Goodbye to you, Mr. Smiley

HAPPINESS! Everywhere we turn, someone’s shoving it down our throats. It’s in pills, self-help books and on PBS specials hosted by bald men in sweaters. Like low-carb diets, low-interest mortgages and pugs (also in sweaters), happiness is the must-have accessory for busy professionals. If we’re not happy (or at least pursuing happiness), the conventional wisdom implies, we are asleep at the wheel of the American dream.

I’ve always thought happiness was overrated. It’s one of those things, like living in France or dating a celebrity, that seems appealing in theory but could easily become more trouble than it’s worth. And as a person for whom achieving mere contentment (the fleeting, five-seconds-at-a-time kind) can feel like trying to scale Mt. Rainier in swim fins, the 21st century cultural preoccupation with happiness strikes me as peer pressure of the most toxic variety. After all, isn’t happiness being hawked these days the way cigarettes used to be? How different, really, is “Don’t worry, be happy” from Newport cigarettes’ “Alive with pleasure”?

In a new book, “Stumbling on Happiness,” Harvard psychology professor Daniel Gilbert suggests that happiness is largely an anticipatory experience. Human beings, he explains, are the only animals that have the ability to think about the future. As a result, we spend much of our time not so much experiencing pleasure as thinking about future pleasure and taking steps to ensure its attainment.

The problem is that very little about real life can compete with imagined life. Gilbert points out that many Americans who don’t live in California think they’d be happier if they did. Likewise, almost all of us who are not conjoined twins believe that we’d be miserable if we were. So why is it, he asks, that in reality Californians are no happier than, say, Ohioans -- and at least one pair of conjoined twins, Reba and Lori Schappel (whom he discusses at some length), who wouldn’t be separated “for all the money in China”?

There are, of course, as many answers to those questions as there are people who live in California, Ohio or China (and who may or may not be conjoined twins). Anyone who’s ever walked into a psychiatrist’s office and been asked to rate his mood on a scale of one to 10 has had to consider the fact that one man’s eight is another man’s four.

Moreover, anyone who’s ever turned on the nightly news and learned less about bloodshed abroad than about the advisability of “talking to your doctor about generalized anxiety disorder” might suspect that we’re living in a culture where the pursuit of happiness is not only a patriotic right, it’s a consumer mandate.

BUT THE happiness-industrial complex reaches far beyond the realm of pharmaceuticals. On the most base level, of course, are the yellow smiley- face icons that have come to symbolize forcible cheer. As it happens, the smiley face (a.k.a. “Mr. Smiley”) -- which is often accompanied by the sentence, “Have a nice day!” -- is at the center of a lawsuit between Wal-Mart, which wants the exclusive right to use it on its shopping bags, and a Frenchman who says he invented it. (They really do hate us.)

For those whose happiness standards exceed the reach of besotted emoticons, a prescription for a serotonin reuptake inhibitor has become the thinking man’s smiley face, the haute bourgeois translation of “Have a nice day.” But considering the intangible nature of happiness, the inherent ephemeralness of it, the difficulty, even, of defining it, it bears asking why we’re so focused on it. Given the extreme, almost utopian, connotations of “happiness,” isn’t our cultural preoccupation with finding it just a cruel setup for disappointment? Wouldn’t the authors of the Declaration of Independence have been better off guaranteeing the pursuit of contentment?

That might have been more realistic, but coasting along on contentment doesn’t grow economies quite as effectively as chasing happiness. As Gilbert notes, even economist Adam Smith knew that happiness, though largely illusory, was the best motivator, “the deception which rouses and keeps in continual motion the industry of mankind.” Smith wrote those words in 1759, back when Prozac wasn’t even a twinkle in our founding fathers’ eyes. Centuries later, self-deception -- or at least the uniquely human ability to tell ourselves that we’re doing OK -- still makes the world go round.

But if Gilbert is right about the fleeting, even theoretical, nature of happiness, it might be time to finally retire the smiley face. What could it hurt to change “Have a nice day” to “Have fun imagining what a nice day would be like”? That might look strange on a Wal-Mart bag, but, then again, if your happiness revolves around Wal-Mart, you’ve got more problems than Mr. Smiley is qualified to handle.