【英语生活】生活太幸福也有坏处？

Eric Felten

The United Nations hosted a 'High Level Meeting on Happiness and Well-being' in New York this week. The confab's point was that judging the success of societies solely by material measures such as Gross National Product fails to capture everything that goes into a life well-lived. True enough, but I do wonder how accurate a sense of happiness anyone can have who is willing to sit through a U.N. conference.

The Gross National Happiness business is generally taken as a rebuke of U.S. culture. Look at the trap we're in -- for all our grasping and getting, we aren't any happier! Why not be more like those happiness chart-toppers in Denmark? And I'm inclined to agree as long as we're talking about pickled herring and aquavit. (Though let me state for the record that, having grown up in Arizona, I refuse to believe that anyone can be happy someplace that is cold and dark half the year.)

Why should we care if Danes claim to be marginally more content than we? It's remarkable how eager we are to compare our happiness to that of others. And yet for all this comparative happiness anxiety, not to mention the many books about how to be happy, we don't like the idea of being too happy. We worry that all joy and no strife makes Jack a dull boy. Take an episode this season of the television comedy 'Modern Family,' in which daughter Haley finds herself flummoxed by her college application essay. She has to write on the theme, 'What is the biggest obstacle you've ever had to overcome?' Which turns out to be a problem given her life of sylvan suburban affluence.

'I can't do this!' Haley whines to her mother. 'I've never had any obstacles to overcome.'

'Well,' says her mother, searching, searching for a worthy impediment, 'you're lactose intolerant.'

Despairing of the requisite despair, Haley blames her mother: 'It's all your fault. You've shielded me from everything interesting and dangerous.' Run-of-the-mill happiness, it turns out, can be a problem -- it lacks the grand emotional drama our Young Werthers long to suffer. Or as Haley laments, 'I've lived a boring, sheltered, pathetic life.'

It's a complaint especially common to the creative class, who have long held that the biggest impediment to their arts is a lack of impediments in their lives. 'One form or another of an unhappy childhood is essential to the formation of exceptional gifts,' Thornton Wilder once said in a bout of misery-envy. 'Perhaps I should have been a better man if I had had an unequivocally unhappy childhood.' We've all been preached the benefits of Tiger Mothers and French Mothers; maybe it's time for a book on the advantages of hateful, neglectful mothers.

Adele is hardly the first singer-songwriter to credit heartache with her best work. The biggest risk to her chart-topping, Grammy-winning ways may not be balky vocal chords but the newfound happiness of her situation.

It isn't just art that demands unhappiness for success. 'A miserable childhood in the worst part of Memphis was typically excellent emotional preparation for what was required on a football defense,' Michael Lewis wrote in 'The Blind Side.' Who, among the happy, have the requisite anger and aggression? 'The NFL was loaded with players who had mined a loveless, dysfunctional childhood for sensational acts of violence.'

These are all variations on a theme -- that being happy, being satisfied, saps the will to strive, to create. It's why we don't usually expect trust-fund babies to be cracker-jack entrepreneurs. For all our happiness talk, we actually cultivate dissatisfaction. We don't want to hog-wallow in the useless sort of contentment that H.L. Mencken derided as 'the dull, idiotic happiness of the barnyard.'

Such questions are for philosophers and theologians (and yes, for each of us in our own lives) -- what's the right sort of happiness? what's the right amount? But as the U.N. conference shows, economists are eager to horn in on the action. They may not be able to predict when housing bubbles will burst, but they're prepared to unravel the mysteries of the human heart. Good luck with that.

