The pursuit of happiness

Am I happy? I spend a lot of time trying to figure that out. But maybe that's not right. You see, I have these three questions about happiness:

1. Is happiness all it's cracked up to be?
2. Is it good to be happy?
3. Is happiness the most important goal in evaluating our lives?

For a person who's never really been all that happy, question number one has an obvious answer: No. I can live a worthwhile and satisfying life without really being happy. In fact, I think I can count the times that I've really been happy on one hand, and I don't really believe those who say unequivocally that they're happy. It's possible that I have a distorted view of happiness, that I wrongly equate it with passivity and settledness and maybe even a sort of apathy about the world. That's the view that Ivan takes in the central soliloquy of Anton Chekhov's short story, “Gooseberries”:

"Apparently those who are happy can only enjoy themselves because the unhappy bear their burdens in silence, and but for this silence happiness would be impossible. It is a kind of universal hypnosis. There ought to be a man with a hammer behind the door of every happy man, to remind him by his constant knocks that there are unhappy people, and that as happy as he himself may be, life will sooner or later show him its claws, catastrophe will overtake him--sickness, poverty, loss--and nobody will see it, just as now he neither sees nor hears the misfortunes of others. But there is no man with a hammer, the happy man goes on living and the petty vicissitudes of life touch him lightly like the wind in the aspen tree, and all is well."

Do happy people really disregard the poor and suffering? Are they self-absorbed? That bears on question two, which asks whether it's good to be happy. I'm not sure that Ivan's view in Chekhov's tale adequately and accurately represents happiness. There doesn't seem anything wrong with the sort of happiness implicit in reuniting with old friends or watching your favorite football team win the Super Bowl. A world with joyful and delighted people is, I think, a good thing. They're more creative and motivated. As Kant wrote in the Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals (4:418), "Happiness is not an ideal of reason but of imagination."

Is happiness a worthy goal in life? Well it's certainly not the most important goal. In fact, I wonder if we should even treat it as "goal" at all. Zach quotes Yitz Greenberg who says that "if you look for happiness, it will elude you. Happiness is the by-product of living a meaningful life." The question is an area of great interest to social psychologists. One study suggests that increasing wealth has not made people happier (remember money can't buy happiness?). Another study categorized subjects as either "blissful" or "contented" and found (according to this article) that "Blissful people were more likely than the merely Contented to have rich and stable intimate relationships." The Contented, on the other hand were more highly educated and more politically engaged. For me, anyway, I think I'm content to be merely content, and I'll stop worrying about it.

An eloquent endorsement

It's more eloquent than Oprah, John Kerry, or even Ted Kennedy. I was of course excited by Kennedy's, whose blue state support means a lot when combined with the endorsements of red state Democrats Missouri Sen. Claire McCaskill, and Kansas Gov. Kathleen Sebelius.

Here's Nobel laureate Toni Morrison's letter of endorsement:

"Our future is ripe, outrageously rich in its possibilities. Yet unleashing the glory of that future will require a difficult labor, and some may be so frightened of its birth they will refuse to abandon their nostalgia for the womb."

Wow.

Of course I'm still waiting for the endorsement of one extraordinary person, the former 22-year-old intern who on November 15, 1995, lifted her jacket to show the President of the United States the straps of her thong underwear. If that's not courage, I don't know what is.

Liar liar pants on fire

Is it ever okay to lie?

Seems like a dumb question. But I’ve been thinking about it in the wake of a report from the Center for Public Integrity that recorded 935 lies by President Bush and his administration about the threat posed by Saddam Hussein. Some lies, of course, are worse than others. Compare Clinton's “I did not have sexual relations with that woman, Ms. Lewinsky” with Cheney's “there is no doubt that Saddam Hussein now has weapons of mass destruction.” (Or more recently, Bush's escalation with Iran, despite the intelligence reports.) Bush distorted the truth in rushing to war in Iraq. That was the worst kind of lie. It killed hundreds of thousands of people, shifted money from domestic priorities, and destroyed US standing abroad.

How about other sorts of lies? Most people think of themselves as motivated by principle, meaning: Lying is a form of deception; deception is wrong; we shouldn’t do things that are wrong. Ergo, don’t lie. Yet everyone knows it’s not that simple, that deception may not always be wrong, and that there are multiple ways to prevaricate and embellish and hide the truth. Before passing judgment, we want to know the intent of the person who's lied and the consequences of that lie.

