The Glass is Half Full of Sour Milk

I am having a minor crisis of my conviction. For years I have tried very hard to believe in the intrinsic goodness of people. This assumption is getting harder and harder to find corroborating evidence of support. It is not that I have crossed over to the dark side and think everyone is a deceitful, selfish, mean-spirited purveyor of degradation and boom-de-boom devil worshipping music making me want to stockpile bottled water, batteries, and Pop-Tarts in my basement, duct-tape plastic over my windows and buy a Rottweiler with a disposition making Dick Cheney look like Mr. Rogers. Nope, I just think too many people are horribly unhappy.
A theory was proposed by my wife stating babies are born knowing how to express unhappiness. (Crying happens before they do anything else.) On the other hand it takes weeks and focused effort by the parents to get the little beggars to smile. (Of course, when they do it would even melt the heart of the above mentioned Rottweiler.) Many babies don’t smile until they are two months old. That means eight weeks of going from overtly cranky to merely placid before genuine signs of happiness appear.
I have read a variety of books by philosophers, psychologists, gurus, and comedians (carefully omitting Dr. Phil) in search of what happiness is and how to make it more prevalent. In “Authentic Happiness” Martin Seligman discusses the evolution of different emotions. He makes it clear that both negative emotions and positive ones have very real benefits. The negative ones (fear, sadness and anger) are the first line of defense against external threats. Of course our ancestors with well honed fight or flight instincts were better equipped to survive and create descendents.
Picture this Caveman A, let’s call him Carl, is a depressed wheel-maker. He is constantly scared and hasn’t smiled since the early Pleistocene. Caveman B, known as Mel, is a happy cave painter best known for the very life-like mammoths he creates. He is cheery and laughs frequently. One day the two of them are sitting by the bank of the river. Mel is cultivating his positive feelings observing small mammals cavorting in the short grass. Carl is cultivating his negative feelings by frequently jerking his head from side to side looking for signs the ice age is coming back. When Mel turns to point out a particularly cute Crusafontia (prehistoric squirrel) to Carl he does not see Carl. He sees an Arctodus, a.k.a short-faced bear (the face may have been short but the bear was six foot). Thus the pessimist, running away Carl, was alive and the optimist, sitting and smiling Mel, was a prehistoric version of Purina Bear Chow.
Mr. Seligman and his Ph.D. go on to say that our positive emotions also have an important purpose in evolution. They broaden intellectual, physical and social resources. Happy people appeal more to other people. Happy people are more open to new thoughts and ideas. Happy people are more tolerant. Happy people are more altruistic. Happy people have fewer health problems like issues with the heart. There is another Dick Cheney joke in here somewhere, but I have already used up my one per column allotment.
The general mood of a person can make a big difference in the levels of success he finds in certain tasks. Seligman says critical thinking is best done in a less happy mood. So doing your income tax while depressed is actually more likely to mean you’ll do it right. That’s convenient. But deciding who to marry should be done whilst one is in a good mood. That’s easy to understand. Happy Guy, being an optimist, gleefully thinks the gorgeous blonde in accounting is just right for him. Depressed Man, being a pessimist, looks at the cute red-head in human resources and thinks she would never be interested in him so he might as well quit his job, move to a cabin in Alaska and write his manifesto on how mankind is doomed due to the mass consumption of carbonated beverages and the fact that Jimmy Kimmel has his own television show.
It seems to me both pessimism and optimism come in handy. Therefore, I have designed a new philosophy. I call it Pezoptimism. The theory here is happiness needs to be doled out on a regular basis in small easy to digest portions preferably by swinging back the plastic head of a cartoon character and having the piece of happiness drop into our hands.