My American Unhappiness Page 5

  I enter the vestibule of the GMHI offices, where the sole remaining staff member of GMHI (other than me), Ms. Lara Callahan, is typing away at the reception desk. I am not quite sure what she is typing, but she is typing rather furiously. There is no reason for such a breakneck pace; there is not that much to do here. The phone rarely rings and the mail—other than junk mail—slowed to a one-envelope-a-day trickle, usually a form from the federal government, which she completes and I sign.

  The days are slow for her. The ten million dollars we received from the federal government is mostly gone: with a rubber stamp from the board of directors, I have generously awarded grants, hired promising scholars, assisted rural libraries and urban community centers in building campaigns, and I have run the ship aground, so to speak, by giving generously and enthusiastically to worthy causes. I believe there is about twenty thousand dollars in federal money left, a few months of operating expenses at best. The truth is, this is exactly what I was supposed to do: give away federal money. But the second part of my charge was to raise significant private funds that would make the GMHI a sustainable endeavor. On that front, I have failed.

  Frankly, I probably do not need Lara's assistance anymore, but I keep her on the payroll because she is thirty-six and is the single mother of two. And, if I may admit this without sounding like a misogynist, I enjoy the sexual energy she brings to the office—her shapely, smooth legs, the faint scent of lavender, the glistening dampness on her forehead when she returns from a vigorous lunchtime walk. When my mother brought Lara up as a potential prospect, she was not voicing a thought that I haven't considered many times myself.

  With the generous federal funding, I am able to pay her fortysix thousand dollars a year plus benefits, and she knows she will not be able to make that kind of money elsewhere. She is very bright, a wonderful receptionist, an excellent writer of correspondence, and she keeps the books tidily and brilliantly, even alerting me, weekly, to the fact that I have spent nearly all of our money and cash reserves. She is a few inches taller than me. Her skin is fair, in the way of those milky Irish lasses I so love to see in movies, and her hair is short and dark, and I would gladly spend a week of my life kissing her extravagant legs, hips to toes.

  Certainly, her legs are one of the main reasons to make her, as my mother urges, one of my prospects: her intelligence, bluntness, efficiency, and grace are other reasons. I see her five days a week, and she sees me. We are both lonely. Some days, I am sure, that is enough. In truth, it's hard for me to think of anybody on earth who knows me better than Lara. But isn't it hard to tell with coworkers, especially those you supervise, how much of the extended kindnesses and smiles and tender gestures are intended as deference and how much of them come from a real and deep well of friendship?

  Never mind. It is better, as I have told my mother, not to mix work and love. My work is, and always has been, the dominant actor on my life's stage.

  I breeze by Lara's desk with the ease and purpose of a busy man.

  "Good morning," I mutter, a tight smile on my lips, and walk briskly to my office and shut the door.

  I hear her say, "What's the matter with you?" as I walk past her, but I do not acknowledge it. Normally, I greet her with a bit of chatter, so much so, in fact, that once she asked me to limit my morning conversation with her to fifteen minutes.

  At this moment, as I wait out the last of the GMHI funds, I am still working, with great passion and discipline, I assure you, on a project that, though this may sound trite, may actually, in truth, be my life's work (if you will pardon the dramatic weight of that old phrase): An Inventory of American Unhappiness. This project has become the sole focus of the GMHI. It is my hope to finish this project before the money that funds the GMHI runs out, and then use the amazingly strong critical and public reception of my project as a catalyst to raise more funds. At this date, however, the mountain of work atop my desk is high; the balance remaining in my federal grant is low.

  The thinking, the rationale, the philosophy, behind my project is this: Americans are fundamentally unhappy, and they are fundamentally unhappy because they suffer from institutional addiction. If you consider the comfort (for most), the wealth (relative), and opportunities (many) with which Americans have matured, it is mind-boggling to consider that anybody here could be unhappy. But everywhere I go, I can see it, such unhappiness, such an overwhelming need to be drugged and distracted, lest a moment of silent, melancholy self-reflection pierce our fragile hearts!

