The psychiatrist Thomas Szasz once said, "Happiness is an imaginary condition, formerly attributed by the living to the dead, now usually attributed by adults to children, and by children to adults." The first time I read this quote, years ago, it seemed like nothing more than prudent cynicism. Now, after years of searching for happiness in myself, in the company of others, in the experience of work well done, and in reckless drug use, I am starting to become convinced of the fully illusory nature of happiness.

Obviously, human beings need something to work for, and in recent years the standard "food and fucking" package that supported us from stinking caves up through stinking huts and, finally, stinking log cabins has finally worn a little thin. On reflection I started to wonder if the concept of Happiness, and not just the feel-good sensation, was just a carrot hanging in front of us on the bumpy trail from cradle to grave.

Since happiness is traditionally meant to be a result of a good life, I went looking through Wikipedia for something about morality. Apparently, although every language has words for good vs. bad in the practical sense (will help you pork and impregnate hairy cavewomen vs. will result in being eaten by wolves), the concept of good and evil shows up around 400 B.C. - a scant few centuries before a filthy carpenter walked on water and around the same time as the Greeks were figuring out the catapult and the Celts were building huts next to a stinking marsh and calling it London.

Before this time, the great aspiration in life was to have a lot of things, whether those things were women, horses, or worthless, shiny trinkets. 400 B.C. marks the first time happiness was advanced beyond owning stuff and knocking up wide-hipped women, so I figure it's a good point to mark as the beginning of the myth of Happiness.

Fast forward a couple millennia, and happiness is a serious enterprise. Everyone famous, from Einstein to the Dali Lama to Nicole Kidman, has a quotable statement on happiness to look at, usually in direct contradiction to one another. There are 73,261 self-help books on Amazon.com, and at least as many songs involving happiness, or the lack of it. Everybody wants to be happy and everybody has some generic, nonspecific advice to give you for it.

But, looking around me, I started to wonder if I knew even a single person who was actually happy. Nearly everybody I know has either exhibited or admitted to deep-seated fears, problems, and, particularly, feelings of their own inadequacy. As for those who don't? Maybe it's me, but I can't help but doubt that they have honestly figured out the secret to happiness. It seems like everyone around me is going through a confusing period of self-doubt and reassessment, and hitting a new decade of problems and aging (read: dying) hardly helps. Is it me? Am I just projecting my doubts, fears and self-loathing onto others? No shit, yes, but that can't be all that it is.

Various Buddhist gurus teach that to find happiness, one must stop searching for it, that happiness is not found at the end of a long journey but at its beginning, and etc. While this is nothing I couldn't have learned watching the Sphinx from Mystery Men, it is the exact opposite of what I've been doing actively for the last five years, and without considering it for the last 20. And since that shit hasn't worked, I briefly but seriously considered this passive eastern method. But I can't do it. I just can't convince myself to sit and wait for happiness to knock at my doorstep, especially considering that I've failed even to receive greasy pizzas using this method. I'm not going to waste my life staring at my navel because the blue bird of happiness couldn't find my street.

So what's left? Catapults? Hairy women? Hairy wolves? I'm out of ideas and out of space. Just like every other post about my anxieties, this one has no conclusion and no real message. So, I'll just cut it off here so we can get back to the action, and so I can get back to shelving books. Thanks for reading. Masturbation and buffoonery will be resumed shortly.