1-800-HAPPINESS: Call Me
To some people, there are few sentences more terrifying than “This is going to involve some math.” For some, even opening one’s phone to discover that your wallpaper has been changed to “You are grounded. Mom was here.” or hearing: “There is a tree somewhere that is growing the wood of your coffin.” fail to induce the same sheer terror that is caused by formulas that want you to replace their exes and solve their problems. Granted, this doesn’t describe me (y would anyone hate the great tan that sin/cos gets you?) but it still appears that most of us, even those who claim to fear the malice of mathematics, live our lives convinced that certain numbers can bring us happiness. Granted, for most of us, this number-driven happiness will not arrive as a result of solving the Bombieri–Lang conjecture. Our numbers for happiness tend to be haphazardly established number “goals,” that are set based upon little more than a stab in the dark, but that stick in our minds enough to feel like a stab to the heart every time we nearly miss them.
Obviously, I’d be as happy as that girl sitting over there is if I had that same GPA. He knows he’ll stop being bothered that he couldn’t care less about his chosen career field when he finally starts making that six-digit salary. She knows she spends too much on clothes, but we can all see that she’ll be satisfied as soon as she has enough clubbing dresses to make every day of the week Tequila Tuesday. Duh. We’re all sure happiness is coming, but we don’t seem to think it’s just around the corner. (Although who ever really is around the corner when they say they are. Do we really expect our friends to believe it takes half an hour to walk one block? Just say you’re still sitting at your kitchen table, in your pajamas, drinking coffee, and thinking of potential catastrophes that could happen to you on your hypothetical two-minute walk to that meeting.) Instead, our upcoming guaranteed eternal bliss is a figure just around the number line. That dress size we were in high school. That salary. That goal weight. A four-bedroom house with three kids and two dogs. It could be a thousand likes on Instagram, or some long-coveted number of followers. Your number for happiness might be some holy trinity of Ivy-League acceptance letters or a “perfect” set of measurements. It could be a square-footage of a home, a GPA 0.01 higher than your older brother’s, a 26.2 mile run logged on your fitbit, or even the number of that cute guy with a charming accent and a stylish haircut sitting three tables away. It seems the math-haters run from chasing 4.0 GPAs to chasing a four-bedroom home with a four-door Mercedes, to dreaming of being a proud member of the four-comma club in retirement. We’ll save our happiness for the dream day, when all the figures fall in place - it’s sure to come someday. In a few years. When we grow up. At 20. At 40. When we’re older. In our Golden Years. Yesterday, I saw the most hopeless look I’d ever seen in the eyes of a middle-aged man sitting across from me on the subway. Perhaps too, ran from being ruled by his grades in high school trigonometry to being a slave to his numerical ultimatums for life satisfaction.
Mr. Michael Simmons steps into the Gristedes 6 blocks from his house. Of the 86 years of his life, he’s lived in that house for 64 and shopped at that Gristedes for 63- he and his wife went through an Earth Organics phase for a year, then realized $1.50 was just too much for a carrot. He pulls a shopping cart out of the line, and further proves his own theory that each time he does that, the cart seems just a little heavier, and that god awful clanging sound seems, well, perhaps just a touch more god awful. He walks into the dry goods aisle. The bulk prices of dried rice, beans, and corn have gone up 67 cents over the past decade, the ten years since, well, in any case he honestly isn’t sure whether the fact that he’s been remembering the bulk price of dried rice for ten years is more pitiful than the rising price itself. Either way, he throws the habitual three 20 OZ bags into his cart. Beans, rice, corn. His own sad little three sisters. He rounds the corner into the beverages aisle. Carton of orange juice. He sees the lemonade: large cartons of water, flavour, too much sugar, and some some sort of yellow (was it Yellow 6?) There are also of course those small glass bottles with “french, fresh, ‘au naturale’ sparkling lemonade”, with pulp, too. He thinks back to those lemonade parties he and his wife always had on their veranda on cool summer sundays, the mornings she spent getting ready, bright yellow lemons covering every inch of the kitchen counter, her old juicer whirring, and her, wearing one of those large floppy garden hats, laughing and looking like an old-time movie star. He half-heartedly tosses a sparkling, pulp-filled “limonad” into his cart - he’ll see if it’s worth the $6.50.
