Happiness Matters

Mr. Salvatore, my Sophomore year high school English teacher — and former Jesuit Priest — hung a banner behind his desk, above the chalk boards at the front of the class:

"It is not important to be happy, but to matter.”

He never explained it, or told us why he hung it there, the mystery being that we should look at it each day, and wonder if it was true.

Certainly, Mr. Salvatore thought it was, his mission in life being to inspire at least one of us to cast aside foolish things and “matter": make something of ourselves; contribute to society; be worthy ... of what?

Over the intervening half century since, I've vacillated on the veracity of that banner. There were times, especially during graduate school, when mattering seemed like the only thing that was important. We'd been led to believe if one were not at least nominated for a Nobel prize, we were wasting everyone's time, and denying a place at the table for someone who would be. Then, there were balmy afternoons, followed by long summer's evenings, the air soft as velvet, when test tubes and Bunsen burners were as far away as a medieval Scriptorium.

It was the lover's game of pulling petals from a daisy: She loves me. She loves me not. It is important to be happy. It is not. It is. Is not.

And now, as I can easily count the petals remaining, I see the final answer: It is. It is more important to be happy than to matter.

Part of the reason is a cheat. If one truly matters — if you are Oliver Sachs, or E. O. Wilson, Yo-Yo Ma, or Stephen King — you are probably already happy because you are doing the thing you love most. The oft-quoted line from Steve Jobs' 2005 Stanford University commencement speech comes to mind: "You've got to find what you love." I wear baseball caps with the admonition hidden inside, "Do what you like. Like what you do." It's a conspiracy.

Playing fetch with my dog, I'm happy. She is too. But, it's pointless! She wants me to throw the ball. I want her to return it to me, so I can throw it again. It's our version of the myth of Sisyphus, except instead of rolling a large boulder up a hill only to have it roll back down, we use a neon-yellow football-shaped toy. It's pointless. It's a paradigm for futility itself.

The French biologist Jacques Monod won the 1965 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for his work in genetic control of enzyme and virus synthesis. Five years later he wrote Chance and Necessity: An Essay on the Natural Philosophy of Modern Biology, a popular book whose theme was that life arose by chance alone, and that if there can be said to be any purpose in it, it is simply to make more life — an endless cycle the Greeks found suitable as an eternal punishment for Sisyphus in Hades.

And yet, Monod concluded, it's in how you look at it. Instead of Sisyphus being endlessly disappointed his boulder rolls back down the hill, perhaps he takes a moment to watch it, studying how it veers one way or another as it strikes a protruding rock, or is air-borne for a moment as it gains speed over a rise. Even when he toils to push the boulder back up the hill, sometimes it rolls easier than others. Who knows: Perhaps even in Hell, not every day is the same.

The point being, if life is in fact meaningless, happiness is the only thing you can create. It's the only contribution you can make. All else — misery, despair, sorrow, and the like — are already provided. They come with the territory. They are built into the boulder and the hill.

I suspect there is no other creature like us in the universe. This means we humans — and other animals on Earth, like my dog, Mochi — are the sole sources for what we call happiness, throughout the entire universe.

Think of it: This tiny little planet orbiting a modest star in an average galaxy among billions scattered across virtually infinite time and space is the source of the rarest thing in the universe: happiness. We are Arrakis, the Spice Planet of Frank Herbert's 1965 novel, Dune:

"The most precious substance in the universe is the spice Melange. The spice extends life. The spice expands consciousness. ... The spice must flow.”

And so must happiness.