The Pursuit of Happiness

A man’s car won’t start one morning, so he takes the train to work. The outcome: he’s late, and his boss tells him to notify her in advance about “these things.” Not really important, is it? Except that his irritation at his boss’s unreasonable demand plagues him through the whole day, causing him to make numerous mistakes, including a misplaced decimal point that will end up costing him his job. All right—one man loses his job. In terms of larger things, inconsequential. Except this man has a wife and teenage daughter, and the loss of his job puts his already rocky marriage on more dangerous ground. His daughter’s grades suffer, her parents blame each other for her unhappiness, and she, overhearing their arguments, starts to believe everything that’s going wrong truly is her fault. All right, maybe that doesn’t matter either. What if she kills herself? Does it matter then? I suppose it doesn’t, if you look at the big picture.

So what if the man’s car had been working perfectly well? Say it was. Say that on his way to work, he was killed in a car accident. Say that his wife had refused to let the matter drop until she found out what exactly had happened; say the accident turned out to be the result of an engine malfunction that could have been avoided if factory inspections were more frequent; say his daughter grew up and went on to get a piece of legislation passed that would all but prevent accidents like the one that killed her father from ever happening again—Does it mean anything? In the grand scheme of things, do the little movements of people on this little planet in the middle of a mind-bogglingly large universe matter at all?

My point is that eventually, you have to accept that either nothing matters or everything does. No picking and choosing—“this, but not that.” Zoom out far enough and all you see is an expanding universe where things rise and fall, come into being and are destroyed, and “time” means nothing else but “change.” Get in close enough and you find that even the movements of atoms are heavy with meaning—that contained in the seemingly chaotic actions of these tiny, tiny things are the building blocks for life. Time. Change. Everything touching everything else and sending it in new directions, making new shapes. Nothing matters or everything does. Choose either. Both mean that you’re free.

Either there is no reason for you to be concerned with purpose, or with meaning, or with doing anything “right”—there is only your little, inconsequential life, and if it doesn’t matter what you or whether or not you’re happy, then there is no reason not to do what you want and be happy—or even your worst, most crushing defeat is its own point of light in the heavens. And if you think that doesn’t matter, then let me show you the Milky Way stretching across the sky on a clear night and, with a word, block out all the stars. Then tell me, specifically, which ones you don’t miss.

And if asking them means that I am paralyzed by lack of answers, I am done with questions. I am done asking whether I and what I do are worth anything. All I have are the minute-by-minute choices that everyone has. Paper or plastic. Do or do not. All I have is this one life that I call mine, and it is going to end. I want to make things of power and beauty, but I cannot define either of those words without being aware that you likely have a different definition and the longer I live, the more I realize that I have never seen anything or anyone that is not beautiful and powerful and I doubt I ever will. I am done with the notion of deserving. I am done with judging what does and does not deserve to exist. I am done with questions of meaning and mattering. You can keep chasing those shadows if you want to, but me? I’m going to be happy. And I sincerely hope you join me, because life is too short to be spent pursuing anything but joy.