  We are, at our heart, a nation of rugged individualists. Not in the absurd, capitalistic manner of an Ayn Rand protagonist or a blue-blooded intern at the American Enterprise Institute, but certainly in the manner of our philosophical forefathers—Emerson, Thoreau, Jefferson, Paine. These men all advocated a nation, a way of living, where men and women are free to march to the beat of their own drummer, empowered by self-reliance, by an abundance of practical skills, and by an economic and political system that champions pluck and innovation over size and institution.

  How quickly has such an American ideal faded! Now, we are all slaves to institutions. Educated in them from the age of five, or younger, and often imprisoned within them, accumulating piles of debt, until we are pushing thirty. At the end of our educational process, we know what? How to plant a garden? Build a home? Repair and maintain machines? Hunt? Fish? Camp?

  Hardly. Rather, we leave these institutions with only one small skill—trading commodities, analyzing prose, ceramics, welding widget A to widget B—and we immediately need to find another institution to take us in: General Motors, Yale, the Federal Reserve, the UAW, Target, any place that will allow us to put food on the table.

  Once food is on the table, we must find shelter, often for a growing family, and instead of having any idea of how to build a shelter, we must buy a shelter, and because the costs of shelter are so absurdly prohibitive in comparison with actual wages, we must move immediately into the debtor system Thoreau likened to slavery. We must move into a home that is owned by an institution—Bank of America, Countrywide, CitiFinancial—and we must make ourselves adhere to a payment schedule. We must then secure health care coverage from a large institution, finance transportation through a large institution, deficit-spend based on the leverage of a large institution, worship the Lord at an approved institution, and then, one morning, our children enter a federally mandated pre-K program or a twenty-five-thousand-dollar-a-year private preschool. And the cycle begins again. You can almost hear the tiny hearts of America's children breaking as they gather around the story circle or line up for a carton of milk. Slaves!

  Thus, for most Americans, life becomes a series of debts and dependencies on entities much larger, and much more powerful, than ourselves.

  The paradox is this: in the middle of such indebtedness and dependence, we are bombarded with an apparent array of choices, are we not? Walk into a Walmart, surf Amazon, pull off at the Des Plaines Oasis, and you instantly are given the illusion of freedom. You can buy anything you want! Read anything you want! Eat anything you want! What a country!

  But in our quietest moments, these very choices become so bewilderingly superficial that they bring with them insurmountable gloom. The fact is, by the time we are old enough to comprehend the magic and bounty offered by the wider world, we are so indebted to institutions, financially, spiritually, and otherwise, that we have no real choices. Listen, the internal memo bellows from our soul's central office: You have no options. You wont start that business, you won't open that café, you wont live in Costa Rica, you wont come out of the closet, you wont write that novel, and you wont ever have a threesome.

  And this is the epiphany, the realization that makes us so alarmingly unhappy. I am not the first to editorialize about my generation's abundant choices, or its accompanying debt, but few people, if any, have expounded on this troubling irony: throughout our lives we will have many choices but little by way of means. By the time the average American is able to grasp the choices and opport
unities that Jefferson and Paine and his ilk so desperately fought for and advocated, they will not have any means or freedom with which to pursue them.

  But, I'd argue, our sadness goes even deeper, punctuated by a crippling lack of the time, space, silence, energy, and/or capacity for critical self-reflection that life in the twenty-first century has brought upon us. In this culture, one discovers an alarmingly high rate of unhappiness. Some of this unhappiness is chronic; one finds some subjects to be wholly unhappy. For many, many others, most of my subjects, in fact, the breakneck pace of change in the past eight years, coupled with national leadership that is fumbling, frustrating, and frightening, has made them absolutely terrified of reflection. Pausing to think—i.e., unplugging the computer, the phones, the BlackBerry, the Facebook—is horrifying. When one does such a thing, one is visited by unhappy images, thoughts of doom and woe, the thumping footsteps of melancholy, and the assurance of global tragedy and destruction. Quickly, the self-reflection impulse is stifled. And that lack of self-reflection makes it nearly impossible for us to find our authentic selves and our true callings, especially ones unfettered from institutional hierarchies and dependence. Thus, we sit, like scores of drug-addled teens with distant parents, inundated with college catalogs and ineligible for financial aid.

