A Manual of Happiness
One does not discover the absurd without being tempted to write a manual of happiness.
- Albert Camus, "The Myth of Sisyphus"
Content warning: lots of explicit talk about suicide and the mindset that accompanies suicidal ideation.
I bang on about absurdism a lot, but I haven't really put anything coherent together explaining what I mean and how it underlies everything else I endlessly bang on about. There are a couple of sonnets with some musings as an appetizer, but they occasion more questions than they answer, because, well... I tend to start conversations in the middle, I suppose? With you, and everyone else. I think of this as a conversation we're having, you and I, from which you can glean that the people who suffer me long-term are very patient creatures who don't mind being ranted at for fifteen minutes and calling that "a conversation."
So I was bopping around trying to answer some questions and express myself like a goddamn person this morning, and scanning back through Camus's "Myth of Sisyphus" essay because I reread that shit like scripture, and I snagged on the line quoted above. This is why I tend to read and watch and listen to the same things over and over, hundreds of times - I get different insights, notice different elements and interpret differently each time. I never paid much attention to this line before, but today I've realized... that's what I'm trying to do here. That's what I've been trying to make all my life, in bits and pieces and a thousand different media: a manual of happiness.
suicide with a grin
It's a ridiculous idea on its face. Who can say what happiness is? We never really know what we want, or how to fulfill all our nebulous needs. And the last person to tell you how to be happy should be a traumatized data ghost ambivalently haunting a run-down flesh prison who brings up suicide with a grin in every conversation, like good Christ, was that strictly necessary?
My friends keep this gif handy, and it's a totally fair way to respond to virtually anything I say, although it's not guaranteed to shut me up.
But of course, the more ridiculous the idea, the more I like it. That's the whole deal. That's absurdism. I want to do this because it's a pointless, silly thing to do that I am desperately unqualified for, much like everything any human has ever done, and for that reason it's beautiful to me.
I'm not sure what form such a thing should take, and obviously me running in here with a new project going, "This is the new best thing ever!" is something that happens semi-regularly, so nodding and smiling is a perfectly reasonable response to my blather at this point. We'll see how it turns out. Think of this as an introductory essay.
Drunk and Full of Bright Ideas
I think perhaps there's something worthy to be said about happiness from the perspective of someone for whom it's never been a given. We get a lot of advice about how to live from people claiming to have attained "success" in their process of personal development. It's good salesmanship, fair enough - they set up a before and after picture with you on the shitty end, and on the other side, their perfect life of whole grains, yoga, four-hour Tantric sex and a schedule full of Oprah-approved activities. The one sure way to get from before to after? Buy their product!
The people who have been the most actual help to me in my life have often been the most damaged. The people who saved my life were the people who were also drunk and full of bright ideas at three in the morning, that's why they were handy when I did something stupid. The shiny healthy people we're supposed to emulate... those people are asleep at three in the morning. They've got to get up for yoga at five, after all.
Some of the kindest, most insightful, most comforting and inspiring people I've known would have said they were desperately unhappy. Sufficient joy and purpose to keep living just isn't that tough to achieve for most people - most people whose brains produce the right chemicals, most people who haven't been kicked in the head by circumstance or other humans. Neurotypical people don't have to analyze the reasons they're still alive. They don’t have to come up with something bulletproof that stands up to endless interrogation. They find it weird and disturbing when you try.
But if you've ever been suicidal, you've stared straight at the fact that you could check out at any time. That understanding… it’s a paradigm shift, a reorientation of your perspective on the world that never truly leaves you. The first time it occurs to you, like all bad ideas, it seems like a sudden panacea, the sword that cuts through all the Gordian knots in your life. Long before it seriously occurred to me, I lived with a man who'd attempted suicide twice before I met him, and tried another three times during the years we were together. He told me once that the days after he decided to kill himself and made a plan for it were the happiest days he'd had in years. All his fear and regret fell away, nothing mattered, the world felt bright and real and precious. He concluded from this that suicide was a good idea. This was, let me at this point emphasize, where he was very wrong.
a sense of existential freedom
What my undead friend was experiencing but misattributing was a sense of existential freedom. He confronted the fact that continuing to live was a choice, that all his misery and all the pains of his life were in his power to simply reject. He chose to reject life, and thought the sense of freedom and peace he then felt came from the rejection.
But ending our suffering by checking out of it isn't control, is it? It's surrender. It's letting the meaninglessness of the universe make him meaningless. It's admitting that he thinks his life is worthless unless something external grants him value. It’s admitting that he’s not willing to keep trying unless someone can promise him he’ll win.
So to truly control his life, to maintain that state of happiness, of existential freedom that he felt having made a choice to end his life... how could he have done that? If it wasn't the rejection of suffering that made him feel stronger than his burdens, at peace with his failures... what was it?
It was making the choice. Choosing consciously to live gives us exactly the same control as choosing consciously to die: ownership of our fate. It's not about what choice we make... the choice is the thing. The fact that we have the choice, and know it, and make it consciously, gives our lives all the meaning they will ever have.
only we can choose to die, rather than simply be killed
only we can choose to live, rather than simply be alive
An illustration: animals don't, for the most part, commit suicide as a way to end their suffering. (The lemming thing is a myth.) There are parasites that can induce self-destructive behavior, and many animals will give their lives for their young or group in an altruistic way, but these aren't suicide the way humans refer to it. The animals who have been seen to behave self-destructively in response to emotional pain have largely been animals with deep bonds to humans - animals we've trained in conscious emotional behavior.
