WORK MEETINGS, A DECLARATION OF HAPPINESS?

Happiness runs in a circular motion, thought is just a little boat upon the sea, everybody is a part of everything anyway, you can have it all if you let yourself be. Donovan, 1969

I set out today to write about individualism and the inherent conflicts posed by the need to work in groups to achieve common goals. Working cooperatively, is not my forte. That is a fancy way to say "I hate meetings!".

"What's the point? What's the point?", I moan. "My time is worth money!" Still I have yet to see a corporation who functions without these monstrosities we call meetings.

I dislike working cooperatively, identifying as an outsider. Obviously this is ironic because the self-image I have as rebel and iconoclast is a clearly defined type in our society. There are probably 100's of thousands of me's in colleges all over the country as I speak.

In any case, this whole blog may turn out to be a tangent, because once I started thinking about individualism my thoughts migrated to a different (but related) theme, the pursuit of happiness. Probably because Individualism and the pursuit of happiness are so distinctly American. And I couldn't blog about either one without putting them in an historical context, lest I engage in a truly foolish enterprise.

The only method that I can identify to TRY to see outside of my cultural influences (protestant work-ethic, individualism, privilege and (mediocre) education, my expectation of happiness, etc.), is to put things in the context of history (all of this just to try to understand why I feel I have a Right to be happy at work).

However ambitious I may be, I can not, in the scope of this blog, start back with Socrates (tempting as that might be), so I'll zoom forward to 1776. When the Declaration of Independence was penned, the potential for happiness was already a given. To call the pursuit of happiness "an inalienable Right" is such strong language. It was so fundamental they had to say it was endowed by God!!! The Divine Right of Kings had gone out of vogue many centuries earlier. But apparently the divine right of happiness was alive and well (and I am NOT going to get into the whole "except women and slaves" thing I swear!).

TANGENT: Speaking of our founders, just returned from a tour of the White House and was struck by the fact that the White House was burned down by the British LESS than 200 years ago (1814). This is only four of my lifetimes ago, in other words, not very long ago at all. I wonder how many hundreds of years from now that September 11th could be called the "Middle-East Invasion" and be only a blip on a history chart and maybe even be viewed as analogous to the British Invasion. In other words, 9-11 wasn't the first time political violence got extremely out of hand and it certainly won't be the last. There is nothing more primitive or more satisfying than destroying a symbol of ones enemies (witness the rival college sports teams ritual destruction of each others mascots). Even the destruction of the temple in Jerusalem (how many times was that burned down and re-built?) and preserved, so that we may go and stand before it and pray?

But back to Happiness...a scientist named Gilbert did a little research on the subject and that research was written up in Harvard's Gazette in an article called "Scientists pursue happiness--Results not too cheerful". Hahaha.

Gilbert noted that the same fundamental things make us all happy since "We share the same brain architecture". He also found that even in the face of things that really should make us unhappy, that we will rearrange (our) view of the world so it doesn't hurt as much."

Recently Darrin McMahon has published his "Happiness : A History".

"Before the contemporary onslaught of therapeutic treatments and self-help guidance, the very idea of happiness in this life was virtually unknown", says Publishers Weekly (via Amazon).

An Amazon reviewer enjoyed McMahon's last chapter were he concludes that (according to our reviewer) "We are a culture that feels happiness is our right, and the search for it extends to recent advances in pharmacology". She almost seems unaware of the irony of her comment when she adds: "I do have to tell you, Happiness: A History, can be pretty depressing."

Maybe the reviewer needs a little pharmacology?