Happiness is a choice.

Happiness is dancing like nobody is watching. Happiness is running through long grass fields, and blowing bubbles from a jar just to pass the time. Happiness is being comfortable in your own skin, and wearing nothing but a smile. Living, laughing and loving without limits. Happiness isn’t the car your drive, it isn’t how much money you’ve got in the bank. Happiness is speaking in a language that only hearts can hear. Happiness is laughing in the face of adversity. Happiness is knowing that the night is always darkest before the glorious sunrise. Happiness is falling eight times, and rising nine. Happiness is in the holding of hands, and the exchanging of kisses. Happiness is the sun that lights your soul, and the…

…Sorry, let me just grab my insulin, because I think I just gave myself diabetes.

This is the kind of inescapable, arbitrary, meaningless tack that social media seems to constantly excrete these days. It’s everywhere. I can’t scroll through my facebook feed without encountering at least five reminders of ‘the secret to happiness’.

If happiness is such a secret, why does everybody seem to have the answer?

Well, not everybody…

It’s pretty easy for white people born into first world countries to preach about happiness. It’s easy -when you’re among the most fortuitous demographic of people in the entire world- to tell the rest of the world how you managed to achieve the zenith of human emotion.

Good for you. Maybe you should go and live in a third world country, and tell the starving, impoverished people of war-torn nations that all they need to do is choose to be happy, and not focus on the horrors that constantly plague their lives.

It seems to me that happiness is a measure of success these days. It’s almost a get-out clause for people who maybe aren’t actually where they want to be in life.

So what if I still live in the town I was born in, and work for minimum wage in the shop down the road; I’m happy, and that’s all that matters. I may not be wealthy, I may not be successful, and I may be gradually coming to terms with the fact that my life is as painfully insignificant as anybody else’s, but I’m happy. Which means I am a success.

Great! If you can truly say that you’re happy, then good for you.

My dog is happy –happier than I’ll ever be– just chasing a ball across the park.

That being said, his brain is the size of a ping-pong ball.

A friend of mine went on holiday to Paris recently, and as can be expected, her facebook was constantly updated with lovely selfies of her stood next to the Eiffel tower, L’arc de triomphe, and the Louvre. When I told her she had some nice photographs, she replied:

“Yeah, does it look like I’m having a good time?”

Does it look like you’re having a good time? What kind of a question is that?

If you’re not having a good time, don’t pretend you are.

I don’t.

If people think you’re miserable, then fuck them. There’s nothing wrong with having a broad range of emotions. There’s nothing wrong with being sad, angry, melancholy, pensive, disappointed, bemused, confused, or any of the infinite and ever-fluctuating range of emotions that you may be experiencing.



And just like that, the world is right again.

But it’s the underlying social media mentality of trying to make yourself look like your life is super fun and interesting; not too different from the middle class family so concerned with “Keeping up with the Joneses” that they’ll buy a brand new car –one that is slightly better than the car that the family across the road just purchased- just to prove their socio-economic and cultural superiority to their neighbour. But underneath the tacky charade, their debts are spiraling out of control.

Beneath the charade, jealousy and feelings of inadequacy grow.

Often when I see a tacky motivational statement posted on facebook, I wonder if the poster is trying to tell me something, or if they’re trying to convince themselves.

Let’s face it. Happiness is not a permanent state. It ebbs and flows throughout life. Happiness is not a choice. No, it’s really not. Sure, you can work towards having a more optimistic outlook on things, and no doubt this will benefit you in life, in some way. But simply choosing to be happy is an unbelievably naïve –not to mention insulting- suggestion.

Go and tell somebody who is suffering from depression that all they need to do is choose to be happy. Go on, I dare you. It’s like telling an amputee to choose to grow back their missing limb. The very notion makes light of people’s situations. You have no idea what they’ve been through, no idea what they’re going through right now, and no idea how they intend to deal with it.

Sometimes, getting sad or angry is good! It’s good to express your negative emotions instead of bottling them up, it’s part of the healing process. Repressing them and just choosing to be happy can be incredibly dangerous; it’s that kind of emotional repression that can lead to suicides among young men, who feel that they have no outlet for their misery, or feel cowardly for showing it.

But surely it’s good to be content with your situation, rather than constantly striving for more?

Yes, if your situation is relatively peaceful, then it’s good to sit back and just enjoy it for a while. But let’s face it, life has it’s ups and downs.

“The landlord says the rent is late, he might need to litigate, but don’t worry, be happy.”

No. If your landlord is evicting you for not paying your rent, you need to pay your fucking rent or you could end up homeless.

