Can You Be Happy for 100 Days in a Row?

The 100 Happy Days project.

“Can you be happy for 100 days in a row?” the website wants to know, taunting me with its cheery font and yellow color scheme.

No, I can’t.

“You don’t have time for this, right?” the next line asks rhetorically.

I’ll answer anyway. I have time. I, despite my grad program and 3-hour commute, have plenty of time to be happy. What I lack is the capacity.

It goes on:

We live in times when super-busy schedules have become something to boast about. While the speed of life increases, there is less and less time to enjoy the moment that you are in. The ability to appreciate the moment, the environment and yourself in it, is the base for the bridge towards long term happiness of any human being.

But I do enjoy the moment I’m in. I enjoy watching the skyline from the train during my commute. I enjoyed my four-hour trek through Central Park yesterday. I enjoy the moment the shutter snaps. I enjoy the food I put into my body, especially when I’ve cooked it myself. I enjoy the feeling of my muscles straining at the gym, several times a week. I enjoy the early morning sun over the Hudson. I enjoy the relief of jumping into bed with a book or a paper after work. I enjoy the music I listen to for hours a day. I enjoy every minute I spend writing, and I spend many minutes on it every day. I’m enjoying the moment I am in right now, despite the subject that I’m about to discuss.

All of this, and yet.

I can’t be happy for 100 days in a row. I can’t be happy for ten days in a row. I can’t, except for certain very rare instances, be happy for a day.

I can be happy for an hour or a few.

And by “happy,” I don’t mean “entirely free of negative emotions.” That’s a simplistic view of happiness that few people probably subscribe to. By “happy,” I mean that the good definitely outweighs the bad. I mean feeling that your life is, basically, what it should be and that the decisions you’ve made to get to where you are have been generally pretty good. I mean feeling like you’re a good person overall, give or take a few flaws. I mean being able to wake up in the morning and feel glad that another day is starting.

I don’t know what the folks behind the 100 Happy Days project meant by “happiness” exactly, but I’m sure it’s closer to what I just described than to “entirely free of negative emotion.”

Nobody expects to be entirely free of negative emotion, so I hope that strawman is now happily burning out in the field.

I can’t be happy for 100 days in a row because my brain doesn’t work that way. The good feelings don’t “stick.” When they happen, they’re genuine and meaningful, but they wash away like words scratched into the sand. I argue against them without meaning to. That essay was shit. He doesn’t give a fuck about you. Everything about you is ugly. Your parents will die and you won’t even have the money to fly to their funerals. Your siblings barely remember what you look like because you’re never home. Your partners will leave you for real girlfriends, as opposed to the sloppy facsimile of one that you are. Everything good is temporary; everything bad is permanent.

I don’t know what the nice people who made the 100 Days website would say about this, if anything. Maybe they would say that I’m just not making enough of an effort, giving enough time, to the project of Being Happy. Or maybe they would say that they’re sorry, but this is just a fun little experiment that was never meant for People Like Me.

And there it is. It’s not that there’s anything wrong with this idea. It’s a neat idea, for certain people, for whom the biggest obstacle to being happy and satisfied with their lives is failing to stop and smell the roses.

But I can’t tell you how often I come across these things, accidentally or because a friend recommended it, and think, “Oh, right, that’s not for me.” All those self-help books, anything that addresses mood without explicitly trying it to mental health and psychology. (This one especially.) All these little projects. The mere idea of self-care.

While I know many people with mental illnesses get a lot out of self-care, and self-help, and what have you, for me personally, it’s never resonated. I’ll tell my friends that I’m sorry, I can’t go out tonight after all, because I just can’t and I’m sad and I can’t. And they’ll be supportive, they’ll say, “It’s okay, everyone needs some time to recharge and take care of themselves.” And I get frustrated and I want to tell them that NO I’m not going to “recharge” and this isn’t “taking care” of myself this is giving up and it’s NOT going to make me feel better to sit alone in my room looking out the window all night, it’s just that crying in public is inappropriate whereas crying in your room is okay, so that’s what I have to do.

For me, “self-care” and “enjoying the moment” aren’t things I do because they make me happy, since almost nothing makes me happy. They’re things I do because they help me feel like there’s a purpose to my being here. And I need to feel that way to continue to be here, because I’ve been close enough to the edge to know how slippery and ephemeral that belief can be, and what chaos breaks loose without it.

People say, “You should do what makes you happy.” They say, “I’m glad you moved to New York where you could be happier.” They say, “The most important thing is to be happy.”

Well, I have to measure my outcomes in other ways. I don’t care how much money I make (I won’t make much) or how far up on the career ladder I get (I won’t get very high) or how desirable of a person I marry (I might not marry anyone), and I can’t really be happy. What does that leave?

How many interesting and fond memories I collect. How many people I impact positively. How much and how well I write. How much I influence the causes I want to influence. Of course, it’s much harder to get a sense of these things than it is to get a sense of how happy or sad I am at any given moment.

It’s entirely possible that in a few months or years I’ll be taking this post back. Maybe happiness the way I define it is in my future, maybe one day I’ll stop bitterly regretting all the choices I’ve made and scanning communications from my friends and partners for signs of imminent departure. Maybe the view of the skyline, beautiful as it is, won’t be the best part of my day anymore, because there will be something better. Maybe the flowering trees along Broadway will be the nice little extras that push the day from good to great, as long as I remember to stop and smell them.

