Survey Re: The Happiness Committee
Early Spring, 2024
Into a void rush monsters, says the prophet. It’s not a problem amenable to political fix.
She calls him the prophet but he could be anyone, really, couldn’t he?—talking on YouTube about spiritual voids and what we imagine truth to be.
The LA Times this morning sent out a survey about happiness with an article about a government committee investigating ways the state can improve the measurable happiness of Californians.
She couldn’t help herself, she answered the survey, ranted, even though she doesn’t live in California anymore.
Meanwhile, the prophet talks about Lent and the need to strip away what’s on the surface to get at what’s underneath. He speaks as an Orthodox Christian. The challenge of Lent, he says, is to remember to practice our own discomfort. The women taking care of the body after the catastrophe didn’t expect to meet the resurrection. Like that, he says, he’s following a candle down into the cave. (Yes, he’s sort of quoted here, patched in. To credit him for words mostly paraphrased, see footnote.)*
Twenty centuries later, happiness is measured by polls, apparently, and ranked through a complex of calculations, nation by nation and state by state. She’s lost track already of what she wrote in answer to the LA Times survey, isn’t sure she even submitted it, the form having vanished without a trace, her rant along with it.
In her heart was objection to the idea of adding a happiness program to any government’s agenda and workload.
Of course everyone’s unhappy, she ranted. We all know we’re killing the earth—plants, water, air, each other, ourselves.
What a state can do for the sake of happiness, she wrote, is take care of the big things: Stop building and using weapons of war. Reimagine economies. End radical wealth inequality and systems serving extractivist greed. Give up belief in human, national, capital mastery of the world. Abandon empire.
The prophet says he feels the world’s problems, the culture’s problems, as insurmountable, and he’s pretty sure he’s not alone, that the rest of us think the cultural problem is pretty insurmountable too, whether we believe the problem is us or them, our side or the other.
The state, she wrote in the survey, could do more to fund what’s good and necessary: education, libraries, parks, child care, health care, housing. It could open vacant green spaces for community gardens, for orchards and trees. It could get rid of guns—all the guns.
We’re in an underworld journey, the prophet says. We are not at the bottom yet.
And she hopes, she added, that the happiness committee will recognize simplicity and solitude as aspects of happiness, rather than its undoing.
Or hopes that she added this.
Hours later, though, she has to wonder exactly how and what that committee plans to measure for the sake of making policy. The article summarizes criteria, methods, and results of a yearly endeavor called the World Happiness Report: eight of the ten so-called happiest nations assessed in 2023 are in the far north, cold wealthy regions, far (to date) from climate catastrophe and chronic war. The remaining two haven’t been as lucky, one not long ago devastated by fire, and the other—if surveyed now, she thinks, in the midst of ongoing trauma, guilt, massacre, bombing, occupation, genocide, and siege—would invalidate the whole procedure if it showed up again on that list.
When the L.A. Times sends a new link, with apology for the original’s failure and an invitation to respond a second time, “Thanks,” she writes back, as if a human on the other end will read her words. “I was ranting. I don’t know if I can call up the same spirit, but maybe I'll try.” She signs off with “Cheers.”
For the moment, though, she’s hungry, breakfast already hours behind her, recalls eating an egg, mushrooms, spinach, and grapefruit with skeletal children dying on her iPad screen.
And no, we don’t believe you can do a thing about it. Thanks, all the same, for asking.
*Paul Kingsnorth, English writer, novelist, environmentalist, former Buddhist, former pagan, controversial social critic, current Orthodox Christian, and “Abbey of Misrule” Substacker: “Empty Throne, Empty Tomb,” YouTube, March 18, 2024
“As if a human on the other end would read her words….” Says it all. ❤️