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August 5, 1997

by Michael Finley of the Masters Forum

Dennis Prager began by sharing the information that few things in his life have made him as miserable as writing a book about happiness. His book Happiness Is a Serious Problem is nearing publication now after ten years of waffling, promising, and procrastinating.

"I always saw myself as a tough topic man," he said. Good, evil, right, wrong, God, Godlessness — the weightier entries at the philosophical buffet. Happiness seemed lightweight by comparison. Besides, he heard that someone who tried to write a summa on the topic of happiness wound up going crazy.

That revelation tells you a lot about the curious way that Prager's mind works. He sees sadness (a tragic point of view) as a prerequisite to happiness. It keeps his expectations of happiness as low as possible, in hopes (not expectations, but hopes) of being surprised. He doesn't like talking about happiness directly. Can't even define the stuff.

It is a dialectic about opposites achieving equilibrium. It is a fundamentally Jewish cast of mind — hoping for the best but expecting the worst, beating the drum for righteousness while whistling by the graveyard.

OBSTACLES

Human nature. It is not in people's nature to be content for long with their condition. Prager noted that a baby's first three words tend to be mama, dada, and more. If you expect to be completely satisfied, give it up. You can't successfully suppress this insatiability, he said, but you can come to terms with it — and prevent it from making you perpetually unhappy.

Genetics. Not everyone has a naturally high EQ. Some of us are born to be gloomy and moody. Brain chemistry may be a part of this, or simply personality. It is no disgrace to be this way, nor is it a disgrace to try to reverse the condition through prescription medicine.

Comparisons. We destroy our own chances for happiness when we compare what we have with what other people have. The grass always seems to be happier on the other side. But Prager noted that the happiness of others is proportionate to how little we know them. To really know people is to come to terms with their struggles and pain. People who seem so happy externally may be faking it — or we just don't know them well.

Images. A confirmed bachelor explained to Prager why he hadn't yet married: he was searching for a Playboy bunny who studied Torah. We all have an image of the perfect job or the perfect spouse or the perfect circumstances, but guess what — we live in the world of reality, not images.

Equating happiness with success. There is only room for one #1 of anything, so why drive yourself crazy competing against hundreds for an attainment only one can win? Plus, the insatiability factor kicks in: even if we are, to all intents and purposes, successful, there is always more success to be had. People driven to succeed are never happy, by definition — it is not in their nature to ever be content. Jimmy Carter pined to be president, then found he hated the job. Today that prune-faced man is the happiest of ex-presidents, and his greatest love is helping build homes for poor people, so do not envy those more successful than yourself. In the words of the Edwin Arlington Robinson poem, about a successful man whom everyone envied "Corey, one calm summer night, went home and put a bullet through his head."

"Missing tile" syndrome. You know how if you have a ceiling with one missing tile, your eye and mind tend to dwell on the one missing piece? "A bald man once told me, when I walk into a room, all I see is hair." Never mind that people wDennis Pragerith hair never give it, or your lack of it, a moment's thought. Prager's advice: replace the tile or forget about it.

Equating happiness with fun. If you love having fun, forget about being happy, because fun is about what you are experiencing right now, whereas happiness is the longer-term outcome. Promiscuous people have a lot of fun, because seducing and being seduced are terrific fun. But do they make anyone happy? Doubtful. "I am for having fun in life," Prager said, "but not for living for fun."

Expectations. Studying Buddhism as a young man, Prager acquired its core practice of shunning expectations. This goes along with his thoughts about the tragic nature of life: he who expects happiness will not be grateful when it makes its appearance, whereas he who does not expect it will rejoice at its arrival. "The more I think about it, the more I think that gratitude is the great unifying force for both happiness and goodness," Prager said.

RECOMMENDATIONS

Know that everything has a price. Milton Friedman's philosophy of economics dovetails perfectly with Dennis Prager's philosophy of life: "There's no such thing as a free lunch." We know the price of things we buy, he said, but not the price of things we don't buy. But we are paying one, whether it is in dollars or time or self-respect or lost trust or meaning.

The 3.5 hours we spend watching the tube every night could be spent doing something else — reading, or talking, or doing things with our families. The TV wasn't free — it cost you a chunk of your life that you can never experience again any other way. Why does this matter? Because it makes us pay attention, and paying attention is critical to happiness.

Know what to do with your vices. We all have 'em, whether they're sex or food or gambling or acquiring things. Prager is not a bluenose. It would be tragic if there were no Las Vegas in Nevada, but it will also be a tragedy if every state has a Las Vegas. We need to get a little crazy every now and then, so long as we don't hurt anybody.

