January 2021,

If I could have a super power, my power would be to invisibly produce happiness. I have no such power, but I hope it will do no harm to mention what I know about happiness. I cannot define what I mean by something spiritual other than to say that it is something that is not material. I think happiness is not material. The happy people that bring me joy do not have a lot of stuff. The happiness they give to me is not material. My wife and I buy almost nothing. We have each other and that is enough. To us new things take up the space where happiness should be. The emptiness of stuff makes happiness too thin.

I do not do something in hopes that doing it will make me happy. I go straight to happiness and eliminate the middleman. I am not good at anything. It does not matter. Being happy is not the same as being good at something. I am much more interested in being happy than being good at something. Being a total loser does not frighten me.

I think the ultimate rebellion to the way things are for humans on planet earth is to be happy in spite of everything. Your happiness will benefit you and the rest of us. A happy, whale hugging Captain Ahab would not make a good story, but a happy Ahab, with friends on a comfortable yacht might upset the world order more than a grumpy Ahab did.

Happiness is meek, mild and not disruptive. Long ago I was a soldier in a war at the basic and direct clueless kid vs clueless kid level. War as I know it it's not a producer of much happiness. We should avoid doing things that will make us unhappy.

I think happiness and violence do not go together well. More happiness would probably mean less violence, anger and hate. Happiness wears away our negative impulses. Happiness quietly comforts us and weakens threats to our well being.

If I could live again, what would I hope to do differently? I would not compete. The mix of winning and losing is not happy enough. I would walk away from every contest. I would run away from every argument. I would not have power, or be known. Creating an opportunity for corruption would not mix well with happiness. I would try to know more stuff firsthand. Every Saturday for 39 consecutive months so far I have kept track of the mean local temperature at at 3301 West Bolt Street compared to the past average mean temperature. I can quietly act on what I now know, without any unhappy argument.

It seems that if more of us focus on being happy we could be happy, but if we focus on doing something well so we can be happy, my fear is that we will probably become good at a lot of stuff other than becoming happy. Practising patience helps I think.

Finally, imagine what the past you know first hand was like compared to the present you know. For me polio is no longer scary. Everything seems safer and more fair. Medicine is much better, hip replacements are wonderful. Healthy food is more available. Cars, telephones, computers are much better. In my experience, people are much richer than when I was young. I feel quite lucky to be living on earth now and not in a much rougher and more dangerous past.