Opinion | Happiness | Observatory - Institute for the Future of Education

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Congratulate me, dear readers, because after days and days of work, of writing and discarding page after page, of reading numerous essays and book chapters, I have finally been able to solidify something around the theme of happiness!

You see, the concern arose when I noticed that my news platform was sending me almost pure articles about why, where, when, how, and with whom to be happy in this life. I, of course, wondered if my sentimentality is sufficient to generate that reaction in the algorithm delivering content to me. I prefer to believe that, in reality, it happens because the topic is a hot one in today’s world, and we all have been receiving the same bombardment of texts about happiness (including you, dear readers). Finally, I have come across the term happycracy, which suggests the current subculture where we all feel somewhat obliged to be happy.

Happycracy would be to blame for the fact that we receive hundreds, thousands, or even millions of messages with texts, images, and music every day, which wish us, and even impose on us, that we must, at least, feel happy. It would also be guilty of making us feel it is difficult to find someone who listens to our sorrows without quickly changing the subject, telling us to try to overcome it, or advising us not to complain at all.

Always attentive to social “trends,” even academia has delved into the burning issue. Today, the world’s most prestigious institutions of higher education address happiness as the subject of scientific research and philosophical discussions, generating countless articles and documents.

I, in my reflections, have passed, as I say, through multiple and contradictory points of view (both mine and those of others), all based on the idea of an obligatory happiness, until, finally, I have realized that in reality things are not like this. Our obsession with happiness does not arise from feeling obligated to it. In fact, when I reflect from that point of view, at least for me, the term happiness dissolves over and over again in my hands, and when I think I have finally grasped it, it wiggles and escapes – I can’t find a way to retain it.

“Happycracy is the culprit behind all those hundreds, thousands, millions of messages we receive every day wishing us, and even imposing on us, to be happy.”

With so much agitation, as I say, I have unexpectedly arrived at a completely new conclusion, which has seemed to me to be true. (Finally! – although, just in case, before it turns out to be one more derivative of happycracy, escaping from me again, I hasten to write it here, fresh, without further development.)

It is this: It is not that now, suddenly, we are obliged to be happy, but something worse: we have ceased to be so. We have lost a happiness that was essential to us, and we are all, as orphans, inconsolably seeking its return.

Let us begin by remembering that, in its original, etymological meaning, happiness is fecundity, it is being fertile in a sense – my dictionary says – “especially applied to the earth.” If we associate the latter with the fact that the word human is, also in the etymological sense, that which is made of earth, that which is earthly, we can conclude that happiness comes from something as basic as reproduction. But the associations don’t stop there: the word shares a root (fili) with the terms daughter and son (hence filial), as if it echoed that feeling, I dare say universal (and of plant origin, it occurs to me), that to be happy is to sprout. There is no doubt that we like to act like trees: we root ourselves to the earth, we seek the light, we have a trunk, we extend our branches to the sky, and we bear fruit. The Mexican poet Carlos Pellicer expresses this as an evident key of happiness: “Something in my blood travels with the voice of chlorophyll.”)

In biological terms, happiness is the survival instinct in its reproductive phase. (This, of course, has to do with the fact that sexual intercourse climax is an archetype of happiness, but we are not going to get into that now.)

The great and terrible question that arises with all this is what will we do now, when the world is already overpopulated; when the new generations, due to scarcity of resources of all kinds, including materials, have stopped reproducing, and women have grown tired of being repeatedly reduced to reproduction and child rearing?

Indeed, for some decades now, the human procreative capacity has been called into question, diminishing that type of direct happiness. Replacing it will not be easy. Creating the happiness that nature has given us for free is highly complicated, as demonstrated by all the articles, books, and testimonies that describe happiness as something that must be strived for to achieve, but which, simultaneously, impresses as being unfathomable, completely invisible, almost – alas! – non-existent.

“We have lost a happiness that was essential to us, and all of us—like orphans—are inconsolably searching for its return.”