The key phrase is a little. "I'm a passionate moderate," Prager insists. He was chagrined to hear a religious leader he respects suggest that a loving husband does not lust after his wife. "Marriage is a great place to let our lower parts express themselves," he said. "There's a lot of raunchy, filthy, disgusting, fantastic stuff in there." And marriage is the perfect place to understand and experience it. He urged us to go home and tell our spouses what we'd really like to do — the risk is small, and the payoff in happiness substantial. "Go home and ask your spouses what was their basest thought? Sure beats 'How was your day?' "

Don't feel guilty about bad thoughts. It's better to think bad and do good than to feel good and do nothing. Prager recalled a man who called saying he was wracked with guilt because he sometimes wished his mother, whom he cared for, would die. Prager told him to buck up and be proud of himself. The man's thoughts about his mother's death caused no harm; they were immaterial. What was totally material was his day-to-day caring for his mother. The caller wasn't a louse, he was a hero, and should feel proud and not ashamed.

Locate the positive. A happy person is someone who finds the bright side at the bottom of a coal mine at night without a Coleman lantern. Prager told how he once rented a first-floor apartment on New York's Upper West Side, and reassured himself that the first floor — legendarily vulnerable to thieves — was the best of all possible worlds. Close to the laundry, you don't need an elevator, you don't need to lug your groceries up five flights of stairs, etc.

"There are few unambiguous blessings in life," he said, so why not choose the perspective that gives you pleasure? You're going to have triplets? Marvelous, get your parenting our of the way while you're still young! Bumped from a plane? Terrific, that gives you another night to explore the fantasyland that is Valparaiso, Indiana.

Get a philosophy. A "tragic view of life" and the Buddhist notion of "no expectations" both constitute a philosophy. Nonphilosophical people lack consistency. Philosophical people have a single worldview that applies to everything they experience. It is a way of putting problematic things into perspective.

Prager wants us to have one, because without one, we think we are exempt from the laws of life. He cited a man who used to pray, until his brother died, and then stopped. Prager went ballistic: "So it was OK for God to take other men's brothers, just not yours?" Likewise the liberal family that opposed capital punishment until one of their own was murdered, and then they wanted blood.

Compare those reactions to that of Prager's friend Joe Telushkin (who will be appearing at The Masters Forum in 1998). After experiencing a flat tire in the middle of a blizzard, he shrugged it off: "I believe that we all have a flat tire quota," Telushkin said. "It was time for me to fulfill mine."

Make friends. If life is a journey, he said, don't make it alone. We need not only individual friends but couple friends, too. Prager is high on friendship. "Friends are terrific, the flower of our existence. They, not our families, are the people we choose to have in our lives." Prager thinks people should "date to make friends," much as we date to find suitable life partners. Couple friends are especially important, but they must be honest. What kind of friendship do couples have when, years after knowing one another, one couple is astonished that the other is splitting up?

To find happiness, pursue things that are more important. Here's the paradox: seeking happiness as our paramount goal can't result in happiness. Happiness is always the result of something else, something we care about more than our own fleeting mental states.

We need passionate pursuits to be happy. The more passion we have in our lives, the happier we will be. Prager injected another of his curious finding-the-pony-in-the-manure stories, this one about bad dates. "I believe there can be good in any situation," said the man who claimed to have no expectations. "When I meet someone boring, I try to find out what makes them boring. After a while, the boredom becomes fascinating!"

What can we pursue besides boredom? How about wisdom, a quest for something beyond individual success? How about clarity, a quest for greater awareness, an understanding of our own inner space? How about depth, the quest for whatever is richer, more profound, or better done? (Prager chose, unjustly in my opinion, to characterize Beethoven's music as deep, and the Grateful Dead's as shallow.) How about transcendence — the attraction to what is greater than us, the search for God?

Be good. It is not a big leap from Godhood to goodness. Prager believes strongly that being good is a pathway to greater happiness, and he refutes the notion we have that there are rotten scoundrels out there who are happier than we are. They can't be happy, Prager says, because their badness, their inability to see goodness in others, prevents them from having friendships. They think everyone is as awful as they are, and that is their punishment — isolation from the happiness trust and friendship bring.

Practice self-control. You can't be happy if you can't control yourself. Our society is unwilling to come to grips with the fact that a lot of our bad stuff is inside us, not out there. We should make a sign and hang it on our foreheads, facing toward us, and it should say: I AM MY BIGGEST PROBLEM. This applies to our addictions, our neuroses, our failure to think of other people, our inconsistencies. Until we are willing to do yardwork on our own side of the fence, we are not likely to enjoy the gardens on the other side.

Get help. Prager gives thumbs up to both psychotherapy and religion. Psychotherapy, if you are lucky enough to have a competent therapist, and can afford it, is the only way we have to find out what is going on inside us. It can unlock the mysteries of our own nature. And religion is our only way of unlocking the greater mystery, of what is all around us, and what it might mean. We take our car in for maintenance, he said, but we don't take ourselves in when we develop a knock or a ping.

Everyone should go to therapy, he said, and everyone should find a moment now and then to pray. It acknowledges that surface happiness arises from something deeper within. Without inner understanding, happiness is a joke.

Masters Forum Review/Preview is written and edited by Michael Finley and Gerald de Jaager.

Mike Finley may be contacted at mfinley@skypoint.com