Year in Joy
In Ted Chiang's short story "Hell is the Absence of God," humans are regularly visited by angels. The angels bestow miracles, like curing disease, but also cause tremendous destruction, both in terms of physical wreckage and body count. After these visitations, humans are either spiritually and religiously galvanized or pushed towards introspection and questioning over a God that at once can cure but also cause great pain. The story doesn't definitively explain whether the path of righteousness or the path of questioning is the key to heaven, but people are regularly seen ascending to heaven upon their deaths, so the incentive to be good and just is readily visible. Heaven is certainly real.
Conversely, so is Hell. As the title of the story suggests, Hell, which is occasionally visible through transparent openings in the ground, is exactly the same as the mortal plane, except that it is in "permanent exile from God." Hell is merely a place where God does not interfere, nor adjudicate, nor even take into account. For Neil Fisk, the protagonist of the story, "the prospect of living without interference, living in a world where windfalls and misfortunes were never by design, held no terror for him." Life in Hell is aimless, but not unpleasant, because there is no meaning, no progression, and no divine interruption.
Coming off a year defined by exasperation and misery (indeed every year-end wrap-up started with a meditation on how fucked up the year was), it seemed more than ever, people were asking for good fortune and happiness in 2018. Only a few days into the new year and that already seems like a fantasy.
All this made me ask: Can we be happy anymore? What does happiness mean in 2018?
I started asking myself these questions while watching the new season of Black Mirror [Spoilers Incoming]. In particular, S4EP4's "Hang the DJ" offers a relatively rosy outlook on dating apps where even cold, calculating algorithms will eventually find us true love. What made me begin questioning happiness was not the happy outcome of the episode, where the love-lost couple ends up together despite technological interference, but rather because of the episode place within the larger context of the show. Black Mirror has become the most popular television show for viewers who want to experience the dark consequences of our technological obsession. The 'too close for comfort' premises are inherently bleak. But after having watched 4 season of the show, I reflected on the notion that two of the most talked about, critically enjoyed, and all around surprising episodes ("Hang the DJ" and "San Junipero") were in fact the happy ones. It turns out the show's creator Charlie Brooker has a heart!
So why are the majority of the episodes so grim? If all the episodes had a more resoundingly positive ending, there is little doubt that this show would not have the same impact or be achieving the same success it is currently enjoying. Brooker believes that our value set has become so dependent on technology the and search for meaning and happiness must be inherently linked to a new technology or some technological improvement.
Art plays this unique role during times of strife and uncertainty. Black Mirror capitalizes on fear, playing out various terrifying scenarios that co-mingle apprehension about our technologically-driven existence with the very real understanding of these possibilities. Shows like Black Mirror, Mr. Robot, and Westworld and movies like Ex Machina and Blade Runner 2049 beckon from the abyss and make viewers tremble as creators pull back the layers of the not-so-distant future. Meaning and purpose are no longer human-owned concepts: when the robots take over, how much of what we perceive and enjoy will be be truly ours?
In conjunction with this movement is a cultural surge towards the absurd. Almost as a rebuke of technological defeatism, and larger culture's eschewing of logic and truth, absurdity and irrationality steer fully into the weird. No where is this more evident than in comedy. TV shows like The Eric Andre Show and the perpetuation of nonsensical memes (O shit waddup?) thrive as audiences, notably millennials, indulge and find pleasure in the absurd and surreal. As Elizabeth Bruenig writes in her examination of millennial humor, art and comedy no longer try to make sense of the world and instead, "play with the moods and emotions of an illegible world." This breed of surrealism, reapplying many of the lessons from Dada and Gutai, pokes fun at our quest for meaning during troubled times not by trying to capture the general malaise but rather stating that the entire notion of meaning and happiness is pointless and unachievable. As Albert Camus writes, "the absurd is born of this confrontation between the human need [for happiness and reason] and the unreasonable silence of the world.”
Happiness is therefore the radical idea whereas its dipole, nonsense, is the norm.
"Distracted Boyfriend" lit up the meme-iverse this fall, with little explanation or social relevance.
Our search for meaning and happiness has become inextricably tied to politics. In our current political climate, small victories and moments are exactingly ripped away in heartbeat or a tweet. The Women's March was a momentous occasion, where millions gathered to fight oppression through solidarity, that sparked incredible joy and hope for the future. But over the course of 2017, it seemed more and more meaningless when movements such as the Women's March were trampled by a barrage of demagoguery from the White House and a symbiotically convivial press. The #MeToo Movement buoyed the cause, but moments of progress and uplift can get lost in the cycle. Protests take on less meaning because what are we fighting for, when those notions are so easily trampled or taken away? I'm not arguing that protests are happy or sources of joy (they are certainly a vicious struggle between belief systems), but the communal activism should provide a goal and meaning, which eventually disseminates happiness, when they succeed in vanquishing wrong and evil.
In January's edition of TIME Magazine, guest-editor Bill Gates opines that even though things seem disheartening, the larger picture and future outlook are much brighter. He argues that bad news is necessary, because "if you want to improve the world, you need something to be mad about." The increasingly maddening political sphere and news cycle has caused great a deal of strife but also painted a target directly on the systems of oppression that cause dourness. In Bill Gates' mind, the more bad things we see, the more targets we have and more opportunities to conquer them present themselves.
People desperately need meaning to find happiness. When sources of meaning are few and far between, happiness is fleeting to the point of irrelevancy or nonexistence.
As Neil Fisk discovers in "Hell is the Absence of God," you need something to strive for. When his wife dies, he juggles his anger with God with his desperation to join his wife in Heaven. Happiness is what we do with the nonsense and the depression. If we fear it or look at it exasperatingly, then the parables of Black Mirror becomes more and more inevitable. But if we allow to the absurdity to galvanize us, there is always hope for happiness.