My sister was happy today. Which normally wouldn’t be a big deal except that it’s the first time she’s been happy in a few weeks which has me relieved.

It all culminated on Sunday when I took her down to Influx Cafe in Golden Hill to get some homework done. She said she was distracted, that she couldn’t concentrate enough to read. “Try writing first” says I.

“I don’t feel like that either. I don’t feel like anything.”

And so we started a conversation that we should have had weeks earlier.

“I just want to get out of here. I’m sick of San Diego, sick of the people, sick of myself. I feel like if I just went somewhere else everything would be alright.”

And immediately I was sucked back in time. It was like falling backwards. I knew exactly what she was talking about, could feel what she felt. What an overwhelming weight hangs over our teenage years. I suppose that’s why they call it teenage angst.

I remember the same thought, the same sensation, which managed to turn itself into a mantra by the time I was to graduate from high school:

Happiness is somewhere else
Happiness is somewhere else
Happiness is somewhere else

But I was sure it was there, just waiting for me. Maybe that’s what Om Mani Padme Hum translates to I figured.

I then traveled far and wide and almost always alone looking for that somewhere else. Until I finally learned – and nothing pisses me off more than discovering the truth of a cliché – that somewhere else is inside, but that it too takes a lot of traveling to find.

No, this is not a self-help post.

This is me looking in the eyes of my 15-year-old sister, filled with so much sadness, her shoulders pushed down with so much weight, and thinking to myself:

Well … what in the fuck do I say?

And what can you say? Sadness is part of life … especially teenage life, but learning how to deal with it, how to be happy most of the time and cope the rest, is probably the second most useful trick in the book. Right below making a peanut butter, banana, and honey sandwich and above both touch typing and finding the clitoris.

In the end I convinced her that, yes, change is fun, but it sure as hell doesn’t last long and that if in your life you are able to find any kind of sustained happiness, then mission accomplished, don’t be greedy and let it go. I also tried to convince her that, not always, but usually there is a lurking culprit responsible for the melancholy. And that the faster you face up to it, the sooner you will feel better.

Which seemed to be what happened. Now if I can just get her to do her homework.

It also occurred to me though, that teenage misery is often just as self-inflicted as those terrible outfits we used to all wear. (baggie pants, flannels, long belts, you feel me right?)

Being happy has never been cool. Or God forbid, enthusiasm.

“Sure.” This is my sister’s word … and it belongs also to all of her friends, always accompanied with a shrug of the shoulders. “It wasn’t terrible” tranlslates into the most amazing thing they’ve ever seen.

I have friends today – twenty somethings, thirty somethings – and they are still like this. Too hipster to be happy. Cynical irony is appropriate, but anything resembling a smile or good will is unacceptable. If you don’t think this is true, try asking one of the waitresses at Pokez how her day is going.

I had always thought this was a defense mechanism. The less you admit to caring about something, the less stupid you will look when it becomes trendy or dumps you.

But James Poniewozik, in one of the best essays I’ve read in a long time, looks at it differently:

You could argue that art became more skeptical of happiness because modern times have seen such misery. But it’s not as if earlier times didn’t know perpetual war, disaster and the massacre of innocents. The reason, in fact, may be just the opposite: there is too much damn happiness in the world today.

After all, what is the one modern form of expression almost completely dedicated to depicting happiness? Advertising. The rise of anti-happy art almost exactly tracks the emergence of mass media, and with it, a commercial culture in which happiness is not just an ideal but an ideology.

People in earlier eras were surrounded by reminders of misery. They worked gruelingly, lived with few protections and died young. In the West, before mass communication and literacy, the most powerful mass medium was the church, which reminded worshippers that their souls were in peril and that they would someday be meat for worms. On top of all this, they did not exactly need their art to be a bummer too.

Today the messages your average Westerner is bombarded with are not religious but commercial, and relentlessly happy. Fast-food eaters, news anchors, text messengers, all smiling, smiling, smiling, except for that guy who keeps losing loans to Ditech. Our magazines feature beaming celebrities and happy families in perfect homes. (Tolstoy clearly never edited a shelter mag.) And since these messages have an agenda–to pry our wallets from our pockets–they make the very idea of happiness seem bogus. “Celebrate!” commanded the ads for the arthritis drug Celebrex, before we found out it could increase the risk of heart attacks.

It gets exhausting, this constant goad to joy. If you’re not smiling–after we made all those wonderful pills and cell-phone plans!–what’s wrong with you? Not to smile is un-American. You can pick out the Americans in a crowd of tourists by their reflexive grins. The U.S. enshrined in its founding document the right to the pursuit of happiness. So we pursued it and–at least as commerce defines it–we caught it.

He’s right. Happiness has been taken hostage by advertising and ecstasy and it’s time we take it back. Could it be possible? Could happy art ever be considered cool in our lifetimes? Probably not because if it’s any type of design at all and it makes us feel good at all – car commercials, classic example (and one of my favorite genres of music) – then it is probably advertising.

And until that association changes, there’s probably not a hell of a lot we can do about it.

As it turns out, Time’s entire issue this week is all about happiness … and of course it’s filled with plenty of happy advertisements about drugs and SUV’s and Milk. My favorite is a Merck advertisement for a cholestrol drug of a happy, smiling Black woman walking under an umbrella in the rain. Side effects include “constipation, impairment of fertility, heartburn, stomach pains/cramps, hepatitis, jaundice, severe liver damage, rash, itching, blurred vision, yada, yada, yada.” I haven’t figured out the connection with the smiling Black woman.

But there are some interesting articles about new research into happiness. I haven’t read all of them, but here is one paragraph:

What Makes Us Happy
So, what has science learned about what makes the human heart sing? More than one might imagine – along with some surprising things about what doesn’t ring our inner chimes. Take wealth, for instance, and all the delightful things that money can buy. Research by Diener, among others, has shown that once your basic needs are met, additional income does little to raise your sense of satisfaction with life. A good education? Sorry, Mom and Dad, neither education, nor for that matter, a high IQ paves the road to happiness. Youth? No, again. In fact, older people are more consistently satisfied with their lives than the young. And they’re less prone to dark moods: a recent survey by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention found that people ages 20 to 24 are sad for an average of 3.4 days a month, as opposed to just 2.3 days for people ages 65 to 74. Marriage? A complicated picture: married people are generally happier than singles, but that may be because they were happier to begin with. Sunny days? Nope, although a 1998 study showed that Midwesterners think folks living in balmy Califonia are happier and that Californians incorrectly believe this about themselves too.

On the positive side, religious faith seems to genuinely lift the spirit, though it’s tough to tell whether it’s the God part of the community aspect that does the heavy lifting. Friends? A giant yes. A 2002 study conducted at the University of Illinois by Diener and Seligman found that the most salient characterisitcs shared by the 10% of students with the highest levels of happiness and the fewest signs of depression were their strong ties to friends and family and commitment to spending time with them. “Word needs to be spread,” concludes Diener. “It is important to work on social skills, close interpersonal ties and social support in order to be happy.”