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Been Up So Long

The comic Henny Youngman used to quip, "What good is happiness? It can't buy me money."

Presumably he didn't speak for a growing number of people so saturated with chasing wealth and dreams of material progress that they feel less satisfied and happy than when they had nothing. Their lament is, "Been up so long it looks like down to me," -- a play on Richard Farina's classic novel of wasted college life in the 1960s, Been Down so Long it Looks Like Up to Me.

No matter which way you turn the phrase, what we expect from life -- and what we get -- are often two different things.

My wife and I were thinking about this recently amid talk of retirement, or what the lifestyle marketers glibly call "the next great adventure." We waxed nostalgic about when we first married, and loaded all of our possessions into a '65 Chevy and drove out to Cape Cod to join a rock 'n roll band. Some weeks we didn't know where the money was coming from, but we always managed to eat well, laugh a lot and revel in each other's company.

Now we're sitting in an upscale home filled with the accumulation from years of buying stuff we thought we needed but don't use anymore. The thought of getting out from under this mountain of material debris is daunting, but there is a strong pull to simplify, downsize and, eventually, to move on. We're just not sure to where.

Progress has always had its critics, but lately it seems that more people are beginning to question the pursuit of material progress and economic growth at all costs, and searching for some meaningful alternative.

Granted, it's facile to critique the dominant ideology from the perch of prosperity when millions of the world citizens, many of them within our own borders, lack even the basic necessities of a safe and secure existence. Still, I seem to run into more people these days from all walks of life who think there ought to be more to life than an economic scorecard and shopping at the mall. The assault on the natural and built environment, increasing levels of stress, anxiety and preventable chronic diseases are all on the rise - the detritus of the most powerful economic hurricane in recorded history.

Surely this can't be healthy.

The world is hooking up at a breathtaking pace, but for what purpose? Happiness and health have become the province of individual decisions and choices; they are not collective ends we have the political will to pursue through public policy. People retreat into smaller communities focused on sustainability, simplicity, spiritualism or some other alternative to the dominant consumer culture; these communities, in turn, are marginalized in the same way as third party candidates in the political process: entertaining, but statistically irrelevant, and therefore meaningless.

There is a grim determinism to all this that is unsettling. It helps to have a sense of history, as well as a sense of humor. I recall my father telling me back in the 1970s when he was just entering retirement that the civilized world was essentially doomed in the face of commercial barbarism, and, like Voltaire, the only thing we could do was "cultivate our own garden."

He also reminded me of a favorite quote from the poet W.H. Auden: "We are all here to serve others. What the others are here for, I don't know."

Paradoxically, contemplating the prospects for health, happiness and relative sanity in the face of this next "great adventure," I am still inclined to fence with Zorro and follow the advice of another English poet, Dylan Thomas:

"Do not go gentle into that good night. Rage, rage against the dying of the light."

Staying engaged, that's the main thing. Don't fold up the tent just yet.

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*The Drift reflects the views of the author, and does not represent the official view of SLHI's Board of Trustees and staff.