What I'm saying is: choosing to continue living is a privilege only conscious beings have. Only we can choose to die, rather than simply be killed. Only we can choose to live, rather than simply be alive.
You can't control the misfortune you encounter, but if you act like you can't control it, you will live the life of a victim and a martyr. You will spend all your days mourning the control you don't have and the life you could have led if only the world didn't insist on fucking you so hard, so specifically, so personally. The only possible agency you can get in your life is by reacting to things as if you can positively affect the outcome, by pretending that your actions are meaningful and your perspective has value. You have to live like you have free will, because if you genuinely believe that you don’t, nothing matters anyway.
lunge at your life like a rabid wolf
Happiness is a matter of choice. Just choice, not a choice, any specific choice, but just choosing to be here. Choosing to keep choosing. Choosing to commit all your attention to the experience you're having each moment and act with the agency you have, rather than raging at how little you can control and what you wish was happening instead. Regardless of what's going on, y'know, try to act like you want to be here on earth, instead of acting like a four-year-old somebody dragged along to a boring cocktail party.
I know it sounds like what I'm saying is a complicated retread of "accept your fate, be happy with what you have and you will find peace, grasshopper," but that's not it. I don't want you to accept your fate. Do not go gently into that good night! I want you to fucking rage at the dying of the light, and laugh at it, and give it the finger while you light more fires. I want you to realize that the only joy you'll ever tear from life is going to come when you lunge at your life like a rabid wolf, okay?
Every time some new bullshit knocks on your door, another bill in the mail, another breakup, another war, another ass-ache, I want you to grin like a fucking pirate with a knife in his teeth and start looking for opportunities to express yourself in this situation, to respond how the passionate, defiant creature inside you wants to respond. You think it's impossible to feel like a badass existential warrior when paying bills? I call that cowardice, my child. That's you saying that in order to be strong, in order to be brave, in order for you to be worthy of your own admiration, you need big, easy, cartoon villains to fight, shiny rewards to win, unequivocal victories to brag about. That’s kids’ stuff - you’re beyond that now, on to foes more complex and problems with more potential solutions than “sword, meet Evil!” Do you really need a politician to wear a scary mask to tell that he’s a bad guy?
That's you forgetting that being alive to pay those taxes and apologize for those fuck-ups is a choice you made, and you're making it again right now, every second you don't jam a pencil into your jugular. You picked yourself and your life, your bills, your bullshit, you decided that they were better than an eternity of utter nothingness. You chose to be here... and then you chose to drag ass through life like it's a consolation prize? Why, because now that you’ve seen the electric bill you think the void might have been the better option after all? Make up your goddamn mind, in or out. Get busy livin’ or get busy dyin’.
And openly I pledged my heart to this grave and suffering life, and often in the consecrated night, I promised to love her faithfully until death, unafraid, with her heavy burden of fatality, and never to despise a single one of her enigmas. Thus did I join myself to her with a mortal cord.
- Me rewriting Camus quoting Holderlin’s ‘Death of Empedocles’, to suit my purposes
Choose Again
Life's like a choose-your-own-adventure book. What if somebody caught you reading a book like that and said, "Hey, why do you care about that? What's the point? All the endings are written down anyway, why go through all the rigamarole when it doesn't really matter what you choose?"
You'd be bewildered. Somebody who'd say that fundamentally doesn't understand the fun of a game, of any activity where we have a modicum of agency and a lot of inflexible structure. Of course the ending is predetermined, nobody cares about that - the fun part is participating, getting to flex the little power we have within the confines of the system, to see what we can do. The fact that you get to decide anything is the whole point, the only point, that’s what makes it interactive! Choosing is all you can do, so if you're going to read the book at all, it's the most important thing you can do. If you're not doing it consciously, you're not enjoying the book, and it's because you decided not to participate.
In this book, you can't go back and read the other endings you passed up. All you can do is choose. So choose. And choose again. And again. Pay ALL your attention to how the world is, not how you want it to be, not what you hope or fear. Then, with the little control you have... make the story more interesting any way you can. Look hard at the world, believe that you can change it, laugh at the despair in you that tells you how stupid that is, and start trying stuff. Make a decision, see what happens, and recalibrate. Stop trying to debug your code without ever running it. Step on the gas and let’s see how far this thing goes!
A man said to the universe, “Sir, I exist!”
”However,” replied the universe, “That fact has not created in me any sense of obligation.”- Stephen Crane (1871-1900)
By being here and putting up with the bullshit, you assert tacitly that being here is worth it, that being you has meaning.
When you become conscious, when you think about your existence, you declare: "I'm here!"
The universe responds, as it always does and always will: "No one cares."
Next time the universe tells you this, like the next time you turn on the TV, repeat after me:
"I care. And I can care, which most things in the universe cannot. I think, therefore I am. The more shit you throw at me... the more I think, the more I care, the more chances I get to try new things, change and grow, discover stuff I don't know and see things I haven't seen. I choose to be here, which makes being here important, because it was my choice. I care, and that's cosmic miracle enough."