Eric Felten

不久前，联合国在纽约主办了“幸福与福祉问题高级别会议”（High Level Meeting on Happiness and Well-being），会议的论点是只凭国民生产总值这样的物质标准来评判人们成功与否并不能涵盖构成幸福生活的所有要素。话倒说得没错，但我确实还是在心里嘀咕一个愿意耐着性子参加联合国会议的人对幸福的感觉能有多准确。

国民幸福指数（Gross National Happiness）通常被视为是对美国文化的一种反击。看看我们陷入的困境吧，尽管获得的东西不少，却一点也没有感觉更幸福！我们为什么不模仿丹麦那些占据幸福榜前列的东西？只要说的是腌青鱼和阿夸维特酒，我就愿意赞成向他们学习。不过，在这儿我想正式说一句，作为一个在亚利桑那长大的人，我不会相信任何一个在一年中有半年寒冷阴暗的地方生活的人会觉得幸福。

就算丹麦人宣称比我们稍微快乐一点，我们为什么要在意呢？显然，我们是多么迫切希望将自己的幸福与别人的作比较。尽管存在这种攀比幸福的焦虑，更别提那些琳琅满目教我们如何变得幸福的书，人们并不喜欢自己的生活太过幸福，担心只有快乐、没有奋争会让人变得愚钝。以喜剧电视剧《摩登家庭》（Modern Family）第三季的其中一集为例，女孩海莉（Haley）发现自己对大学入学申请论文无从下笔，其题目是“你曾克服的最大阻碍是什么？”考虑到她在郊区田园般的富足生活，这对她明显是个难题。

海莉向母亲抱怨道，“我不会写。我从来没有什么要克服的阻碍。”

“呃，”她的母亲在脑海中搜寻着，想找到一个算得上阻碍的事物，然后说道，“你有乳糖耐受症。”

绝望的海莉怪罪起了自己的母亲，“都是你的错。你替我挡掉了所有有意思和危险的事情。”事实证明，波澜不惊的幸福也可能是个问题，它缺乏我们的“少年维特们”渴望遭遇的宏大的情感事件。换句话说，它就像海莉所哀叹的那样，“我过的是无聊、封闭、可悲的生活。”

这种抱怨在创意工作者中尤为常见，很久以来他们就认为他们所从事的艺术工作面临的最大阻碍就是生活缺乏阻碍。美国剧作家桑顿•怀尔德（Thornton Wilder）就曾在痛苦和嫉妒中说道，“这样或那样不快乐的童年是铸就非凡的天赋的必要条件。如果我曾经历过无疑是不快乐的童年的话，或许我本来会更优秀。”我们一直听到的都是“虎妈”或者“法国妈妈”如何如何好，也许现在是时候出版一本讲述可恶的、马虎的妈妈有何优点的书了。

阿黛尔（Adele）在其最棒的音乐作品中注入了一种悲伤感，但她绝对不是第一个这么做的创作型歌手。称霸排行榜、屡赢格莱美奖的她面临的最大风险或许不是出问题的嗓子，而是她现在所处的优越的新环境。

需要悲惨遭遇去推动自己走向成功的不只有艺术工作者。迈克尔•刘易斯（Michael Lewis）在《弱点》（The Blind Side）一书中写道，“在孟菲斯最穷苦的地方度过悲惨的童年往往是成为优秀橄榄球防守球员的极佳的情感铺垫。”那些生活幸福的人，有谁会具备这种必需的愤怒情绪和攻击性呢？他还写道，“美国全国橄榄球联盟（NFL）有不少球员因为缺乏关爱和不正常的童年而曾经做出一些耸人听闻的暴力行为。”

上述这些都表明了一个主旨──生活幸福满足会削弱我们去奋斗、去创造的意愿。这也是我们通常认为家境殷实的孩子日后不会成为白手起家的企业家的原因所在。谈论了这么多关于幸福的内容，实际上我们却酝酿出了不满情绪。我们不想沉迷于被H•L•门肯（H.L. Mencken）讥讽为“牲口棚里乏味愚蠢的快乐”的那种毫无益处的满足感。

哪种幸福是真正的幸福？幸福的度多少为宜？此类问题需要哲学家和神学家来回答（尽管每个人在自己的人生当中也都需要回答这些问题）。让人意外的是，联合国此次会议显示，经济学家也迫切希望参与其中。他们或许无力预测房地产泡沫何时破灭，但是已经准备好解开人类内心的奥秘了。祝他们好运吧。