We forget how to be happy, but children and animals remember

By David McElroy · April 26, 2019

I clearly remember the moment this picture was taken — and I remember why that day was so special to me.

I was visiting my sister and my nieces at their home in Nashville. It was an unhappy time for me — about 10 years ago — because I had gone through an emotionally difficult breakup. I was eating my way through depression and I’d gained a hundred pounds. (I’ve never managed to take all of it off.)

In the middle of that darkness, I lost the ability — at least temporarily — to experience joy or pleasure. The only exceptions to that were the joy and happiness I felt with my nieces and with my cats and dogs.

That’s Anna on the left and Katherine on the right. They were two radically different personalities, but I loved them both. They seemed to enjoy my visits, too. Maybe it was because I gave them interesting gifts. Maybe it was because we would go to Maggie Moo’s for ice cream. But I like to think they just loved me.

I was visiting that day because I had been so unhappy. Seeing them always made me feel loved and it always connected me with something which I find lacking in most of us who have grown old enough to forget.

Thursday evening, Lucy and I were in the car on a quick trip to an ATM. She was in the back seat, but she had her head near my right shoulder, as she tends to do in the car. She periodically rubs slightly against my face and I can almost hear her thoughts.

“I love you so much,” I imagine Lucy thinking. “I’m so happy to be with you every day. I can’t imagine being happier than this.”

It’s no surprise that I call her the World’s Happiest Dog®.

I know better than to think the thoughts in Lucy’s brain are really that complex or self-reflective. But something about her attitude makes me feel that this is how she instinctively feels about life.

It’s the same sort of attitude that I experience from children, for the most part. Even when things don’t go their way, they can quickly find another way to be happy.

And as I thought about this with Lucy, my mind went back to the time I’ve spent with 4-year-old Isabella this week. In her, I experience the same unbounded joy of living that I feel from Lucy. And it’s the same sort of joy that I felt back when I used to visit with Katherine and Anna when they were much younger.

I frequently say that I like children and animals better than most adults. It’s a joke, but there’s some truth in it, too.

Children and animals seem to live in the eternal “now.” They don’t seem to be held back by the past that they can’t change. They’re not crippled by a future they can’t control. They’re not worrying what other people think. They’re not crippled with self-doubt.

They seem to be happy to be alive and enjoying this world.

I know that adults can experience this, too. Every now and then, I’ve met some of them. My mother was one of them. She was very child-like in some ways, and I wonder sometimes if I shouldn’t be more in touch with that part of me which came from her instead of the critical part which I inherited from my father.

But most adults have forgotten how to experience happiness, much less joy.

Most adults are confused about what happiness is. To them, they’ve substituted an odd notion that being happy is about pleasure or “having fun,” which most often seems to involve getting drunk and doing things they wouldn’t do if they were sober.

There’s nothing wrong with having fun, although my idea of fun is very different from that of most people. There’s also nothing wrong with experiencing pleasure, although most people seem to be willing to degrade themselves or others in order to have momentary pleasure.

But fun and pleasure are fleeting. You experience them for a moment and they’re gone. They’re like candy or some form of empty junk food.

Joy is different.

Joy is transcendent. It touches something deeper in your soul. If you remember how to feel joy, it’s something which doesn’t ever fully leave you.

The more true joy you feel, the closer you feel to all of Nature. You start to realize that Creation is more than just a random collection of molecules that somehow magically came to life. You realize that there is meaning in life — not necessarily even in what we accomplish or what we show to other people.

There is meaning in life that comes from just experiencing the joy of being alive.

Children would rarely be able to articulate that. Animals would never be able to comprehend it, much less say it. But children and animals somehow understand that joy. As we become “responsible adults,” we seem to forget the joy. We seem to forget the meaning of life. We forget everything that seemed so obvious when the world was beautiful and innocent.

That’s why I enjoyed Katherine and Anna so much as children.

That’s why I’ve enjoyed spending time with Isabella this week.

That’s why I love Lucy and my cats so fiercely.

They all give me something — a window into something which I barely remember. I want to spend my life more deeply enmeshed in the joy and wonder and happiness which seem to come so easily to them.

As adults, we forget how to do that. A few of us remember — just enough to want it back — and I’m still trying to bring that joy and meaning back to my life full time.