  I have many other secondary hypotheses about our unhappiness—it stems from constant war, environmental degradation, chemical toxicities and food additives, the underfunding of cultural programs, the student loan industry, et cetera. The companion essay for the oral history project was supposed to be a five-page overview but has become a three-hundred-and-sixteen-page document titled Why So Vague?: An Introduction to the American Unhappiness Project. Why so vague is a question I once heard a man ask the author Charles Baxter at a fiction reading (GMHI mini-grant #02-898: Surprised by Joy: The Unhappy Midwest of Charles Baxter). The open-ended obtuseness of the question has always stayed with me: yes, so much malaise, so much heartache, a mountain of woe—but who can define it? Why so vague? Indeed!

  I suppose the idea for my project came to me shortly after college, when I was rather absent-mindedly thumbing through a copy of The Portable Chekhov, during a register shift at the bookshop where I once worked. Rereading the story "Gooseberries," I came across these lines: "There ought to be behind the door of every happy, contented man some one standing with a little hammer continually reminding him with a tap that there are unhappy people; that however happy he may be, life will show him her laws sooner or later, trouble will come for him—disease, poverty, losses, and no one will see or hear, just as now he neither sees nor hears others."

  It was during a time in my life when I wanted to do something revolutionary, or at least vital. I wanted to serve some greater purpose, to create something that changed the way humankind viewed itself. Having also just finished reading a slim volume called Let Your Life Speak by Parker Palmer, I was quite open to signs and symbols; I was sort of anticipating an epiphany about what I would do with my life's work. And there, buried in one of Chekhov's masterpieces, was my calling. I would be that little man with a hammer, constantly tapping away on a happy nation's door.

  In subsequent years, An Inventory of American Unhappiness has led to my interviewing over five hundred Americans about the nature and rubrics of their discontent. I've also collected thousands of e-mail responses to the question Why are you so unhappy? In my grandest moments, I imagine it will eventually be a seminal work that helps us understand our culture in a new and promising way, something along the lines of Studs Terkel's Working and Rachel Carson's Silent Spring.

  Lara tells me that the project is a brilliant one and she has worked countless hours transcribing my interviews and editing video. Yet, she is an optimistic woman—the sort of person who ends a phone call with the phrase Make it a great day—and her one complaint is that my questions often steer the conversations off into depressing places. Well, of course they do! She feels that perhaps it is I, the anonymous interviewer, who might be convincing my subjects of their unhappiness. Of course! I know that happens! But there is no malice at work here. It is more like Michelangelo, I tell her, when he was asked how he managed to carve the beautiful figure of David from a towering piece of marble over eighteen feet high.

  It was already there, he said. I just chipped away the excess.

  Yes! It is already there, so much woe. I want to distill it for the world to see.

  Why are you so unhappy?

  That is the simple question I ask after a very brief introduction. And certainly some people say, "I'm not." Or "What do you mean?" Or "I gotta get back to work." But so many people, triggered by such a direct and probing question, tell me everything.

  Some recent responses:

  Abigail H., 41, medical software trainer, Verona, WI:

  Unhappy? Well, I suppose I am. I suppose it has something to do with, well, work. Actually, in all seriousness, I've been unhappy since I was about nine. One day, this gray, damp January day, I remember waking up and getting upset because I had to go to fourth grade that day. And then, in one of those bizarre flash-forward moments you sometimes get as a kid, I saw the older version of myself, me, now, and I thought, there I am, getting up for work, going somewhere I don't want to go. And at that moment I realized that there was my life, all of it, and almost every day of my life I would have to get up and go somewhere I didn't really want to go. And now, the other morning, I was dropping off my daughter, Zoe, she's four, at preschool, and I was like, oh, look at this, here we go again, her too. God.

