A Culture of Happiness

Christina Rose

“Aren’t you worried about old age? No career! No savings! No 401K! How are you going to live?”

“I didn’t know poor people could be happy.”

“How come I have all this money but I am miserable and alone?” 

“My kids are grown, and I feel like I have no purpose.”

“Christina, why are Americans so unhappy?”

I think most people would agree that a life of sustained happiness is not only elusive, but unrealistic. 

Fear of poverty drives a five day work week much of our lives. I get that. I work, too, and the man who asked me why Americans are so unhappy has two or three jobs and his wife works full time. In terms of the American Dream, their life is far from financially secure, but they are happy. Visibly and tangibly happy and it has nothing to do with finances.

America offers everyone the opportunity to have what the upper classes have had: nice things, abundant food, maybe even help in the house. But in the old days, middle classes didn’t expect to live like royalty. They were connected to their communities in which everyone’s talents played a part. 

Wealth doesn’t really improve life more than by providing physical comfort and accessories we don’t really need. What wealth does do is give people a sense of entitlement. Some people of recent comfort seem to feel they have earned special treatment if they can afford fancy restaurants and nice clothing. It isn’t respect gained by actions, but an expectation of respect for all they have earned.

I have spent time with a multitude of cultures and for most of the world, acting entitled is not acceptable behavior. Frightening road rage, impatience with clerks in shops or services, even just a competitive nature can set people against each other instead of bringing them together.

The class systems were not left behind at Europe’s shores; they are woven into the fabric of America. Grace, kindness, warmth towards others, feeling secure, helpful attitudes—all of that may exist within our circles of peers and family. Towards strangers on the street, or anyone we think might be less than us, maybe not so much. 

In Asian and indigenous cultures, politeness is important. Being kind, honest, having integrity and showing respect towards others are valued.

When people win at the American Game of Wealth, a sense of privilege and our love for the less fortunate may start to fall away. People may donate financially to needy people but hobnobbing with the suffering is rare In America. If life is about winning, there is little incentive to be kind unless you want to be.

Now, I know for a fact that there is tremendous kindness to be found in Americans, but we also all recognize America’s competitive spirit and unfortunately, that can have a negative effect people on people. 

America is country of colonization; of going after countries in the guise of lifting them up. Most people know that colonization is more often about exploiting countries for their resources. Mostly, though, colonization is about changing one culture into another, sometimes from a smaller traditional culture to one that values the dollar and economic growth. That effects everyone, the new country and the old alike.  

As colonizer, America has an egocentric attitude of being better than others and usually that is based on wealth. On the other hand, America’s goal is often to destroy a culture in which the economy wasn’t the reason for existence. Traditions were. Traditions that may have served to hold a community together where people relied upon each other.

Colonization often has sought to crush the older traditions. The mission of America has been to seek and destroy but sadly, when we destroy cultures of old traditions, we are also crushing our own happiness. How, you may ask. 

Let’s step back a minute and imagine another way. 

In an immigrant community in California, a couple works four jobs between the two of them. Grandma stays home with the kids and they live seven people in a two-bedroom apartment. They know all about the pressures of keeping a roof over their head. Yet, they taught me more about happiness than I knew possible. 

For one thing, their small living space kept everyone close and the rent low. Their kids have name brand sneakers, the two oldest have iPhones, the parents own two cars and a truck for his business. Paying rent for a bigger home would cost them quality of life. 

Three kids sleep in a triple bunkbed and the baby slept with the parents until he was almost three. In the evenings after dinner, all the neighbors, myself included, go outside where everyone is talking and laughing, sometimes with music, loads of kids running safely up and down the street. The whole neighborhood is like living with family. For me, my apartment was only a place to sleep. Life was outside.

I often asked the father of that couple about Mexico, where he said people lived a freer lifestyle. 

A man of impressive size, he swept his hands across the community. Men were playing cards in the garden across the street. Women were watching the children, laughing and talking together, which reminded me of a suburban cul-de-sac, but there were other ways I had never known in which their traditions enhanced their lives. 

When I moved into the neighborhood, I didn’t speak a word of Spanish and most of the grownups spoke little if any English. The kids did, though, and they became my pals. I was brought into the community and enveloped in the kind of love I had never experienced before. I felt like I lived under the cover of safety and security, openness and acceptance, such as I had only ever felt with my immediate family. My life was interwoven with my neighbors in ways I had never felt within any other community.

My neighbors worried about me if I came home late. The children brought me dinner their mothers had cooked and if they had cooked one of my favorites, I was invited to their homes.

