“Life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness,” said the Declaration of Independence. Somewhere along the way, the pursuit part got lost, somehow it morphed, somehow it seems as though we believe we’ve been entitled to it all this time.
Each year that passes, each spin around our Sun I learn something new. Some lessons are soft ones, easily held or understood, some feel effortless, easy, some, do not.
Freshly into this new year, this twenty twenty six, a day removed from Valentines Day in this still-sparkling batch of 365 days that will teach us all we’re probably not prepared to learn, I realized something…
Some lessons are ours to teach, to pass down to those we love, those we shape, those we so dearly hope come to understand sooner what may have taken us ages to grasp.
It wasn’t some lonely Valentines Day of my past that jogged my mind hard enough to wish to write of this today, it wasn’t some moment with Henry and Addie (though if I thought hard enough, I am sure I could find a dozen dozen with them, or with so many young people in this young generation), it was one of You, in a comment left on another post entirely. Kevin, I share your comment here because I believe it so important this entire essay was born from it:
“But given the reality of health, relationships, and expectations… it becomes our own burden to realize happiness in life. And as we age, this burden is laden with more and more experiences that teach us how little there is we can do for others if we don’t take care of ourselves. Such is the dichotomy of how elusive and brief true happiness can be. Or as Abraham Lincoln said; “Most folks are as happy as they make up their minds to be.”
Touching on this before in an essay I just recently wrote called The Entitlement Epidemic (click to read it below), I think somehow we’ve morphed into not just a generation that sees happiness as a passive state, an entitled benefit, but so nearly an entire species.
The Entitlement Epidemic | 1.18.26
I want to conduct an experiment, and I would love it if you played along. Give yourself a point for every one of the situations I list below. One point for each one that makes you think, “Oh God, been there.” Let’s go:
We can place blame wherever we wish, I suppose, wherever makes us feel better about the way things have gone. We can call it victim to the algorithmic promise of instant gratification, we can call it the dwindling and nearly-constant erosion of our own resilience, hell, we can point our fingers at the way we’ve been parenting the generations below us. We can say we have been confusing comfort for care and thinking that over-protection, over-pleasing, over-entitling, is love, despite the fragility it produces.
It matters not, we don’t believe we’re entitled to the pursuit of happiness anymore, just happiness itself. In life, in comfort, in need, and so often, in love.
Yesterday was Valentines Day, a day many struggle with, a day I believe has always been slowly morphing more and more into a microcosm of this entire problem. The warm expectation vs. the startling chill of reality. This holiday has become one that teaches people, especially our youth, that happiness in love is something delivered to them, through gifts, through gestures, through constant validation.
Here’s the truth that goes missing as each V-Day passes, as a million more moments pass with it:
True, sustainable love AND happiness require effort, constant effort, agency, and an almost nearly always requirement of choosing.
What becomes of us when we believe happiness is an entitlement and not a consequence of our own effort or care, our compassion or empathy? What happens when we think we’re owed this constant IV-drip of joy?
Lincoln said that most people are “as happy as they make up their minds to be,” and to me this does a few things. First, and this is a foundational idea in Buddhism, it’s up to us to choose our own response to the uncontrollable and inevitably suffering-laden events of our own lives. We have to work at this, through mindfulness, through almost constant meditation (of all kinds, not just the cross-legged OM humming that pop-culture seems to define it as), and through an outpouring of our own empathy. By choosing, we can directly increase our own capacity for this suffering, we can change its flavor, we can find happiness despite it all.
Second, we can finally understand the actual work that goes into the happiness that’s sent back to us in the end. The more we give, the more we get, though if we give to get, this somehow quickly falls apart.
In love, and this holiday serves as the direct reminder of this fact, I know for certainty that if each person in each relationship believes that the happiness they think they’ve been promised is owed, it will not work, it cannot last. Happiness is not a right, it’s a responsibility, others first and then a hopeful heart that the joy you’re practicing imparting is being practiced all the while in your direction.
As Kevin said, given the reality of health, of aging, of expectation, “it becomes our own burden to realize happiness in life.” He so eloquently explained that the more we age, the more we change, the more difficult things inevitably become, the more this burden is then weighted with more and more experiences that truly teach us the limits of this entitlement.
Finally, on this day after a day that many struggle with, I wanted to remind you of what I believe to be his most important point: “how little there is we can do for others if we don’t take care of ourselves.” We don’t have to have a love in our lives to feel joy, too. We don’t have to accept a love that is not fulfilling to our souls. We don’t have to immediately assume that alone means lonely. We can, as Lincoln said, be exactly as happy as we make up our minds to be.
So, if you’re in need of an excuse, of permission, to focus some of that all-important pursuit of happiness as Jefferson put it, back onto yourself, here it is. Consider it granted, not that you need it from me but hey, every little nudge in the right direction helps. Consider it part of the verb, part of the idea that we must build happiness, not have it gifted to us.
We must build the happiness we deserve.
We do ourselves, and most certainly we do our children no favors when we protect them from the true work that joy requires. Though the entitlement they, and so many of us feel, isn’t malice but misunderstanding, it exists all the same. Its existence plagues our ability to truly feel, to truly show up, to be resilient against the times that will always test us.
Happy Valentines Day to you all, to those madly in love, to those freshly seeking it, to those on the other side of something less than you deserved, to those finally understanding that “too much” was always invented by those who never had quite enough. Happy Valentines Day to the singles, the couples, the throuples if that’s what floats your bubble. Happy Valentines Day, and I hope for you, for all of you, that you build the happiness you’ve been waiting for all this time.
I love you all. Be good.
There’s more to the conversation I didn’t include in the essay above, I think because it feels smaller, and a bit closer to home, and I think because you all here in this community, will understand in a way maybe the others won’t.
The truth is, it’s impossible to not catch yourself wanting happiness to just be a bit damn easier. Especially now, especially from those we love the most.
I want Henry and Addie to feel the joy of being entirely themselves without the worry of someone capturing it, sharing it, using it against them. I want them to feel love without friction or worry of persecution. I want their lives to be lighter than ours have been, and right now, it is so precisely the opposite it’s staggering.
They have seen the real-time videos of people being murdered, dying in very real life, on social media. They’ve seen people drug from cars, beaten, pepper sprayed, and treated like cattle. They’ve seen more in their formative years than Sarah and I have in a lifetime leading up to now.
It’s so tempting, and I know Sarah feels this even more than I do, as I’m still just a step-parent who joined the party much later, and the instinct is so real and so constant to try to soften and smooth all the rough edges for them. To remove the struggle before it can truly teach them.
Problem is, doing that doesn’t spare them from pain, it doesn’t insulate them from anything, it just delays it awhile. It just makes them woefully unprepared for how to carry it themselves.
I think that’s the work, then. That’s the effort for the rest of us. Letting happiness be built, instead of us delivering it all the time. Learning this for ourselves, again.
For you who are here I ask you: How do you handle this? With your kids, with your parents, with your partner, hell, even with yourself?
You don’t have to have the perfect answers, I never do. But, you’re welcome to sit round this little fire, and ask together.
