Brown - Happy: Why More or Less Everything is Absolutely Fine

From Letters to a Young Poet, Rainer Maria Rilke

He is ubiquitous. At once irreproachable and black-eyed sinister, he cheers us for a moment before we sense a sneer. He is the rubber-stamp guarantee of congeniality, designed for contagion: a morale-boosting initiative for a life assurance company in the 1960s, disseminated into the world in the form of fifty million black-on-yellow badges. The hallmark of seventies psychedelia and eighties electronic dance music, his is the glazed ecstasy of the narcotically compelled. Today, he is such a familiar currency in electronic communication that the modern iconoclasts first break with convention is a decision not to use him.

In England, the smiley or his sideways colon/parenthesis cousin provides a familiar sign-off where an X would seem too intimate; and in an age of typed communication, where tone of voice is not conveyed, it is important shorthand. I am happy; now you should be happy. It reports that no offence has been meant, that ones intentions are entirely benign, and the warm lubricant of assured conviviality will smooth any further communication. But within it lies the troubling behest to be cheerful, and the childish contours of this exhortations grinning emblem tell us that nothing should be simpler. Yet the desire to be happy, to obtain happiness, to claim our right to be happy, remains the most enduring and conspicuously self-defeating aspect of our modern condition.

A WHILE AGO , my long-term friend and collaborator Andy Nyman told me the following story.

Andy, an actor with a strong fan base, had emerged from the stage door after a show to find waiting for him a lost-looking, nervous young girl, perhaps fourteen years old, barely able to make eye contact. Her mother, who was clutching a small camera, stood next to her. The mother asked if her daughter might get a photograph with him. He happily agreed, and the girl wordlessly stepped forward and wrapped an arm tightly around his torso. He could feel her trembling at his side as they posed. He grinned dutifully, and as the mother took the picture, Andy sensed that the girl had neither smiled nor properly faced the camera. He asked to look at the picture on the cameras viewing screen, and there he was, looking the picture of happiness, while the poor soul next to him had indeed been caught with her eyes half shut and expression indistinct.

Do you want to do that again? You werent smiling, he asked the girl.

The mother answered for her: Oh, she always looks terrible in pictures.

My friend was taken aback by her words. Dont say that! he protested, in defence of the daughter.

The girl spoke up for the first time: Oh, its okay, its true.

In that brief exchange over a photograph, there also appeared to be a snapshot of a life: one of wretched self-esteem for the girl, and its apparent maternal origins. Instead of helping to encourage and nurture her child at all times as we would hope, the mother, it would certainly seem, is instead helping to perpetuate a crippling lack of self-belief. The damning word in the mothers remark is always, because always tells us there is a pattern, a story at work. And stories affect us deeply.

When I perform my day job as a kind of magician, I work with peoples capacity to fool themselves with stories. A good magic trick forces the spectator to tell a story that arrives at an impossible conclusion, and the clearer the story is, the better. Normally, everything you need to solve the puzzle happens right in front of you, but you are made to care only about the parts that the magician wants you to. When you join up those dots, so misleadingly and provocatively arranged, you are left with a baffling mystery. A good magician might make the trick mean more, by elevating it beyond the mere disappearance or transposition of some props. If it can be made to feel somehow relevant to you, rather than a mere display of skill, then the story is likely to have more import and the trick more impact.

If magic exploits our capacity to continuously, unconsciously modify events in the ongoing world to form a story, even at the expense of everything we know to be possible in the universe, then we are indeed master editors, tirelessly working to communicate to others and ourselves a meaningful tale. We turn the memory of a holiday or a meal into something entirely wonderful or completely appalling, depending on the story we have decided for ourselves of a successful or failed event. We adjust details and selectively remember what fits into our preferred narrative. When a relationship ends, we may one day recall all the good times we shared with that person, and the next day all the bad. These stories shift and change.

We are, each of us, a product of the stories we tell ourselves. Some of our stories are brief and inconsequential, allowing us to get through our day and make sense of other people: Ill do this and head to the shops and get that done, and then Ill be able to completely relax this evening. Or, She was snappy because really shes worried that Im putting other people before her. She does that because shes insecure.

These are neat narratives that allow us to arrange complicated reality into a satisfying and tidy parcel, and move on with our lives. Without them in place, we would see only a mess of details. If we were unable to form meaningful patterns, our lives would become overwhelmed.

Other stories, like the one we sense the girl at the stage door is learning from her mother, become deeply ingrained and in many ways define who we are. We tell ourselves tales about the future: Oh, Im an awkward misfit who looks terrible and always will. Or, Ill never have a fulfilling relationship. Other stories are about the past: Im like this because my parents treated me in a particular way. Or, Im an unlucky person always have been. Yet our entire past, which we feel (in many ways correctly) is responsible for how we behave today, is itself just a story we are telling ourselves in the here and now. We join the dots to tell one tale when we consider how, for example, we came to this point in our career, another when we consider how we developed our psychological foibles or strengths. It is hard to think about your past without tidying it up into a kind of story: one in which you are cast as the hero or victim. Invariably we ignore the regular dice-rolls of chance or random luck; successful high-flyers are typically prone to ignoring the interplay of blind fortune when they credit their career trajectories to their canny business sense or brute self-belief. We tell the story we want to tell, and we live out those stories every day.