But the truth is that we have earned it. As with any people who become a plague, the time has come —perhaps (I was about to say hopefully) —to admit tremendous limits and halt our progress. This abrupt change entails questioning and reflecting on all the human aspects associated with reproduction, which means considering them without exception: we are beings who reproduce. (I say confidently that even those among us who have chosen to avoid parenthood recognize themselves as children). Along with the current boom of respect (or rejection, unfortunately) for all gender identities, this new wave of happycracy, which is as complicated as the former, seems to be gripping society. If recognizing ourselves as binary, non-binary, fluid, trans, and the entire range of options has tinges of a riddle, being happy has become, perhaps, an even stranger enigma, so complex that even universities (Harvard, in the United States, and Tecnológico de Monterrey, in Mexico, as examples) have resolved to solve it.

A clarification: it is not lost on me that the possibilities of being happy and fertile also have to do with creativity: human fecundity is recognized not only in artistic creation but in practically every activity in which we emerge from ourselves and create something, that is, to give birth. However, even this way of being happy seems to falter amid today’s onslaught. It is as if the original meaning of fecundity has blurred, its metaphors have also lost strength, and we can no longer understand what we mean by the idea that happiness comes from creation.

I think part of this problem lies in the fact that the same trend that exploited women, repressed genders, impoverished the “human” and brought us into this overpopulated society, forced us, little by little, to do something equally appalling: to confuse the creative with the productive. I have already written on another occasion about the chill I felt many years ago, on December 31, when I received an email from a friend at work wishing me a Happy and Productive New Year. The phrase itself betrays an unbearable contradiction: producing does not bring happiness. This is not because it is not good, but because fertility, giving birth, supposes the arrival of something radically new and unexpected, something that can amaze us and provoke unsuspected transformations. In contrast, productivity is just the opposite: in it, what is expected, what is going to be obtained, is perfectly calculated: to produce it implies repetition, exact copying, something totally planned and in no way novel. (If a product presents something new that was not foreseen, it is because something failed.)

Production, in itself, does not imply any fertility and therefore does not make anyone happy. Yet, our society has insisted on linking the two terms (and thus the concepts of subsidiary company and parent company, referring to one company that derives from another).

A product is a sterile creation. By itself, it does not bear fruit, and to reproduce it, one must manufacture, from the outside, another one like it; it is easily replaced and lacks essence. Products are creations for which we do not give ourselves either to offer or receive. That is why, for the man and woman of the productive world (Byung-Chul Han calls it “the society of tiredness”), the idea of happiness ends up as sterile as any product: Being happy has become reduced to being calm, tranquil, oblivious for a time to all responsibility and obligation. (“My idea of happiness is a coffee in silence and without rushing when I get up,” confesses the writer María Dueñas in the last article that my algorithm delivered.)

Maybe ours are not times of happiness. Or perhaps they are, but only if we admit that, if we want to be happy, we must (and here’s a new term in all this!) learn to give birth again. Giving birth, yes, not biologically, but to creations that put us through the intense and painful processes of pregnancy and childbirth, and above all, those of upbringing and love for life. (Creating requires, as my grandmother used to say, “many sacrifices.”)

Giving birth is not something productivity ever achieves, but creation can: recovering the desire to give life and resignifying it as the birth of a world that is equally fertile, new, and unexpected, to which we commit ourselves to sustaining forever—a world fragile at birth, but also full of the power of the amazing and mysterious. What is born is always a source of happiness and hope.

It is therefore a question of giving birth. Each of us knows what this means for us. I particularly associate it with my children, my love as a husband, my work as a teacher, and my political commitment to animals and non-typical people. I am happy to educate my children, to create a new love for my partner every day (if I am being sentimental, don’t let my algorithm hear me!), to enjoy life with my students in what we call “class,” when I strive and fight with myself for a diet that avoids animal suffering (and scientific experimentation as well), and when I write to convince others that human divergences are opportunities.

Now I conclude this text with a beautiful surprise, confirming what I have already said: the value of the new includes magic and mystery. You see, just now, when I was about to tell you how happy I am to do everything in my power so that, one day, in Mexico, we might have a senator with Down syndrome, my wife comes up to me and – without knowing this – interrupts me with the happy news that in our country the first lawyer with Down syndrome in the world has just graduated. She says that her goal is to be a senator!

You see? Fertility is magical creativity that spreads in happy and unexpected ways. I have no doubt about this!

Translation by Daniel Wetta