His doctor’s always telling him to drink more water. Smirking, he walks right past the overpriced bottled water case. Evian spelled backwards is naive anyway. Lastly, into the canned goods section. He runs his hand along the second-from-top shelf, tipping 7 soup cans into his cart: minestrone, Road Trip Chili, Grandmother’s Chicken Noodle. Not that he’s got any sort of road trip planned these years. Certainly no Grandmother around, either. But at least he’ll have something warm to fill his belly over the 5 O’Clock News. Walking out, he grabs some cookies in case the landlord stops by to brag about that time his son graduated law school 5 years ago. On his way to the cashiers, he walks past some cereal on sale. 2 for $5. Sugar Smacks. He hasn’t had those since he was 5…
Little Mickey stops wailing, leans back on his red chair, knocks over his cereal bowl, and says “I don’t care.” Clearly, NOW Mommy and Daddy will see how mad, mad, mad he is and he’ll get his Thomas the Train set back. He’s confident- he’s seen his cool teenage brother use the “ I Don’t Care” tactic many times. Admittedly, he says it with his arms crossed, and finishes it off by rolling his eyes- Mickey hasn’t quite figured out how to yet- but clearly his brother always gets what he wants; he’s older, his life must be perfect.
Unfortunately for Little Mickey, his foolproof plan doesn’t quite work. Exasperated, but trying as hard as she can to hold back a grin, his mom holds his train behind her back and sends him to the room he and his brother share.Why does his brother always complain about it? He sits on the carpet and flips through Dan The Great Brave Fireman, he can just see himself, in that mystical time of “grown-up,” taller than all the other boys, with big muscles like daddy, riding in that big red truck, fighting the scary fire, holding the axe, saving lives and being in “the papers.” Someday. Meanwhile, he’ll just have to rummage around in his brother’s drawers for entertainment -there are always odd things in there. Big headphones that get really loud, a driver's license with a fake birthday, and a crumpled exam with “C+” written on it in red pen. There are ads for rock concerts, and a few pages ripped out from the “Intimates and Lingerie” section from the Macy’s catalog their mom gets in the mail. In the future, when he’s 16, he’ll have all of that, and more, too. Older-Little-Mickey will be unstoppable.
Mick crosses his arms, leans against the garage door and exhales. He’s never smoked a cigarette, but he’s sure that if he were, he would have blown the smoke out just like that. Cool. Nonchalant. No coughing fit. His friends will be meeting him soon to play that new first person shooter game he’s been pretending to be into for the past month- it just came out on PC. He subtly adjusts his hair and his new cap and looks at his reflection in a car window. He wouldn’t dream of mentioning it, but he half-hopes that someone, someday, will offer him some small nod of acknowledgement for the vintage band tee he dons with pride. It frustrates him that only his dad’s friends appreciate his music taste, but he knows full well that his Chris from AP chem won’t recognize Emerson, Lake, and Palmer. His friends might say something about the cap, at east. It’s expensive - brand name. He’d spent money he’d promised his mom was for a field trip on it.
Maybe some Call of Duty will be a nice break after all- he’s just gotten off the phone with his grandmother. She doesn’t like his gelled hair. Why doesn’t he know any nice girls? He has no plans for the future- doesn’t he know his grades aren’t high enough? Does he drink‽ And good lord, why does he always wear THOSE pants? She doesn’t get it. It’ll all work itself out at some point, probably. He’ll get into college, get some job in some office somewhere with a vague-sounding name like “Amerisource.” Doesn’t she realize that school is hard? So many tests, grades, expectations. He stayed up so late last night writing a paper, and then in the morning dealt with a lecture about how he “really shouldn’t drink so much coffee.” Things are different now from the way they were back when she was 16. She keeps telling him he should be more romantic; all the guys at school say emotions are stupid. Fuck all the bitches, get all the money. At least, that’s what he’s supposed to want, probably. To be the cool guy with a good job, money to spend and girls to spend his time with. 30, that’s where it’ll be at.
Michael leans against the wall near the door of his bosses office. He’s sweating profusely- he hopes it doesn’t show through his sky blue Lacoste. It’s far too hot to put his suit jacket back on. He can practically feel nervous sweat stains forming - Old Spice Extra Protection better not betray him now. His boss is asking to “see” him. God, why didn’t he email that report in an hour earlier? But then it wouldn’t have been quite as good- he’d stayed up until 3 AM making it look perfect. He’d fixed his boss’s typos, made all the graphs extra clear, and spent fifteen minutes deciding whether to use Arial or Futura Bold. Popping a mint, he hopes the third cup of coffee doesn’t show on his breath. Didn’t he promise himself he’d stop drinking it at some point? He sighs and sinks into a chair. God, he needs this promotion; he needs some step up in his career. Just some proof that he’s doing something right. Then, he could really have it all figured out.
