Constantly Moving Unhappiness Machines

some stray thoughts I scraped out of an unfinished and rejected essay

I’ve been preoccupied with moving and “work” (the “toad that squats on my life”) and missed posting for the first week in months. But the content mills must churn. Here are a few stray sentiments left lying at the bottom of the barrel.

In Bob Dylan’s memoir, “Chronicles Vol. 1,” he says that his second wife was the only person he’d ever met with her own natural “inbuilt” form of happiness. It stuck with me, because I’m not sure I’ve ever met someone who seemed like they had truly “inbuilt” happiness, happiness that was just there, for no reason and with no need for an excuse. But I wanted to believe it. And still want to. If I ever run into Bob Dylan’s second wife (well, now second ex-wife), I plan on strategically annoying her to see how stable and sturdily structured her happiness really is. If she passes the test, I’ll beg to be her disciple.

Externally, you can mistake people for having this completely natural happiness, and they might genuinely seem like they have it for awhile, but ultimately they’re running on fuel of some kind, whether that’s feeding the homeless, building an Ed Gein skin suit, collecting Funko pops, etc. etc.

Nonetheless, I feel like I’ve had brief, occasional moments when I realized I was happy for no reason. There were probably preconditions for this happiness—I couldn’t have low blood sugar, be hungover, have just received a late-stage syphilis or glioblastoma diagnosis, and so on. The physical organism had to be in a basically stable and healthy state. But those preconditions alone weren’t enough to explain why I was happy. It just happened, the same way, when you’re at the beach, you might wander into a spot in the ocean that is unexpectedly warm. (The true reason for your happiness hopefully won’t prove quite so disillusioning as “That’s where a whale just pissed.”)

The idea that you might always need a reason to be happy, that you’re constantly trying to give yourself reasons and generate more of them, is fairly maddening. It reminds me of what Herbert Hoover said to a group of advertising and public relations men in 1928: “You have taken over the job of creating desire and have transformed people into constantly moving happiness machines.”

The way Hoover describes us, “constantly moving happiness machines,” implies that we are actually constantly moving unhappiness machines. Why else would we need to stay in motion? It suggests that, without ceaselessly engaging in the search for happiness, our default state is abject misery and utter, howling emptiness. We need someone to keep rolling us around even after we’ve fatigued ourselves to the point of listlessness. It’s like the world of Alice in Wonderland’s Red Queen where “it takes all the running you can do just to stay in one place.” The hedonic treadmill, indeed.

It’s nice to think that the trick might be that there is no trick, that you’re already quite naturally happy when you forget not to be. It’s less nice to think that you’re almost powerless to initiate this state, and that it essentially has to happen by accident. Until such blissful cessation arises, you are doomed to continue to seethe.