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David McElroy

An Alien Sent to Observe the Human Race

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In a cold and disconnected world, it’s very simple to fake happiness

By David McElroy · November 24, 2017

“You’ve certainly been happy,” the woman said. “I can always count on you to cheer me up. You seem like you haven’t got a care in the world.”

I wasn’t sure I’d heard her correctly. I was in the middle of a conversation with someone who I see a couple of times a week. She’s bright and mature enough — at least 50 years old — to have experienced a lot of life. She’s no dummy. As a restaurant owner, she deals with people constantly — and she knows me pretty well from our frequent conversations.

We had been talking about how it’s easy to tell how unhappy some people are. She chose me as the counter-example to make her point. She said I always seem especially happy.

“What makes you think you know me?!” I wanted to scream.

It was an oddly alienating moment for me Friday night when this happened. Instead of lashing out, I just asked why she thought what she did. Then I briefly told her I’m actually quite miserable lately.

She thought I was kidding, so I dropped it.

How well do other people read you? How well do you read other people? Are most of us walking around every day just as clueless about the people around us as my casual friend is about me?

I’m not really blaming this woman. It seems like a reflection of how disconnected we are from one another in an increasingly shallow culture — and it also seems like a pattern in me that I learned long ago.

A hundred years ago, humans dealt with far fewer people than we do today. We didn’t travel as far, so we were stuck dealing with the same group of people in a more in-depth way. We lived and worked and did everything around the same few people almost all the time. We had to get to know each other very well, because there was no escape from that small group.

Today, we’re around more and more people in our daily lives. We frequently drive a hundred miles or more a day, dealing with all sorts of people who we never would have met before the widespread adoption of cars. Our interactions with others are shallower, so it’s easy to project whatever we want people to see — if we care.

Whether I should or not, I do care what others see in me. It’s not a conscious thing, but I play a role every day. Just like almost everybody else, I’m running through social scripts everywhere I go — and I’m good at it.

You see, I feel guilty if people know I’m unhappy. I feel as though I’m supposed to play a role with every person I run into. I constantly feel as though the world is a stage and I’m an actor running through lines. A good actor doesn’t reflect what he feels. A good actor reflects what’s in the script he’s been given — and he gives the audience what it wants.

I present the same face to the world every day — at least to the casual observers around me in person. I don’t remember what it’s like to be able to be more honest with someone every day about what’s going on. That’s something I long for — not to be melancholy and miserable all the time, but to be able to share the reality of an emotionally volatile life with someone who cares.

I feel as though I do what the comic above depicts. I wake up knowing how I feel — knowing the dread and unhappiness and loneliness inside — and then I put on my “happy suit” before leaving the house.

It’s really easy to play this role. It’s easy because I have years of training and it’s easy because the world is set up in such a way to allow us to hide.

I’m glad I have this ability. It’s useful. Not everybody needs to know what’s going on with me emotionally all the time. So it’s convenient to laugh and smile and say all the right things.

But it can be lonely, too.

I miss having someone from whom I can’t hide. I miss having someone who knows when I’m running a social script and when I’m being real. I miss having someone who cares about the difference between the two — and who wants the part that’s real.

It’s easy to hide. Maybe you’re doing it, too. Maybe people think you’re happy. Maybe you fake it just as well as I do.

But you can’t do it forever. I can’t do it forever.

Everybody needs a place to hide from the world, where we can set aside our pride, where we can be real. That can’t happen without someone who loves us, understands us and who wants us to be real for them.

I don’t have that right now.

For now, I’ll keep putting on the suit of fake happiness before I venture into the world each day. Until I finally have someone who wants something more real from me, this is the best way I know to live — even if that means the people around me have no idea what’s going on in my head or heart.

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Briefly

It was five years ago tonight when Lucy first rode in the car with me. She was on her way to her “forever home” with me that night, but she didn’t know it, so she was terrified. It was a much happier and braver girl who took a ride in the car tonight so we could go through a drive-through window and order a hamburger for her — to celebrate five years with me. She had a great time. If she could remember five years ago tonight, she would be proud of how far she’s come, too. If you’d like to know more about Lucy’s journey from scared dog to brave queen of the household, here’s something I wrote after her first year with me. I’m hoping this girl will have many more happy years with me.

I’ve never been attracted to skinny women. There’s nothing wrong with someone who’s naturally thin, but it’s never been my preference. What has shocked me, though, is the judgment I’ve heard from women all through my life — about themselves and others — about who’s “fat.” I concluded long ago that most women in our culture have been brainwashed to believe that skinny is attractive — and that anything other than skinny is ugly. I first assumed that I was the oddball — for preferring women with bigger and heavier bodies — but I’m coming to the conclusion that most men naturally feel this way to one extent or another. I just ran across new research by a couple of Northwestern University psychology professors that shows that women seriously overestimate how much a straight man will be attracted to a skinny woman. In a perfect world, we would all be at a healthy weight, but when it comes to attractiveness, too heavy is more attractive than skinny. At least to me — and to a lot of men, too.

Years ago, I heard a question that seemed very insightful at the time. You’ve probably heard it, too. What would you do if you knew you couldn’t fail? The question is intended to help you uncover things you really want to do, but which you’re afraid to try — for fear of failure. In an interview today, I heard the great marketing guru Seth Godin give a different point of view. He said the better question is to ask what you would do even if you knew it would fail. That struck me as far more insightful than the original version. We ought to be doing what we know is right, not what will maximize our success or praise from others. There are some battles that are worth fighting even if you believe you’re doomed to failure. Those battles are often for love or important ideas or our children. Some things are simply worth fighting for — and the truth is that you might win anyway. Do the right thing. Take the chance.

The more I understand about myself, about human nature and about the nature of reality, the more I realize I’m a radical by the standards of both Modernism and Postmodernism. Seeing the things which I’m stumbling toward makes me an enemy of many of the core ideas upon which contemporary culture is built. It exposes the culture as a monstrous lie — like a dangerous infection that’s slowly destroying what human were created to be. My “inner observer” has always known that truth was found in the ideas of the Enlightenment, but I’m slowly finding words to explain what has merely been instinct until now. The Enlightenment was humanity’s great leap forward, but shallow and arrogant thinkers for the next two centuries threw away the fruits of that achievement. We can’t go forward as a species until we go back to correct this intellectual and spiritual error — and part of that is acknowledging that our collective attempts to do away with our Creator will always fail.

I’ve come to believe that some of us — including me — aren’t very good at knowing how to be happy. I don’t mean that in the sense that happy talk and positive thinking should be able to make us happy regardless of the circumstances. I mean that some of us had so much experience with being unhappy when we were young that we were trained to be unhappy — and that being happy is an unconsciously uncomfortable thing. When I look at times in my past when I should have been happy, it rarely lasted. I believe now that I found reasons to be unhappy — and caused real problems for myself — because being comfortable and happy felt so foreign to my programming. If I’m right, this means that some of us have to do more than just change our circumstances. It means we have to learn how to accept the happiness that we unconsciously fear we don’t deserve.

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