Maybe he should stop complaining. He’s got a decent salary, a gorgeous wife, and a nice place not too far from the city. Maybe even a kid someday. If only he could climb just a little higher up the ranks, save up a little money for retirement. Sixty five, that’s when he’ll really have it all. Just him and Elizabeth. No more work, emails, bosses, meetings, awkward corporate headshots or tense phone conference calls. Finally relaxed: no need to worry about being at Socially-Acceptable-Level-Of-Successful Co. from sunup to sundown, and then coming home to sit in the kitchen with his laptop late into the night, drinking Miller Lite or wine from a box. He could have adventures, maybe travel where he’s always wanted to go, or even just sit on a veranda and talk- his wife’s a wonderful woman. His happiness, their happiness, it’ll all last forever.
The number lines of salary, weight, property value, and social media stats aren’t the only number lines we measure our life lines alongside. In a life where we each have a credit score, a net worth, a Starbucks loyalty points score, and an Uber rating, it’s almost impossible to avoid rating every year, day, and hour of our lives on some sort of value scale. How much “better” or “worse” they are from a run-of-the mill, “5/10 would recommend” day - the sort when you make it on time to work, but get a little ketchup on your tie at lunch, find that your favourite coffee shop has raised its prices, but get a really nice hug from your wife when you come home. Was today worth getting out of bed and putting pants on? Well, let’s see - was it better or worse than a “Meh?”
This sort of daily ranking system is quite natural, and that makes perfect sense - comparing data to a mean is probably the most intuitive form of statistical analysis. There is, however, one notable problem with treating our ratings of the quality of our lives the same way we calculate BMI and SAT scores. As anyone - math hater or not- who has made it through a basic statistics course knows, the sum of deviations from the mean in a data set comes to...zero. And, I’m not sure about you, but the prospect of living a life comprised of events, days, months, and years whose total value comes to zero is not exactly appealing to me. So let’s make an adjustment here. The amount of happiness in our day-to-day lives is going to vary - that’s to be expected. But let’s take a moment to think of how those of us who get our kicks from data sets (I’m a member of the cool kids club, I swear,) go about calculating the Mean Average Deviation; here’s a hint - it involves the use of Absolute Value. Don’t be MAD at me for getting technical - I swear this will come out in your favour.
To judge how something compares to average is easy, but why not take a little something from the might of mathematics and find a way to turn the negatives into positives? We’ll all have days that are, well, crappy. You spill coffee all over your desk, you’re thirty minutes late for an important meeting, you have no milk for your 3-AM bowl of cereal, and you get reamed out by your wife for not noticing the new ash-blonde lowlights she spent three hours in the salon for. It might get even worse. We all someday face the truly difficult, terrible things in life: loss, tragedy, illness, natural disasters, break-ups, and massive disappointment. But these occurrences don’t make us any less as people; if we grow from them and become stronger, perhaps we ought to acknowledge the bittersweet value they add to our lives.
Now, I’m not going to perch on my MacBook Air of a soapbox and tell you to walk down New York City’s streets grinning ear to ear (that just breaks all the rules of big apple etiquette) and throw a party every time you miss an opportunity. I’m merely proposing that, perhaps, if we were to start replacing our negative perspectives of our lives with positive ones, we may start to get more positive results. It may be inevitable that we will judge all of our experiences and track the degree to which we’re “living our best life” with more vigilance than we millennials track the value of Bitcoin. A hike involving many high mountains and deep valleys make be more difficult than a flat one, but I’d forego walking a lifetime of miles down a flat highway anyday. If my absolute lack of curves motivates me to figure out the Grothendieck–Katz p-curvature conjecture, you know, I’ll take it. We’re all on a life journey together, and I’d rather say thank you for the values of the highs and the lows than to for my life to be “normal” and regress to the mean. I can’t promise that a positive attitude will solve all your problems, but I promise that in the worst case, it will annoy the bloody hell out of enough downers to make it worth it. Happiness might not call every day, but I’m pretty sure her number is an absolute value.
