An article in the February 12, 2006, issue of Time, bearing the title "Happiness Isn't Normal," reports on a book by psychologist Steven Hayes in which he advances the idea that, as you might have guessed, happiness isn't normal.  The book, titled Get Out of Your Mind & Into Your Life, tells readers, Time says, "not to fight negative feelings but to accept them as part of life."

Shucks.  More and more, experts are expounding ideas that I've had for years, only to be told that I'm nuts.  For example, a few years ago, I read somewhere that sleep is our natural state.  Wakefulness is unnatural; the mind has to work at it.  Now, I knew that.  From the time I had difficulty getting up in the morning to get my carcass to school on time to the present, when I enjoy naps and sleeping about as much as anything I do, I sensed that sleeping was my natural state.  However, other people spoke of sleep as something they needed, not as something they really liked to do.  Some of them seemed to greet every dawn with a kind of cheerfulness that I couldn't muster, even when I was on vacation.  They made me feel like a lazy oaf.  It was a great relief to find out that I was merely indulging in my "natural state."

It's a great relief to learn that happiness is abnornal.  I have always been suspicious of people who seemed to be perpetually chipper about virtually everything, who smiled constantly, who apparently didn't have a grouchy bone in their bodies.  In fact, they annoyed me, and I avoided them as much as possible – while, of course, secretly believing that there must be something wrong with me.   Consequently, I have had to hang out mostly with people who admitted to being at least moderately unhappy some of the time or with those who accept me as a curmudgeon by birth and therefore incapable of running about proclaiming how he has a bluebird on his shoulder, life is just a bowl of cherries, and all those other tiresome cliches.  So, paradoxically, I am quite happy to learn that at least one psychologist believes that happiness isn't normal.

Though I haven't read this book and don't intend to (it could make me less happy than I am), I surmise that it might put some people on the right path – people who think that happiness is their Constitutional, if not divine, right.   The Constitution says nothing of the sort; it gives us the right to the pursuit of happiness.  That's sort of a paradox.  Pursuing happiness can be work, and many people who think that happiness should be their right and normal state become unhappy about anything that involves work.  I have, on the other hand, a deep conviction that achieving anything really worthwhile involves work.  That includes happiness.

Now, I'm not a great believer in the "no pain, no gain" philosophy, which strikes me as masochistic.  I don't make a practice of hitting my thumb with a hammer because it feels good when I stop.  I don't seek situations that will make me miserable because, by comparison, situations that are not misery-inducing will make me happier.  Sure, I'd like to be happy all the time, but I know that I cannot.

It's all a matter of expectations.  My Pollyanna pals (yes, I do have a few friends of this ilk) who see a silver lining to every cloud – and sometimes don't see the cloud at all – treat me as if I'm Chicken Little, running about screaming, "The sky is falling!"  It's no use telling them that I'm merely a realist, that I not only accept but also expect a considerable amount of unhappiness and misfortune in my life, that we're delusional if we expect every story, including our own, to have a happy ending.  I can't explain to them why I think such a view is healthy.

I notice too that people who think happiness is "normal" and even perhaps a state that we should aspire to all of the time often go to great pains to achieve it.  They're constantly seeking something that will make them happy or, in their terms (since they're always "happy" and dare not be otherwise), happier.  They will also go to great lengths trying to make other people happy, which is an admirable goal except that it isn't often realistically possible and can often be quite annoying to people who are experiencing some unhappy moment (albeit a transitory one).

None of this means that I'm happy to be unhappy, as is sometimes charged.  It means only that I accept my feelings for what they are.  Constantly fighting our feelings or denying them can, I believe, make us terribly unhappy.  Refusing to admit to negative emotions and expecting them to go away all by themselves isn't normal.  I'm glad to know that at least one psychologist agrees with me.