But if anything, all these years of feeling like my brain is a science experiment gone awry have taught me that happiness isn’t always an accurate or precise measurement of anything. When I’m achieving everything I want to achieve and I’m surrounded by loving friends and family but I still feel miserable, the failure to be happy isn’t a “sign” of anything. For me, mood is mostly decoupled from the things that are actually supposed to create happiness, whether that’s professional success or pretty flowers or whatever.

I can’t be happy for 100 days in a row, but that means nothing other than my brain doesn’t work that way. All things considered, I think I’m doing pretty okay for myself, despite and regardless of and, most importantly, because of the challenges my mind creates for me.

Can You Be Happy for 100 Days in a Row?
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Is All Pickup Advice Sexist?

I was reading an article that started out with the question, “Is all pickup advice sexist?” So of course I immediately started thinking about that. (I proceeded to write the following without having read the rest of the article, and when I did go back and read it, I realized that I and its author basically agree on everything. I love it when that happens.)

If you’re unfamiliar with pickup advice/pickup artists/the seduction community, it generally refers to advice targeted at straight men who would like to meet and “pick up” women for casual sex. For a less charitable explanation, see this Twitter account that collects actual quotes from pickup forums.

I don’t know if all pickup advice is sexist because I am a skeptic and I would need to either review all pickup advice or see a large representative sample of it to come to a conclusion, and that’s impossible. However, I think I can offer three reasons for why pickup advice so often tends toward sexism.

First, pickup advice is meant to be generic; i.e. “here’s how to pick up chicks” or at least “here’s how to pick up this subtype of chicks.” There’s no way to give advice on how to “pick up” an individual person because, well, people are extremely different. So pickup advice must by necessity use stereotypes and generalizations as its basis, and because all you know about your “target” is that she is a woman, the advice uses stereotypes and generalizations about women and what women like and how women’s sexuality works.

But there is no such thing as What Women Like or How Women’s Sexuality Works. Assuming that there is is sexist. And while pickup artists may still pay lip service to the fact that there are some minute differences among women, the entire thing is predicated on the notion that there are “tricks” and “techniques” you can use to “get” women.

(And that’s not even getting into the coercive and rapey elements of pickup advice.)

Second, pickup advice is, for the most part, not focused on establishing a relationship or a one-night stand or anything else that takes the needs and desires of both partners into account. Pickup advice may grant that you shouldn’t do things women explicitly say they don’t want (sometimes), but the emphasis is still on the man getting what he wants from the woman, not on having a sexual experience in which both partners have equal agency. The age-old notion of men dictating the terms and boundaries of a sexual encounter is, needless to say, also sexist.

Even when these types of advice suggest ways to please women, the emphasis tends to be on establishing yourself as Everything She Needs and a Manly Man, not on helping someone with sexual desires of her own fulfill them and feel good.

Finally, when pickup advice does center on things the guy can do to improve himself and how he comes across to others, the advice tends to center on “faking” things, exaggerating stories, and performing a certain stereotypical version of masculinity. It does not focus on genuine self-improvement, on the things that most people will tell you help make you more appealing as a partner: having real interests, being curious about the people you meet, working on developing your confidence in yourself (yes, it’s a process!), having good hygiene (guys, you wouldn’t believe how much more this matters than being “attractive”), and so on.

In this way, pickup advice is sexist because it presumes that women can be tricked into sex with cheap ruses, and because it presumes that the only way for a man to be attractive is to perform stereotypical masculinity.

Many people defend pickup advice as occasionally legitimate “self-help” for men looking to make themselves more attractive to women. I do think there are decent men in the community, and decent bits of advice. However, my take on this view is that genuine “self-help” when it comes to dating should not focus on “picking up” women; it should focus on becoming the sort of person who is ready to be a respectful, attentive, and consent-conscious partner, whether it’s just for a random one-night stand or for a serious relationship.

A big part of this that I would like to stress to any man considering pickup advice is that if everything about you screams “WAHHH CHICKS NEVER WANNA FUCK ME I HATE ALL THESE FUCKING BITCHES,” I promise you that women will stay far away. Being lonely and sexually frustrated is extremely difficult, yes. It’s even more difficult to maintain a positive, open attitude both about yourself and about your potential partners when you feel this way. But it’s important to work on developing this sort of attitude before you try to find partners*.

If you become this sort of person and you put yourself in situations where you are likely to meet people who are similar enough to you to be interested in you, you will be infinitely more successful than someone who reads every single pickup guide in the galaxy and then heads out to bars and plies women with alcohol.

~~~

*That’s not to say that people with insecurities can never get laid or get into relationships, of course. But there’s a fine line between insecurity and WAHHH CHICKS NEVER WANNA FUCK ME I HATE ALL THESE FUCKING BITCHES.

*Edit* OOPS I FORGOT A REALLY IMPORTANT FOURTH REASON. Here we go.

Pickup advice is predicated on traditional gender roles; namely, that 1) that men are the pursuers and women the pursued and 2) that men want sex more than women, who must be “persuaded” into “giving it up.”

In this way, actually, pickup artists and feminists agree on one thing: many women are unwilling to have casual sex. But they take this premise in two very different directions. Feminists argue that the problem is culture and socialization: women are taught that casual sex makes them bad and dirty, but even women who escape this sort of upbringing must deal with the social consequences of having casual sex, which leads many of them to avoid it even if they do really want it.

Pickup artists, on the other hand, often couch their observations of human behavior in evolutionary-psychological terms and view their techniques as ways to circumvent the ways in which women are “wired.” Or they claim that women who say they don’t want casual sex aren’t “being honest with themselves” and that sort of B.S.. (I’m now reminding myself once again to write an article about how creepy it is when people say things like that.)

Is All Pickup Advice Sexist?