Lying comes up a lot in medical institutions. Is it ever okay for doctors to lie? To tell the patient’s family that the death was peaceful when it was in fact horrific? To hide from the patient’s mother that her seventeen year old daughter had an abortion? Here are three of the most obvious reasons not to lie in the medical setting, as I count them: (1) A lack of honesty in the medical setting can compromise the trust between doctor and patient. (2) An incomplete medical record may mislead future doctors and hinder future treatment. (3) Dishonesty may violates the contractual relationship with payers (whether public or private). Dr. Martin Donohoe posts a quiz that illustrates some of the nuances of truth-telling in medicine. I've pared down the quiz.

If you were a physician, would you “lie” in the following situations?

1. A 26 year old male presents to the ER after crashing his vehicle and suffering a radial fracture. His blood alcohol level is 0.17. When he sobers up, he asks you not to report him to the DMV, as he is afraid of losing his license. Do you report him?

• yes
• no
• only if he hit another vehicle rather than, say, a lightpost
• only if someone else was injured in the accident
• if he’s a pizza delivery guy, and needs the job to support his sick infant

2. A 33 year old female is admitted to the ICU with severe pneumonia. An HIV test is positive. She dies after 3 days. Her parents request that you leave the diagnosis of HIV off of the death certificate. Do you accede?

• yes
• no
• if she is a celebrity or public figure, and the media may find out
• if the parents are fundamentalist Christians and would be ostracized from their church if the obituary said HIV

3. A 45 year old nurse comes to your office with symptoms of depression. She requests that you leave off any information about her mental illness from the chart, as she fears that her colleagues could access the computerized medical record, in which case, she thinks, she'd be ostracized or lose her job.

4. Other situations: Would you lie if a patient asked you to not record a STD? Would you fudge the date of disease-onset so the patient isn't disqualified for having a pre-existing condition? Would you downcode (bill for less than provided) visits for self-paying patients and upcode (bill for more than provided) for insured patients?

What the doctor ordered

Here's this week's New Yorker cartoon caption contest (drawn by Leo Cullum):


My captions are below. I've submitted the first one and friends are submitting the second, third, and fourth. Others are up for grabs. Do you have other captions? Deadline to submit is Sunday.

“Oh him? He's allergic to blood. Now, where was I? Oh right, this isn't going to hurt one bit.”

“I told your wife you're not contagious, but she insisted.”

“If you're not comfortable in the gown, we do have one alternative.”

“Surgery wasn't successful. Let's just say you're a wreck.”

“The insurance company rep has some bad news... Looks fishy to me.”

“Trust me, I saw it on House last night... Or was that the Discovery Channel?”

“Like I said, we're gonna have to dive deeper.”

“Captain Nemo will be performing your surgery.”

“We've been expanding our medical school applicant pool.”

“Now do you want that second opinion?”

Good thing I'm not a horse

Looks like it'll be another four weeks on crutches. Here's my x-ray. Can you find the fracture?


When he saw it, my housemate Jake said: "If you were a horse, they'd have shot you."


Below you can see what my literacy student Paul wrote on my cast. He wrote his name first, naturally. I made sure he could spell "get well" before he picked up the sharpie. Paul sometimes leaves out the "e" in words like "well" or "bell" because the letter "l" is pronounced "el."


You can read the "accident report" here.

Antonin "cruel" Scalia

Justice Antonin Scalia challenged today whether the Constitution requires "the least painful method" for executions. "Is that somewhere in the Constitution?" he demanded.

Uh, hello? Try Amendment VIII of the Bill of Rights: "Excessive bail shall not be required, nor excessive fines imposed, nor cruel and unusual punishments inflicted."

And even if it weren't there, it'd still be wrong. The Supreme Court's debate over the method of capital punishment is utterly absurd. We're talking about ways to kill people! Capital punishment itself is cruel - I don't care what the founding fathers thought about it. The emotional toll of waiting to die must be awful. A friend and I were recently debating what would be the worst way to die (it was a long car ride). He said: "Getting stuck while cave-diving and waiting for your oxygen tank to run out." Yea, I thought, that would be pretty horrific, and ya know what, it's not so different from waiting on death row. Moments like these, I wonder: what kind of country are we? So I keep coming back to capital punishment, even though I know the inmates on death row are just a small fraction of the (oh geez) two million people incarcerated in the United States.

P.S. cru·el
/ˈkruəl/ –adjective, -er, -est.
1. willfully or knowingly causing pain or distress to others.

Rockin' the vote

My forty-year-old literacy student registered to vote today.

It was one of his goals when we started meeting weekly last July. We tackled some new words, including registration, citizen, and affidavit, but spent most of the time on his regular word list - words like "provide" and "store." It's an odd experience, teaching somebody to read. Paul is not a sharpest pencil, but he keeps his pencils sharp. (Okay, that was an awful use of metaphor. I meant: he may not be too bright, but he's dedicated.) Paul works two jobs, at a dry-cleaners in the morning and as a custodian at night. He never complains about taking the bus. There's a reason why this relatively poor uneducated black man, whose gentle demeanor I've mentioned before, hasn't ended up in prison.

