As a Self Help Junkie, I wonder: have you “personal appearance” vanity, like me? Have you “far too many” scattered books and magazines, like me—and it drives you mad? Are books your “darlings,” and “stupid junk!”?
Clutter wise, as Henry David Thoreau might say, “The mass of people lead lives of quiet desperation.” … If that’s you, oh desperate one, then read on, for today your favourite Self Help guy has a new insight. Well, new to me, that is.
Perhaps, years ago or recently, you lost a job, or a roof over your head, or even a limb. I wonder if your general happiness today is nevertheless comparable to before that awful thing happened. The answer, scientists tell us, is “yes.” Our happiness, they say, has a “set-point” that varies little down the years, even for years with fewer limbs.
This set-point is said to be genetic, pretty much stuck, but nevertheless, I would like to think we can change our set-point: “Most people,” said Abraham Lincoln “are as happy as they make up their minds to be.” I cannot read the words of this melancholic, joking man without remembering he had a harpy for a wife, a harridan who could never keep any hired help for long. Perhaps Lincoln meant we may control, decide. , our attitude towards life: Such a happy thought.
The scientists on Madison Avenue once came out with an advertising picture to sell something or other. A picture shows a happy woman stepping out onto the sidewalk from a hair salon. The caption: “She has never felt so beautiful.” Slowly, I puzzled it out. She has her normal vanity, with her usual hairdo, at her happy set-point, and then—temporarily—gets to feel a bit more beautiful, feeling a bit of dopamine. When the prophet said, “All is vanity” I think he meant, “All is temporary.”
And then there’s me, passing through the doorway of a musty Used Books Store. Then temporarily feeling a tiny rush at buying a few more books… books that I may never, in actuality, get around to cracking open—although I kid myself I will. Given the price of a used book, you might think I’m paying a little too much for my brief dopamine hit.
But here’s my new improved idea: if I can reframe my stacks of books, remembering that I’m not really a reader, but more of a Self-Help dopamine Junkie, then
—hold that thought.
This week I found a cartoon strip in the funny papers—ever since Charles Schultz inked Peanuts, I’ve treasured philosophy in comics—I found Betty, a cartoon about a wife who looks more like Dagwood than Blondie, with her husband who is more a shabby cartoon doll than a Ken doll.
The two are seated, reading from a carton they found full of Self Help magazines by Oprah and Martha, magazines which I, as a Self Help Junkie, would enjoy. Betty says, “…(Wow) Full of encouraging ideas for living a healthy life. Which is why I kept them.”
Husband responds, “…in a dusty box hidden under the basement stairs.”
I feel hope.
—back to that thought:
Then maybe it has been perfectly appropriate for Betty and I to buy our magazines and books that are now stored in the house. And maybe, what we kept around in our home were not nicely bound receptacles for future knowledge and reading pleasure… but empty candy wrappers from dopamine… after which, the wrappers might just as well be squished into a dusty basement box, or burnt in some Great Incinerator under the sky. “All is vanity.”
Which means those darling books the Secondhand Bookstore won’t take from me… I won’t need to keep merely because they’re “still perfectly good.” I may ignore that ghost of a Puritan, complete with buckled hat, looking saying sternly over my left shoulder. Over my right shoulder, of course, are my dear parents, who grew up during the Great Depression, silently saying, “perfectly good.” I’m entitled to ignore them, too.
I can report that I have already removed several boxes away from my domicile. But where is my “living happily ever after?”
“Not here,” I reply, smiling at my remaining stuff.
… …
… …
Sean Crawford
Calgary
December
2024
