We were absolutely floored by the millions of you that watched us make silly water sillouettes on our driveway last summer. We are starting out the summer the only way we know how, and this time it’s all about movies! What else do you want to see? We have a whole summer ahead, a driveway and a hose. The possibilities are endless!!!
“If in days to come you remember the words of Melian, it will be for your good: fear both the heat and the cold of your heart, and strive for patience, if you can.”
- Melian to Túrin (Tolkien, The Children of Húrin)
Around 1,950 years ago in Pompeii, a weaver named Successus fell in love with a barmaid named Iris.
She did not love him back.
We know this because his rival, a man named Severus, decided to humiliate him publicly. He grabbed something sharp and carved this into a wall for the whole city to read:
"Successus the weaver loves the innkeeper's slave girl named Iris. She does not care about him at all. But he begs her to have pity on him. His rival wrote this. Goodbye."
Imagine walking to work and seeing that with your name on it.
Successus found it. And instead of letting it go, he carved his reply directly underneath:
"Envious one, why do you get in the way? Yield to a man who is better looking and being treated very unfairly."
Severus came back one more time to end it:
"I have spoken. I have written. You love Iris, but she does not love you."
Then, in 79 AD, Vesuvius erupted and buried the wall, the tavern, and the entire argument under 20 feet of ash. The thread was frozen mid-beef for almost two millennia until archaeologists dug it up and translated it.
We will never know who got the girl. We do not even know if any of the three survived.
Pompeii has over 11,000 of these inscriptions. Bar reviews. Bragging. Bad poetry. A bakery wall that says "Welcome, hungry people." Two guys fighting over a girl in the comments.
The technology changes. We do not.
Half of your baseline mood is genetic. And if yours runs low, you got lucky.
The people born with naturally cheerful brains coast through life. Their default setting is good enough, so they never have to develop the habits that make happiness a craft. So when real adversity hits — and it always does — they are completely unequipped to handle it.
The rest of us have to train. We learn to manage sleep, exercise, attention, relationships. We get good at moving negative emotion from the limbic system into the prefrontal cortex. We build the practices because we have to. To us, happiness is a sport.
By age forty, the trained-up gloomy person is an elite happiness athlete. The naturally cheerful one is an amateur with luck.
I'm not saying this just from research. I come from very gloomy stock. I've worked my whole life on these habits because I had to. Without them, I'd be sad and sick; with them, I'm doing better at sixty than I did at thirty.
This is the same principle as alcoholic genetics. Half your tendency toward addiction is inherited. People with the worst genetic risk who never drink are not addicts. People with no genetic risk who drink hard can still wreck their lives. Knowing the genetic tilt means you can pay attention to the habit. And paying attention is how you win.
The gloomy who don't train end up sad. The gloomy who train end up better than the cheerful who don't. If joy doesn't come easily, discipline will — and discipline is something the lucky never had to build.
So if you're naturally gloomy, congratulations. It's harder for you. That means you'll be better at it.
Happiness is a sport. And you'll be one of its best athletes.
A customer at the library asked me a question I wasn't prepared for.
Customer: Excuse me.
Customer: Why does this machine require flesh?
Me: ...what?
Customer: This machine.
Customer: I am touching it, but it does not work.
Customer: Is because... flesh?
At this point I was trying very hard to figure out whether I had accidentally wandered into a horror movie.
Then she held up her hands.
She was wearing gloves.
Me: Oh!
Me: The touchscreen.
Me: Right.
Me: Yeah, it probably can't detect your fingers through the gloves.
Customer: Ah.
Customer: Okay.
Customer: Sorry to bother.
Me: No, no.
Me: That's the best thing I've heard all week.
She laughed.
The machine worked.
And I thought that was the end of it.
It was not.
Now whenever one of our library computers stops working, someone inevitably says:
Staff: It requires flesh.
Staff: The machine must be fed.
Another staff member: Who's volunteering?
So thanks to one perfectly innocent question, our library now sounds like a cult every time the self-checkout freezes.