"How long you been on crutches, Eli?" he asked today.

"Well, tomorrow will be one month."

He laughs. "And you thought it was sprung!" That is, sprained instead of broken.

After the addresses and birth-dates, the voter registration form asks whether you'd like to affiliate with a political party. He reads the question himself (it's been a long time since we did bat, cat, hat, and mat) and before I can say anything, he checks off the box for "Republican."

"Republican, eh?" I say, trying to sound neutral (if a little Canadian).

"Yea, 'cause I don't think the government should give things away. I like to work hard," he says. Classic conservative mentality. Of those who think that everyone in America has a chance to succeed through hard work and persistence, 46% are Republicans and 26% are Democrats.

Still trying to be neutral, I give a one-paragraph description of how Republicans and Democrats differ on health care, Iraq, climate change, and taxes. We talk a bit about Barack Obama. Like the black men I've tutored in prison, Paul doesn't think America is ready for a black man. He then picks up the pen and re-registers himself as independent because, he says, there's too much he doesn't know. I remind him that independents can't vote in New York's primary on February 5. He says he wasn't planning to vote in the primary anyway, only in the general election. "Life's real stressful right now," he says, "things need to be more simpler" [sic].

An excerpt from our conversation:

Me: "The Democrats pick a candidate and the Republicans pick a candidate and they face off."

Paul: "Oh, sorta like the Superbowl."

An apt and very seasonal metaphor.

Crutchin' around town

Crutches countdown: 4 weeks done, 1 (and maybe more) to go.

Things I can no longer do on my own: bike to work, carry laundry downstairs, take out the trash, sweep the floor, stand in one place (on one foot) for longer than five minutes, water the houseplants, shovel the driveway, and carry dishes from the kitchen to the dining room. More frustratingly that I would have imagined, I can't walk and talk - on my cell phone - at the same time.

People, strangers definitely included, are suddenly very kind to me, quite unnecessarily in fact. They stop to open doors that they themselves aren't going through; they hold open the elevator though it isn't closing; they suggest that I cut in line at the bakery; they carry little things for me - things I could carry even while I crutch - as if to say, "No, don't move your arm! Not while your ankle is broken!" Meanwhile, I often have little choice but to say thank you. Saying "really, I'm alright," is seen as just pain rude. Yesterday as crossed the street, a driver actually backed up as I crutched by so the tip of her car wouldn't be in my way. Really?

And unconditional plus, though, is having friends sign my cast. That's really fun.

Messiness of serendipity

It's been a rather uninspiring holiday season. My plans to go caving in Alabama for a week collapsed with my broken ankle. I didn’t feel much urge to make other plans since I didn't have the stomach for another coffee-shop-vacation. And travel would not have been easy on crutches. So I spent the time in Syracuse, working at the bioethics center during the day, watching season two of The Office (which was excellent) by night. I also cleaned out my inbox and found a note-to-self listing various "joys and shits of life." It was a deliberate attempt to appreciate the little things. You see, the big things (life plans, world peace) can cause anxiety, as Ian McEwan understands so well in Saturday.

Joys: walking around shirtless, speeding through a book but savoring the last chapter page-by-page, reading the newspaper (or even a magazine!) in print on a Sunday afternoon, going to bed before 10 pm, walking through museums, mocking religion, mocking gender, belting Tom Petty's "Free Falling" in a full car, trying to remember the words of Puff the Magic Dragon, leaving a potluck with an empty dish, blowing your nose with your hands, finishing a cut-throat ultimate frisbee game, 9 to 8, not remembering who had 9 and who had 8.

Shits: when people in the library deserve to be shushed, when the guy in front of me leans back his bus seat, when pressing apple-d means duplicate on a Mac and delete on a PC, when the city park service mows the grass so short that they chop off the yellow daffodils, when motorists don't share the road, when a high anticipated movie contains too much violence - and of course, the usual suspects: prisons, patriarchy, religion, ethnic nationalism, pollution.

Pluses and minuses and vicissitudes of life... But whither? In one ear, I hear Martin Luther King Jr., in a speech delivered the week he died, resolutely declaring that "the arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice." In the other, I hear the pangs of a mortal universe. It has no teleology; there will be no second coming, no great rapture, no redemption. All is not, in fact, for the best. Failure is indeed an option. Shit happens, sometimes for no reason. But in denouncing the idea of fate, I come away feeling empowered. That's as close as I'll come to a New Year's resolution. Don't settle for the status quo. Be an activist. Lest you become a pillar of salt, seize the year.