John Mark Mines

Die Again Tomorrow 

And they lived happily ever after.

All fairy tales end in the same way: eternal happiness. This is the most perfect, idyllic, and satisfying conclusion to any story. But it’s a lie.

“The happy ending is justly scorned as a misrepresentation,” Joseph Campbell writes in his book The Hero with the Thousand Faces. “For the world, as we know it, as we have seen it, yields but one ending: death, disintegration, dismemberment, and the crucifixion of our heart with the passing of the forms that we have loved.”

Happy endings couldn’t be farther from the truth. Still, their popularity endures. In vain, self-help authors swap the word “happiness” for terms like “wellness,” “contentment,” or “thriving.” Unfortunately, no one knows what these mean. Yet even children understand happiness. The deception, then, isn’t in the happiness, but in the ending.

Happiness has a secret: it’s boring. No story is only happy; rather, adventure is filled with suspense, action, and catharsis. Stories should have “fencing, fighting, torture, revenge, giants, monsters, chases, escapes, True Love, miracles,” to name a few. Happiness comes last, like a tiny period at the end of a long sentence.

Life is like music. It rises with tension, stirs the heartstrings, then relieves harmoniously. Happiness is the quiet breath between tracks. Soon, we’re ready for an encore. 

No young athlete retires after winning a first championship. Celebrations are cathartic, but ephemeral. Soon it’s time to “take a few breaths, slug some water, and get out there and do it again.”

Like the seasons, a new chapter starts after another closes. Unlike the seasons, it doesn’t have to. Each day is like a hand in poker: we can fold, take our chips, and go home. Or, we take a chance, play another hand, and raise the stakes.

Fortunately, we get to choose. Unfortunately, playing never comes for free. 

Happiness Homeostasis 

“There’s a problem,” the customer tells Chris Farley in Tommy Boy. “There’s no guarantee on the box.” The guarantee ought to be printed in big, bold lettering. “It should always be on the box, comforting you, calling out, ‘I’m good, I’ll never let you down, but if I do, I’m going to make things all better.’” 

There’s no feeling like a money-back guarantee. The reassurance is comforting. Sadly, there is no such thing as a happiness-back guarantee. Life doesn’t have a reset button or ctrl+z. If we let happiness go, it may never come back.

In a perfect world, happiness would permeate permanently. This doesn’t work. To play is to challenge the status quo. To act is to change, without the reassurance of an Uno reverse card. Once out, the toothpaste can never be put back into the tube. 

This doesn’t stop us from chasing both simultaneously. In Western culture, if someone asks, “How are you?,” the expectation is a positive reply regardless of circumstance. It’s normative for every day to be a good day. 

Not even fairy tales are this monotonous. That would be like a song composed of a single note: calming at first, then boring, then infuriating. What would the world be like without mountain ranges, rainforests, and volcanoes?

Great stories always deviate from happiness. “It’s like in the great stories Mr. Frodo,” says gardener Samwise Gamgee. These stories, the “ones that really mattered,” had moments opposite of happiness. In fact, after so much tragedy, living happily ever after became impossible.

Frodo and Sam could have stayed in the Shire. They were happy. Saving Middle Earth meant leaving comfort so far behind that, by the end, they could hardly even remember what it home felt like.

Like Sam said, the greatness of a story is correlated with its hardship. Living a good story means leaving happiness with no guarantee of getting it back. Living a great one means having the courage to abandon the expectation of happiness altogether.

Given the choice, we’d much rather chill in the Shire, smoking pipe-weed and drinking ale, than save Middle Earth. Unsurprisingly, one of those options makes us much happier than the other. Surprisingly, it’s not the one with weed.

Couch Po-Tay-Toes 

Happiness typically elicits images of leisure, luxury, and relaxation. Rarely is it associated with struggle, labor, and effort. Unfortunately, this mindset is dead wrong. 

In researching optimal experience, Professor Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi conducted an experiment to determine when people felt fulfilled. Volunteers wore pagers that randomly prompted them to record their thoughts, feelings, and behavior. He expected participants would feel the best when relaxing. They didn’t.

People were three times as likely to feel “strong, active, creative, concentrated, and motivated” at work than in leisure. In fact, leisurely activities made people feel “passive, weak, dull, and dissatisfied.” Samwise was right: the times that mattered were the times of struggle, not vegetation.

Nevertheless, worker bees were jealous of couch potatoes: those working wished they weren’t, like the Hobbits longing for the Shire at the foot of Mount Doom. When times get hard, we long for the comfort and stability of leisure. We want a money-back guarantee. But in the middle of the fight, guarantees are long gone.

Csikszentmihalyi’s work illuminates what is most important: to write our own story. The participants were fulfilled by work, not winning. Engagement alone made them feel alive. When it comes to story, the only losers are the ones sitting on the sidelines.

But if that’s true, then why do we love leisure so much?

Oh, The Places You’ll Go 

To work is to try. It is to invest, risk, and expose yourself to failure. It means letting go of the status quo; and, if there’s one thing we hate, it’s letting go.

Blame biological programming. Daniel Kahneman, author of Thinking, Fast and Slow, says that “losses loom larger than gains” because “organisms that treat threats as more urgent than opportunities have a better chance to survive and reproduce.” In other words, leisure lets us live to fight another day.

But it also entrenches us in the status quo. “Suppose you hold a ticket to a sold-out concert,” he writes, purchased for $200 though you would have paid up to $500. Later, you find out you could sell the tickets for $3,000. Would you sell and pocket the profit?

No. Most people do not. What was worth $500 to you is now worth more than $3,000. That’s the power of the status quo. Once in-hand, the scariest thought in the world is letting go.

Lovers of leisure must face a hard fact: doing nothing means having nothing to celebrate. Adventure means more bad days than good ones, and some really terrible ones. But it also means a chance to play a hand, make a difference, and write your own story.

Don’t worry, the couch will always be there. You can always Netflix and chill. Eventually, though, your story will come to an end. Between now and then, do yourself a favor: next Christmas, die harder.