The Fear of Being Happy

 

The Fear of Being Happy

Read this essay as originally published at Watermark.com

Recently, I was out to dinner with some friends, sitting at the bar of our favorite local restaurant, sipping happy hour martinis and munching on brick-baked pizza. We were acting silly, loving life, and enjoying each others’ company. Even in the tumult since the election, and even though we range, politically, from Trumpers to ultra-Pinkos, we find our common ground in love and affection. On this night, our cheers were interrupted by a wet towel from down the bar, repeating the “wah-wahhh” refrain of a muted trombone that she clearly had been playing to much sympathetic reaction since November: “We are all going to die. He’s going to kill us all. America is over.”

I, ever the radical centrist, shouldn’t have engaged. I should have let the irrational shot across the bar land on deaf ears; I couldn’t. “Look, I didn’t vote for him. I think he’s a rotten person, a narcissist, and has some really bad ideas. But I also don’t think that the bad that he can do can undo two hundred fifty years of an ascendant America. Do you really think that America is somehow, all of a sudden, that weak?”

“Oh, we will be finished within a year.”

“Well, let’s do this. Let’s plan to meet here in a year to celebrate another year of America surviving. Then we can assess, based on fact, where we are.”

“Oh, we won’t be here.”

Pushing harder than I should have, “Can we make a date? To meet here in a year?”

Afflictedly, “No.” She walked away as my buddy asked me to, “not get elevated.”

I licked his ear as she skulked away, dampening joy further down the well. “Sorry, dear. Hand me one of those garlic knots and do a cheers with me.”

We cheers’d.

America is imperfect. Even during the Era of Good Feelings, we had imperfections. We have not always treated neighbors right. We have not always lived up to the ideals of the founders or of our founding documents. We are not, as a people or as a nation, perfect, but rather in the ever-evolving state of perfecting: inching incrementally toward a more perfect Union and knowing that such a state is unattainable except in the great hereafter.

But there are those whose entire perspective is on the failures—systemic and social—along the way rather than on the progress made. Ronald Reagan said, “Optimism comes less easily today, not because democracy is less vigorous, but because democracy's enemies have refined their instruments of repression.”

Those instruments of repression have been wielded by both poles of our politics: skepticism and nuance have succumbed to cynicism and bogeymen: facts have given way to deep-fakes: temperaments have given way to hyperbole. Our ultra-factionalized discourse has targeted on amplifying outliers and super-minorities as if they are the rule and not the exception: as if every transgender is a molester, as if every immigrant is muling fentanyl, as if every billionaire is a robber baron, as if every abortion is late-term, as if “this or that” budget line is a waste: as if every idea that the forty-seventh President has is based in evil intent.

Hypotheticals have become proof-positive and conspiracy theories have become dangerous wormholes into which realities slide.

Oh for the good old days when cultural malaise and melancholy were remedied by irrational exuberance.

Oh for the good old days, before the pursuit of happiness was displaced by the irrational fear of it.

What we are experiencing as, “democracy’s enemies have refined their instruments of repression,” is a psychological pandemic.  Cherophobia, a phobia where a person has an irrational aversion to being happy, is spreading through the masses with indifference to political affiliations. Like the cultural malaise of the Seventies, Cherophobia has been weaponized, it’s been amplified online and in echo chambers: it’s being utilized—not unlike other recent pandemics—by our enemies via disinformation, misinformation, and lies. They’re using media that were unimaginable a generation ago.

The vast right-wing conspiracy and Trump Derangement Syndrome have been subsumed into this horrible all-permeant cultural Cherophobia. How will we get over our irrational fear of being happy? How will we stop the spread?

It has to start at the grassroots. It has to well up. Twistedly, we must remove our masks. Where do you wear your glee? Does it spring forth from thanksgiving or from progress? Do you find your glee in nostalgia or in optimism? Pride? I’m not suggesting that we can’t feel anger or sadness or disappointment, but we also can’t be irrationally afraid of happiness. We can’t be afraid of being great.

For me and mine,  we will love our friends and celebrate each other. We will find joy in our communities and let that swell up—optimistically punch—through the crevasses in our social  and political superstructure. I will dwell in optimism. We must temper our joy-sucking cynicism and maintain a healthy, democratic, empirically based skepticism. We must remember where we came from, what we’ve overcome—personally and collectively—to be inhabitants of the greatest nation. We must allow ourselves to believe that we are great.

We must allow ourselves to believe that THESE are the good old days.

I, for one, look forward to meeting at Armando’s—my antidotal glee fully exposed—with my friends on January 20, 2026 and to cheersing with them and new ones, to America, and to the eradication of Cherophobia.

Read more essays, poetry, and short stories at Momentitiousness.com