Feeling Happy?
JUST when our entrenchment in the mass media and popular culture, and their manifold demands on both the collective attention and on the pocket, could scarcely be more absolute, Michael Foley, a London-based Lecturer in IT, comes up with The Age of Absurdity: Why Modern Life Makes It Hard to Be Happy, now available in paperback from Simon & Schuster.
With so many branches and forms of communication dictating what we do, what we think, wear, watch and hear apparently solving the conundrum bound up in that sub-title, we might be forgiven for wondering what more needs to be said. It is the mixed messages about how to look and what to believe that leave us perplexed about our prescribed, yet ever-fluctuating, value system, right? Well, before that assumption prevails and a book is judged by its cover, it is worth observing that, whilst The Age of Absurdity is indeed, on the one hand, a sobering primer that mercilessly critiques the eccentricities, benign and crude, of the modern condition, it is at least an infectious, instructive satire rather than some moralistic indictment revealing more home truths than we are comfortable with.
The inaugural chapter, ‘The Absurdity of Happiness’, sees Foley charting the invasive, nuanced and bewilderingly diverse box-ticking process incumbent upon the individual to prove to society they are “one of the crowd” – the material acquisitiveness, sexual adventurousness and brute independence necessary to verify him or herself as “well-adjusted”, attractive, dutifully libertarian and, wait for it, normal. Like Lester Burnham’s opening narration to American Beauty, Foley’s initial musings itemise the tensions and frustrations abundant on the road to societal acceptance, but end on the positive note that happiness initiates the purported wonder of potential, not contentment itself but the practice and satisfaction of the will.
Though there are points during this scene-setting when the poetic licence, infused though it is with impact and humour in its account of how, allegedly, “to fit in”, might leave us asking “And?”, Foley duly announces the intent of his project – to “…trawl philosophy, religious teaching, literature, psychology and neuroscience for common ideas on fulfilment.”. A multi-generic quest for the origins and possibility of happiness, then, embracing the sciences genetic and social, fundamental doctrines guiding ethical conduct, and seminal texts Eastern and Western, to ask how satisfaction can be so elusive when humanism is so incorrigibly proud. The ultimately brittle quality of that arrogance, though, is aptly summed up in Foley’s aphoristic assertion that one is more sinned against than sinning – “It is possible that a starving African farmer has less sense of injustice than a middle-aged Western male who has never been fellated.”
It would be difficult to stylistically pigeon hole Foley’s book, but “a historical analysis” might well be a valid classification, since it contains a wealth of reportage and provocative insight into cultural and intellectual definitions of happiness, and curious case studies (including claims that children who reject offers of marshmallows may go on to be happier and more successful in their adult lives!). To be sure, Foley’s book is no self-help guide, those well-meaning but superficial handbooks for “a happy life” beautifully derided in Chapter Four, ‘The Old Self and the New Science’, but that is not to say he merely commentates rather than entreats or inspires. On the contrary, he sums up, absurdity is neither to be celebrated nor scorned, but merely accepted. Life’s manifest oddities and contradictions go far in accounting for and accentuating its beauties, apparent and hidden, intuited and pursued.
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