  Seth S., 30, bike messenger, New York, NY:

  Cars, the great American automobile, pal, that's what has me down. Not only do I come close to getting clipped once an hour by some cell-phone-talking prick in a Land Rover, but I have to breathe all that shit we put into the air. When my son Silver inherits this earth, it's gonna be totally fucked. There. Sorry you asked?

  [Interviewer: No. No it's okay]

  You said this is going to be on NPR?

  [Interviewer: Perhaps. I said perhaps]

  All right. Cool. Check this: www.cararmageddon.org!

  Simms P., 39, retail clerk, Cleveland, OH:

  Well, if you mean, why am I so depressed, look around you. Food courts. Shitty fast-food places posing as Asian-fusion and Latin-fusion bistros. ATM surcharges. That rent-a-cop hitting on that high school girl. The Pretzel Peddler, where I just had lunch. Think of it: I'm almost forty, I'm on my lunch break from a place called Famous Footwear. And where did I eat lunch? The fucking Pretzel Peddler, man? I eat pretzels with fake cheese dip for lunch. And you want to know what makes me unhappy? Me. I make me miserable.

  Josh F., 45, government analyst, Washington, DC:

  I'm wondering if you have any idea how much federal money goes into this project, which, in my view, is a deliberate attempt to cynicize the nation?

  And so on.

  5. Zeke Pappas is Bloody Married.

  LAPTOP SLUNG OVER my shoulder, I slip out to lunch a bit early, around eleven, for an omelet and a Bloody Mary or two at Nick's. George and Gus throw in a third Bloody Mary on the house, as Gus remarks that I look "weary with the weight of the world." How perceptive good bartenders can be! How they know exactly what a regular client needs! I work away on my laptop at the bar, firing off e-mails, then I change my Facebook status, pay the tab, tipping generously, and walk back to the office, abuzz and enlivened.

  Having spent much of the morning, and much of my lunch hour, poring over responses to my unhappiness inventory, I come back from lunch in a kind of intellectual fog; I plunk down on the small sofa in our reception area and find myself staring at Lara as she works. This goes on for some time and I find myself still wondering about my mother's inquiry from the night before. Don't I have any prospects? Haven't I even considered the fact that it is time for me to get married, find a wife?

  Finally, Lara stops typing for a moment, looks up at me, and slides her delicate reading glasses down her nose, lifting her eyes to meet mine. She
points her small chin right at my heart. "Are you okay, Zeke?"

  "A bit of reverie," I say. "Lost in a bit of a reverie." She pauses and now removes her reading glasses. "What?"

  "I'm afraid I was staring."

  "I didn't notice," she says.

  "Yes, well," I say, "often one can't help it."

  "Who kept calling this morning?" she says.

  "Pardon?" I say.

  "Your direct line's been ringing all day. It must have rung fifty times!"

  "Did it?"

  "You didn't hear it?"

  "I suppose not. I was working on my project."

  "What's wrong with you?"

  "You know I have an amazing ability to tune out distractions when I am engaged in my project."

  "Have you been drinking?" she asks. "No," I say. "Jesus."

  She gazes at me for a minute, but I say nothing else.

  "Have you been crying?" she asks.

  "That's extremely doubtful," I say.

  "Your eyes are all red."

  "Are they?"

  "Yes."

  "Seasonal allergies. Spring! The rise of leaves and vegetation, so ripe with pollen and lust!"

  "I thought I heard weeping."

  "What?"

  "Earlier this morning, when you first came in."

  "You did not!"

  "It's unsettling to hear your boss weeping in this economy," she says. "Did something happen?"

  "Lara! Stop!"

  "Are you okay? Did you eat lunch?"

  "Yes," I say.

  "Did you drink?"

  "I had a drink. Just one."