How happy are we?

The piece below appeared today in the Oregon Daily Emerald, the University of Oregon's student newspaper, where I'm a summer columnist. I'm re-running it here less as a means for shameless self promotion (no, really) and more as a way to gather more responses on the question it poses, which has become a minor obsession lately. Start asking around. You'll be surprised at what people say.


Take a second and answer this question: on a scale of one to ten, how happy are you?

I’ve been conducting an informal survey this week, asking friends, housemates, co-workers, and my family that question. There are several categories of responder, I’ve found. There’s the optimistic wiseass, who provides a high score to three decimal places; the cautiously hopeful, who decides on a number somewhere in the upper half; the blunt realist, who notes the big picture and scores in the middle; and the exhausted tool of ill fate, who has just been having a bad day/week/year and whose number is bargain basement low.

The numbers themselves are interesting, but what really fascinates me is what happens next: people want to offer an explanation for their score. Some get quiet, or defiant, and others think aloud at length about the way they arrived at their answer. But In every case, I learn something about the inner life of the people I’m surrounded by. Everyone has something to say about how they measure their own happiness, or lack thereof.

I’ve been thinking quite a bit about happiness lately. Happiness and, well, death. You know your life has taken a bizarre turn when you find yourself spending three hours on a sunny summer morning writing obituaries. But such is my existence these days. My desk is covered with envelopes marked “In Memoriam,” often in shaky, elderly handwriting. Inside, newspaper clippings and notes composed on the world’s last remaining typewriters spell out the lives and deaths of people who graduated from the University long before my parents were born.

As the summer intern for Oregon Quarterly, the University’s alumni magazine, I’m in charge of reducing these already-brief life stories into even shorter sketches, a task that’s rather like making a topographical map of the Andes out of orange Play-Doh: the result feels ridiculously simplistic.

But like a map of the mountains, I put in the highest points, those easily quantified and admired. Degrees, jobs, awards, children, spouses, years of service. I write about ninety birthdays, fifty anniversaries, all those big round numbers.

Universities, like obituary pages, run on accomplishment the way I run on nonfat lattes. The march toward a degree, a professorship, an ever-longer list of awards and grants and big shiny research buildings is what consumes all of us here. Last week the Emerald had the heartbreaking duty of reporting student Todd Doxey’s untimely death. Our sadness, like at the passing of any young person, was in part made of the knowledge that he won’t compile his own list of the deeds of a long and fruitful life.

Binding up happiness too closely with that list seems dangerous, though. Ambition and joy are both important. A horizon, goals, something to work for and a sense of making progress are all important to my personal happiness quotient. But I keep trying to find the delight in small moments as well as big accomplishments. It’s not good fodder for obituaries, but it’s what keeps my own score on the happiness scale buoyant.

And when I think about Doxey, a young man I never met, I think he might understand that idea, too. Even though leaping into the cold river’s swift water on a hot afternoon ended so tragically for him, I hope wholeheartedly that in the moment he spent suspended between the bridge and the river, Doxey was filled with a profound sense of joy. I hope that if he been asked the happiness question in that brief midair instant, he would have yelled “ELEVEN” into the bright July air of his last day.