Is happiness the goal?
Hank Green said out loud that he isn’t sure he wants to be happy, and I felt caught.
Today’s vlogbrothers video is called “Is happiness the goal?” and it has been rattling around in my head all day. First, what he said, because it’s a better frame than anything I came up with on my own.
What Hank said
He’d made a joke on Bluesky. Someone had quoted one of his old lines back at him, the one about how you’ll keep feeling unproductive until you accept that your own joy can be something you produce. His joke was that now he had to figure out how to make his own joy matter to him. Then he admitted it wasn’t entirely a joke. “I’m not sure that I want to be happy,” he said, and he knows how that sounds.
A Nerdfighter named Lee wrote back that it can matter to him because it matters to the people who love him, and because everything else he cares about is easier to carry when he isn’t miserable. Hank cried a little. Then he said something I didn’t expect, which is that misery isn’t his problem. He has very little of it. What he has is a frenetic kind of flow, building and making and being needed, and he compared it to a pianist working through a hard piece. He finds it satisfying. He doesn’t find it joyful. The thing he says he’s missing is feeling at all, joy or sadness, and he isn’t sure how to make room for it.
Two good things that want the same hours
I’ve been thinking about how many people carry a thing that makes them happy and a thing that keeps them housed, and how often those two want the same hours.
Neither one is the villain. The first is usually good for you and for the people near you. The second is often work you’re skilled at, with people you like, and being needed there can feel a lot like the flow Hank describes. Both are good. Both are yours. The trouble starts when the calendar has room for only one.
Maybe it’s obvious
Maybe the answer is to pick the happiness, and everyone who loves you is glad. Maybe it’s to pick the paycheck, because the paycheck is what makes every other choice possible, including the happy ones next year. Maybe the choice is a fake one and there’s a third option you can’t see because you’re too close to it. Maybe you’re tired, and you’ll feel differently after sleep.
I’ve argued myself into each of these at different hours of the day. I don’t trust any of them yet.
Who gets to ask the question
Hank can wonder whether happiness is the goal. Most of the time, when your survival is conditional on employment, the question gets answered for you before you ask it. Survival has a price, and the price is hours.
In the US, the price is also health care. Employer-sponsored insurance is the largest source of coverage for people under 65, and KFF counts about 166 million people on it. A job is a paycheck, and it’s also the difference between a doctor’s visit being an errand and being a disaster. That’s why “just do what makes you happy” is such a glib thing to say to someone, and why I flinch when I hear it, even when it’s kindly meant.
Here’s the counterargument, and I take it seriously. People make this trade every day. Plenty of them picked stability over the dream and are glad they did, and some of them are the people I admire most. I’m not going to tell them they chose wrong. I’m also on the lucky end of this. I have skills people pay for, a field where someone would probably hire me again, and a choice at all. Most people weighing something like this have fewer options than I do. And I notice that having options doesn’t make the feeling go away, which tells me how far down the dependency goes.
Hank’s line about joy being something you produce is the right way around. The economy is built the other way around. Joy is what you do with the hours left over after you’ve sold the good ones. It’s leisure, it’s vacation, it’s PTO you have to request from someone. It counts as a reward for production and never as production. And when the thing that makes you happy happens to be marketable, the system offers to turn it into a job, which comes with its own precarity and its own boss. Plenty of people I know make a living at what they love. Several of them have told me it doesn’t stay the same thing.
I’m not sure it’s capitalism’s fault that I love something that doesn’t fit a salaried schedule. Maybe that’s just my life, and I’m struggling with it anyway. I do think it’s capitalism’s design that the cost of loving it lands on me, one person, as a private dilemma, instead of being something a society might decide to make easier. I keep looking for who decided this and finding only a system.
What I’m missing
Hank ended up somewhere I recognize. Being needed is different from feeling something, and a person can live inside the first for a long time without noticing the second has gone quiet. I do that. I’m good at building, maintaining and being useful, and a system that rewards usefulness is glad to let me keep going forever.
Where I differ from Hank is that I know exactly where my joy is. I don’t have to go looking for it. What I lack is permission, or the money-shaped version of permission, to go there when it calls.
Hank isn’t sure he wants to be happy. I’m sure I do. I’m less sure I’m allowed to, on the schedule I’d choose, and I notice how strange it is that I have to phrase it that way.
I don’t know whether happiness is the goal, but I know a person should be able to ask without a health plan riding on the answer.