Hippy Parents Do Not Deserve to be Happy

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I Like It!

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When I was fourteen my dad told me that he wanted to check-out of our family to follow his bliss. He didn’t use those exact words, but his basic argument was that I should agree with his decision to abandon us because he deserved to be happy. My father did offer to stick with the family and be miserable, if that was what I really wanted, but the unspoken understanding was this would be an incredibly selfish thing for me to ask him to do. There seemed to be no choice but to give my blessing to my dad’s plan to run off and start a new family, but that conversation haunted me for years. I still tend to feel a bit angry when I hear anyone say that they deserve to be happy. I know they are full of shit.

The Right of Hippies to be Happy

I could be wrong, but this idea that people ‘deserve’ to be happy seems to have originated in the late sixties – or at least this is when it became a fashionable notion. From what I can tell, the nearest my father ever came to being a hippy was buying records by the Beatles, but he was certainly strongly influenced by that culture. My dad was a wonderful man in many ways, but he also possessed a selfish type of optimism and sense of entitlement that I associate with hippies – the follow your bliss mentality. This ‘right to be happy’ idea is not only illogical, but it has also been used as a justification for all kinds of shitty decisions. It is a kind of ‘get out of jail free’ card that can be used by the self-obsessed.

Who Gave Us the Right to be Happy?

I can’t figure out where this right to happiness idea originated from in the first place. I have no problem with the claim that people have a right to food and shelter because these are tangible objects, and it is just a matter of fair distribution. It is not like there is a store of happiness somewhere on the planet though that we can ration out so that everyone gets their just share. Happiness isn’t something that we can accumulate and exchange like a commodity. It is not something that can be given to us, so where does this right come from? It reminds me of the scene from the Life of Brain where the Judea People’s Front agree to fight for a man’s right to have a baby even though he doesn’t have a womb. The right to happiness is something that could never be enforced, so it is a useless idea.

How to Make a Happy Hippy

This right to happiness becomes even more difficult to understand when we stop to consider what this word actually means. How do we define happiness? Does it mean constantly tripping out on feelings of bliss or just doing okay in life? The problem is that happiness is a very subjective term. I now associate happiness with a general feeling of contentment, but I used to have much higher standards. In fact, my current understanding of happiness would probably sound a bit drab to the person I was twenty years ago.

The real irony with the ‘right to be happy’ mentality is that it can only ever lead to misery. Happiness is just one part of this wonderful experience we call life, and it is something that comes and goes like the weather. As far as I can tell, it is not something we own, and it may not even be within our control. The suggestion that we just follow our bliss doesn’t seem to have worked out very well anyway. It makes people feel bad about feeling bad, and their resistance to this normal emotion just makes things much worse. We believe that any unhappiness in our life is a sign that we are doing something wrong. We have to defend our right to be happy so we exercise more, join a club, take a drug, or abandon our family.