UD could feature some new happiness study every week on this blog.

Manically, university researchers pursue the condition, the question, the mystery, the much-sought-after Thing. It’s especially much talked about in these thanksgiving days.

Most recently, a Princeton economist and psychologist teamed up to analyze data that allowed them to announce the exact most-happiness-inducing yearly salary: $75,000.

As a lifelong ‘thesdan, UD assumed this referred to personal income, but in fact family income is meant. Lower than this, you’ll be less happy; higher, you won’t be any happier.

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There’s other stuff. Consider this article about the happiest woman in America (the happiest man in the world is apparently Matthieu Ricard, a Buddhist monk). She’s in her fifties, has a meaningful job, an intact marriage, just one kid, takes long walks along the beach, has friends, is spiritual, is active in her walkable, close-to-a-city community, lives in the same smallish house she’s lived in for decades, and locks away the tv.

(Oh, and on Ricard: Here’s a hilarious article in the Independent about him – or, rather about the journalist interviewing him.)

The article about the happiest woman cites a much-cited recent statistic: One in four American women is on antidepressants or antipsychotics or something along those lines. This remarkable number has generated the sorts of headlines you’d expect (‘ONE IN FOUR WOMEN CANNOT POSSIBLY NEED MENTAL HEALTH DRUGS’), as well as the equally easy to anticipate defensive reactions from depressed people (‘MENTAL ILLNESS IS ILLNESS.’)

No one denies mental illness is illness; people are skeptical about that many American women really being mentally ill. Marcia Angell and others are skeptical about the utility and safety of all those potent, side-effect-rich drugs.

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Surely there’s too much vagueness in the matter of happy and sad for us to conclude anything with much firmness. OTOH, UD takes from years of thinking about this (she’s the daughter of a suicide, and suicide marvelously concentrates the mind) at least the following suggestion: To be happy, you have to be a human being with longings, as Ravelstein / Allan Bloom puts it in Saul Bellow’s novel: ‘A human soul devoid of longing was a soul deformed, deprived of its highest good, sick unto death.’

But the longing needs to be in the direction of love – for one other person, for humanity, for the earth, for ideas, for aesthetic experience, for God – rather than, say, money or status. Recall that $75,000 family income figure. If you’re a hedgie for whom anything less than twenty million a year is a disgrace, this model anticipates that you’re not a terribly happy person because of your, well, money worries.

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UD will venture another little point about sadness and happiness. In a review of Blue Nights, by Joan Didion – an iconically anxious and unhappy – and extremely wealthy – person – Meghan O’Rourke takes note of Didion’s regrets about how she and her husband raised their daughter.

The couple assiduously [built] a vision of Quintana as “the perfect child,” with John urging Didion to come watch their daughter — “a towhead in that Malibu sun” — descend the hill toward the glowingly blue Pacific on her way to school. “How could I not have had misconceptions?” Didion writes now…. “I had been raising her as a doll.“

Outsized fantasies – of the perfect life, the perfect child, the perfect portfolio – are real downers.

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And yet, having said all that — let’s be scrupulously fair, and remind ourselves of what shits happy people can be. Let’s do it prettily. Poetically.

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The Happy Ones are Almost Always Also Vulgar

Those stilled by pain don’t mix
with the cheerful, self-assured runners
but with those who walk at the same slow pace.
If one wheel locks and the other’s turning
the turning one doesn’t stop turning
but goes as far as it can, dragging the other
in a poor, skewed race until the cart
either comes to a halt or falls apart.