Allowing Oneself to Be Happy

It is hard to allow oneself to be happy.

Making a choice because you actually want to make it, rather than because everyone else seems to be making it, is a difficult enough problem on its own. What makes it stranger is that even when we manage to make the choice we genuinely want, we often refuse to let ourselves enjoy it.

Do you actually want to go out tonight, or is it that a lot of people you know are going out and you think you should be among them? Maybe, if nobody knew what you were doing tonight, you would rather stay home. But people do know, or at least you imagine that they might, and suddenly the decision is no longer only about what would make the night enjoyable. It becomes a decision about what your absence means, what you might miss, and what other people might think when they notice you weren’t there.

Suppose you recognize all of this and decide to stay home anyway. You have listened to yourself. You have made exactly the choice you wanted to make. The problem should be over.

And yet, sitting at home, you begin thinking about the night you aren’t having.

You wonder who went, what they are doing, whether something memorable is happening, whether somebody will talk about it tomorrow. You might check your phone and see fragments of a night that seems, from a distance, much better than the one you chose. Eventually you can spend so much of your night wondering whether you should have gone that you lose the very thing you stayed home to enjoy.

This seems to reveal a second problem, one that may be harder than making an independent choice in the first place. It is one thing to choose what you want. It is another thing to allow yourself to be happy with having chosen it.

Every decision creates a life that happens and several lives that don’t. The strange advantage those unlived lives have is that reality can never ruin them. The party you skipped can remain incredible because you never attended long enough to discover that it was boring. The person you didn’t talk to can remain fascinating because you never got to know them. The path you didn’t take can preserve every possibility that the path you did take inevitably had to surrender.

Perhaps this is why being content with a decision can feel so difficult. We compare the full, imperfect reality of the life we chose with an edited imagination of the lives we didn’t.

Sometimes what we think we want is not the experience itself, but what the experience would allow us to believe about ourselves. Maybe you don’t particularly want to go out. Maybe you want to be the kind of person who goes out. You want to be included, wanted, remembered, or simply able to tell yourself that while everyone else was living, you were living too. The desire is real, but its object is different from what it first appears to be.

I don’t think the solution is to always stay home, or to distrust anything that other people enjoy. There will be nights when you genuinely want to go, and staying home because you are trying to prove your independence would simply be another way of allowing an audience to make your decisions for you. The more difficult task is figuring out what you actually want when nobody else’s choice is available as evidence.

And then, once you choose, allowing yourself to live inside that choice.

There will always be another room you could have been in, another person you could have spoken to, another school you could have attended, another city you could have lived in, another version of yourself you could have become. If happiness requires first proving that the life you chose is better than every life you could have chosen, happiness becomes nearly impossible.

Maybe allowing yourself to be happy begins when you stop requiring the life you are living to defeat all of its alternatives.