Happiness

Oct 08, 2015 20:39

From a fantastic essay in Harpers about finding meaning in life:

Questions about happiness generally assume that we know what a happy life looks like. Happiness is understood to be a matter of having a great many ducks lined up in a row - spouse, offspring, private property, erotic experiences - even though a millisecond of reflection will bring to mind countless people who have all those things and are still miserable.

We are constantly given one-size-fits-all recipes, but those recipes fail, often and hard. Nevertheless, we are given them again. And again and again. They become prisons and punishments; the prison of the imagination traps many in the prison of a life that is correctly aligned with the recipes and yet is entirely miserable.’

***

I have done what I set out to do in my life, and what I set out to do was not what the interviewer presumed. I set out to write books, to be surrounded by generous, brilliant people, and to have great adventures. Men - romances, flings, and long-term relationships - have been some of those adventures, and so have remote deserts, arctic seas, mountaintops, uprisings and disasters, and the exploration of ideas, archives, records, and lives.

On Children
I found the previous essay linked from an article in Elle magazine There are More Childless Women Than Ever Before… So Why Don’t We Know What to Do With Them?

Implicit in both those definitions is the idea that the value of a woman is rooted in her usefulness to other people, be they husband or children. Being a useful person is a worthy goal for anyone, but it is rarely required of men as the sole path to happiness or societal value.

What we need, and what both Bingham's post and Cattrall's comments were leaning towards, is a cultural conversation about women's lives that does not include the mention of children. None. No defense, no justification. Just: Here is my life. This happens all the time with men. You will often have to scroll all the way down to end of a profile of a powerful man to find mention of children, even when he's married and has a house full of children.

***

NEARLY HALF OF WOMEN BETWEEN THE AGES OF 15 AND 44 DID NOT HAVE KIDS, THE HIGHEST PERCENTAGE SINCE THE CENSUS BUREAU STARTED MEASURING IT IN 1976.

Wow, I hadn’t realized there were so many of us out there without kids.

links, feminism

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