See, I’ve been homeless, and do you know how it feels? Really really shitty. It’s lonely, depressing and cold. You get treated like you’re sub-human, people ignore you, because they don’t want it to bring them down.

Now I actually had a lot of ‘happy’ friends during my time on the street. Not one of them offered to help me, and not one of them tries to help the homeless now. They’re far too busy maintaining their own levels of personal happiness, climbing up Maslow’s triangle and stepping on the heads of everybody below them. They are so concerned with their own happiness, that they remain blissfully unaware of the horrors that surround them. They skip past the stories of war, famine and disaster in the newspapers, and head straight for the celebrity gossip.



…Said the crack addict in denial.

Last weekend, a friend and I took a big bag of food and toiletries to a group of homeless people living under a bridge. It wasn’t to make them happy, it wasn’t to make me happy, we did it because I understand their misery, and I wanted to allay that misery, even if just for a moment.

“Don’t seek happiness. Happiness is like an orgasm: if you think about it too much, it goes away. Keep busy and aim to make someone else happy, and you might find you get some as a side effect. We didn’t evolve to be constantly content. Contented Australophithecus Afarensis got eaten before passing on their genes.” – Tim Minchin

Tim Minchin’s happiness quote is one of my favourites. It is one of the few quotes that addresses happiness, and the pursuit thereof, for what it actually is. A fleeting feeling, which you may be lucky enough to feel sometimes, but which can actually put you in danger.

Think about it; imagine you’re trapped in an abusive relationship. Your partner comes home every day and beats you from wall to wall, verbally and sexually abuses you, controls, manipulates and belittles you.

But, instead of striving for more, you just choose to be happy with your situation. You choose to believe all of those internet-assembled philosophical statements about love, and decide to just live with it. Better yet, enjoy it.

You could end up dead.

Sometimes, it’s better to say “I’m not happy” , sometimes we actually improve our lives by getting angry or sad. Sometimes it’s better not to accept your situation, and to make progress to change it. Does this come from blind positivity? No, it comes from calculated pragmatism; knowing that your life is shit, and deciding that you deserve more.

Often, some of the best things I’ve ever accomplished (in my own personal opinion) have not come from times when I was happy. The time that I shouted at my arsehole boss, and ended up getting myself and everyone I worked with better working rights. The time that I felt lonely and miserable, so I went to a party and had a threesome with two girls. The many times that I’ve written fiction during some of the more depressing periods of my life. If I was happy all the time, I’d have never done any of these things.

See, in my opinion, happiness is not the apex of all emotion. It is not the emotion that drives social progress, or breaks the chains of oppression. I actually find that the pursuit of happiness is something of a distraction, a path we are all told we are on, even if we never said we ever particularly desired it.

I think it’s far more intelligent to accept happiness as a temporary emotion that will come and go, rather than actively pursue it. It’s not a choice, it doesn’t come when you stop seeking it, it’s just a reactive emotion like any other emotion you possess.

If happiness quotes actually did anything to make people feel better, do you know where the happiest places on earth would be?

Telesales call centres.

I’ve worked in telesales call centres, and they’re filled to the brim with grotesque happiness quotes and tacky motivational slogans.

This is because working in sales is fucking depressing. I think “Salesperson” got voted third most depressing job of all time (for the fourth year running) recently. Those happiness slogans aren’t there to make their employees happy, they’re not even really there to motivate them to sell more; they’re there to try to make their employees forget how shit their jobs really are, and plead with them not to leave.

George Orwell’s Winston Smith from 1984 was always questioning whether life was better ‘before Big Brother’ (the all-powerful oligarch that holds unquestionable rule over England). I often feel like the more someone tries to convince me to just ‘be happy’ -without actually giving me a reason why I should be happy- is about to feed me a shit sandwich and wants me to smile whilst I eat it down. It could be the middle manager telling you how much they appreciate your work, but the company is over-staffed and you’re being made redundant; or the landlord who reminds you how nice your house is, before increasing your rent.

Questioning your life quality is a good thing, it stops you from just accepting the status quo, and helps you to strive for improvement, recognise flaws, and stand-up to injustice.

If you truly believe that the reason people feel unhappy in life is just because they’re not deciding to be happy, you’re utterly naive. Go and tell that to the people dying in Syria right now; go and tell them to their face, tell them that they are not ‘thinking positively’, they’re not getting in touch with their actuality, they’re not ‘dancing like nobody’s watching’, and that’s why they’re being bombed out of their homes.

I’m not saying there is anything wrong with being positive, content or happy with your life, but I believe it’s important to accept that others aren’t happy, and maybe they aren’t super-thrilled about your shitty advice either.

You may actually be making them more miserable.

JC Axe

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