The Happiness Question: A Conversation

I have a confession to make: I am a happy woman.

Career-wise, as I have admitted below, my life is less than successful. Financially speaking, I am circling the drain. But in terms of simple, minute-by minute, silly joy, I have nothing whatsoever to complain about.

It would be an oversimplification to say that I am happy because I am in a stable relationship with someone wonderful, who suits me. It would be an equal oversimplification to blame my happiness on having a wonderful little girl, when for most of my life I honestly didn't believe I'd ever have children.

But I do think there is something to be said about every human being's profound need for connection--deep, stable, and unbreakable--and my little family provides that. I lacked it for so long that just the simple fact of its existence is like a long drink of cold water after a marathon.

I bring this up because of a small flap about a recent Ross Douthat column about women, happiness and the lack of it, in which he brings up statistics which suggest that women are less happy these days then formerly, and suggests that more stigmatizing ought to make them happier:

They should also be able to agree that the steady advance of single motherhood threatens the interests and happiness of women. Here the public-policy options are limited; some kind of social stigma is a necessity. But a new-model stigma shouldn’t (and couldn’t) look like the old sexism. There’s no necessary reason why feminists and cultural conservatives can’t join forces — in the same way that they made common cause during the pornography wars of the 1980s — behind a social revolution that ostracizes serial baby-daddies and trophy-wife collectors as thoroughly as the “fallen women” of a more patriarchal age.

Actually, I'm all for ostracizing serial baby-daddies and trophy-wife collectors, but I'm with Ross--it will never happen. Not because modern society won't accept 'sexual stigma,' as he tut-tuts, but simply because high-testosterone, high-earning males will always invoke placation before ostracism. It's hard-wired into our brains and our culture. We're going to have to undergo a few more millennia of evolution before that changes.

But enough of my opinion! The reason this post is entitled 'A Conversation' is that I'm proposing just that. My time is fragmented these days; I can't fit all my thoughts into a single post, nor a post into a single day. So I pose you this question: are you happy? Why or why not? What do you think of Ross's article, and the subject it discusses? Let's take it from there.