Note: The last photo was from a visit to Nashville to see Katherine and Anna in about 2002. I can’t believe Anna was ever that tiny.

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Why are children unhappier today than in the past? And why are today’s teens at least five times as likely to be clinically depressed as teens of 50 years ago? In this sobering article for Psychology Today, a research psychologist argues that children are being deprived of the opportunity to play on their own and take responsibility for themselves. Peter Gray is a professor at Boston College who specializes in the role of play in child development. He blames “coercive schooling” and the rise of additional adult-directed activities for taking away children’s sense of autonomy and self-ownership. Gray says this leads to anxiety and depression. I went through a very traditional system of schooling, but today’s children have even less control of their time than I did. Parents who think they are helping their children by controlling their time and giving them so many well-meaning activities are hurting them instead.

If you get here from Flipboard, you might have noticed that many of the keywords with which Flipboard tags my stories are horribly inaccurate. I’ve reported this to Flipboard, but the system is automated — and there’s nothing I can do about it. If I happen to mention something in an article, the automated algorithm at Flipboard often randomly picks that extraneous item as a tag. The article above, for instance, is about making personal changes inside yourself. I compared it to the process of renovating a crumbling old house which has been abandoned, so the Flipboard software thinks the article is about home flooring. Another recent article mentioned Tom Hanks — though it was about something entirely different — so the software tagged it as being about Hanks. So if you end up here expecting to read about flooring or about Tom Hanks, I apologize. I’m aware of the issue, but it’s a Flipboard problem beyond my control. I’ll keep looking for a way to change it if I can.

Do antidepressants work? It depends on who you ask and what standards you use. But a new Danish study concludes we just don’t know. There’s no question antidepressants make chemical changes in the brain, but the truth is that doctors don’t know enough about those brain processes to do anything more than try certain drugs and see what they do. The Danish study says that if antidepressants do help, the effects are tiny. I know plenty of people who swear they couldn’t live without their antidepressants, but the more I study about the root causes of depression, the more I suspect the placebo effect is what’s going on. Although some studies suggest these drugs have slight positive effects for some people, others argue that the positive effects are tiny — and that they cause more deaths than can be explained. There’s nothing wrong with using any drug that helps with something wrong with us — especially short term — but I’m coming to suspect that whatever good SSRIs and similar drugs do comes from masking our underlying issues, not fixing them. Denial is popular with humans, so it will be no surprise if this eventually turns out to be true.

Your brain has almost certainly tricked you into making bad romantic choices. A California psychology professor writes in Psychology Today that there are four things our brains do that cause trouble: 1) We think we know what we want — but we don’t. I’ve seen this in myself and if you haven’t seen it yet, you will. The things I wanted in a mate when I was young are completely different from what the mature version of myself wants. 2) We like more choices — as many as possible. We tend to believe that more choices lead to a better selection in all sorts of areas, but the truth is that too many choices tend to lead to the paralysis of failure to choose. 3) We try to be rational by “keeping our options open.” We’re scared to make the choices we need to make, because we’re scared of doing the wrong thing. This keeps us trapped in bad situations — and better choices eventually disappear. 4) We stay with the wrong people, because we don’t want our effort to go to waste. I’ve done this. Maybe you have, too. On several occasions, I’ve stayed in a relationship that I knew was dead and needed to end. At this point in my life, I know to trust my gut. It’s a lot smarter about most things than my conscious brain.

I just noticed that I’m approaching 3,000 subscribers for this site again. Although I’ve had plenty of individual days with far higher readership, the core of any site is those readers who are interested enough to subscribe and keep coming back. In the days when I wrote about politics, I hit 3,000 subscribers at my peak, but once I shifted focus, those subscribers started dropping like flies. These days, the readership numbers are still lower than they were when I wrote about politics, but I think it’s a better quality reader — people who are interested in something more important to long-term happiness than politics will ever be. I don’t know if I’ll hit 30,000 readers in one day anytime soon — as I did one day years ago when Rush Limbaugh and several conservative commentators linked to me — but I appreciate those of you who keep coming back again and again. I can’t thank you individually — and I don’t even know who you are — but I want you to know that I really appreciate you.

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