I took the children on ride bikes, played ball, walked to the ocean with them and swam with them in the rivers and ocean.

My four cats spent their days sitting at the large picture window where children and adults always stopped by to say hello to them. One man brought his new puppy over to show the cats. Another man passed by each morning with his chihuahua dressed in a bathing suit. (That’s California for you. :-)

On Tuesdays, the tamale lady knocked on my door and I always bought a few. Several nights a week, weather permitting, everyone chipped in to buy meat for a barbecue. For many, it was the only way they could afford meat.

They ate outside together, and they’d invite me, too. On Friday nights, a man raised money by selling tacos from his backyard. Another refinished furniture in his truck and another made exquisite ice cream, sold within the neighborhood.

Once, when a young man passed away, the whole community made food and sold food to raise money for the funeral. Hundreds of people participated and they all gathered in the street and ate together.

I hated to leave for work in the mornings and whenever I entered the mainstream, it almost always included a stressful experience. Traffic. Rudeness. A sense of being solitary and far from home.

Competitive drivers cut me off for a good parking spot. Once, a man’s car blocked the pedestrian ramp at the curb as I was trying to cross the street with a baby in a stroller. He refused to move for me because he had paid taxes for that sidewalk.

In five years in my little hispanic community, I was never greeted gruffly, angrily, rudely, with judgement or privilege.  People there just didn’t treat each other that way. They weren’t perfect but their kindness towards each other was deeply refreshing. I wished the whole world was like that.

In a different situation, a Lakota woman who’d just had a baby told me she was leaving her California suburban home and returning to her reservation. 

In South Dakota, a newspaper stated, “A fire burned down a house, killing the ten people who lived there,” and the judgement in Rapid City spread like the flames themselves. “Ten people living in such a small house!”

The young mother told me that the American Dream of a home with two parents and their children was too hard for her. “When I lived on the reservation, ten people in the home was normal. We have always lived like that. I never had to leave my baby with strangers. My mother, my sisters, my aunties, were all nearby or in the home. Life was so much easier when I didn’t have to do everything myself.”

In my Hispanic neighborhood, everyone counted on each other. Together they cooked, they fixed cars, they watched each other’s children, they planted vegetable and fruit gardens. I was never lonely and I never lacked purpose. As I approach retirement age, being an integral part of my community gave me purpose and constant company.

In America, we have neighbors, friends, and family. In my California community, neighbors and friends called each other “primo.” Cousin. From a variety of countries, unrelated by blood, they had brought together traditions of love, generosity, purpose, and connection with each other. This was the way of life they had all known.

In America, we are so individualistic that being intensely connected with neighbors doesn’t occur to us. We don’t need it. We may not even imagine we want it. Being so separate, so focused on our own lives, we may even see each other as competitors rather than as relatives.

Life is busy from the start. We go to school, get married, have kids, buy a home, get a job, raise the kids, send them to college — and when we finally have time to breathe, we look around and wonder, Now What? 

My mother was too busy to help me with the kids and in her old age, my family sent her to a nice nursing home, where she is very happy and doesn't seem to miss her family. 

As I get older, I look around a Connecticut community where people talk about feeling isolated but make little effort to remove themselves from that. I think possibly because people cannot envision the kind of a neighborhood where everyone acts more as family than individuals. 

If we strengthen our connections, if we keep grandma close, if we raise the kids to value neighbors as family, we will find staying connected makes us happy and gives us purpose. Not through our individuality, but through our connections. A strong vision of individuality can result in being rich or poor, but alone.

Don’t take this as a personal attack, America. Everyone has strong connections to someone and values them. But in looking further, beyond the obvious people we love in our life, by welcoming everyone we meet into a circle of loved ones, as cousins, we can change the hardness of the world.

How? There is so much already being done in other places. Connection and purpose effects justice, disassembles discrimination, levels all of the playing fields, and can help America reach its promise for equality for all. Next week, I’ll share some ways that create a safer environment for the youth, the disenfranchised, people of color and any one else who slips through the fingers of the mainstream. 

See you next Saturday, right after dinner.

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Thanks to Lisa Lund Leach, who allowed me to interview her right then and there in the middle of a tea date. I asked her the question above, “Why are Americans so unhappy?” She said, “We live in a Culture of Misery.” That got me thinking, and while it was a profound thought, you might not read such a sad sounding blog. 

“We live in a Culture of Misery.”

Think about it though. It’s a powerful thought.