldn’t have been seen as strange — basically nobody played pickleball back then.

Today, pickleball is exploding in popularity. If that were to continue, and eventually virtually everybody played pickleball, your rejection of it would start to be seen as a decidedly weird act.

If the trend of increasing unhappiness continues to rise, it will mean that we can’t look to the wisdom of the majority to tell us how to be happy, because the majority won’t know.

The fundamental things humans need to be happy aren’t changing — the conventions surrounding them are. If this continues, being happy will require you to become an increasingly unconventional person relative to the society around you.

Eccentric, quirky, odd, strange – these may become the words the world uses to describe people who do things that were once seen as the building blocks of a fulfilled life.

Again, I’m not here to tell anyone what those building blocks are or should be. But the next time you’re considering making a change in your life in service of your personal happiness, but you’re hesitating because it’s a change that feels unconventional in your social circle, remember this:

The more normal unhappiness becomes, the weirder you’ll have to be to be happy.