Your God-given right to be happy

Medieval kings would envy you.

“We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.”

Whenever I’ve read these words, I’ve tended to gloss over the final phrase —“the pursuit of Happiness” — but I’ve come to understand it as a noteworthy choice by the drafters of the Declaration of Independence. The traditional refrain is, of course, Life, liberty, and property — the three natural rights which actually show up in the U.S. Constitution (5th and 14th Amendments) but for some reason the founders chose to substitute property for the “pursuit of Happiness”. Why?

There’s no one definitive answer but there are a few that I like a lot:

Arthur M. Schlesinger Sr., the social historian, argued in 1964 that pursuit was better understood as practice. So rather than understanding the founders to be declaring our right to seek happiness, they were actually declaring our right to be happy. Schlesinger writes that from John Adams to James Otis, “none of these spokesmen of the American cause thought of happiness as something a people were entitled simply to strive for but as something that was theirs by natural right.”

Danielle Allen, a modern political philosopher, has argued that the choice to leave out “property” had to do with slavery. At the time, slaveholders were using property language to defend the brutal institution, so Allen’s read is that the “pursuit of happiness” is evidence of the antislavery faction’s strength in Congress.

Pauline Maier, another historian and author of American Scripture, argues that for Thomas Jefferson and his contemporaries, happiness “no doubt demanded safety or security, which would have been in keeping with the biblical phrase one colonist after another used to describe the good life.”

This biblical phrase comes from the book of Micah in the Old Testament. Micah was prophesying about the last days and wrote: “Everyone will sit under their own vine and under their own fig tree, and no one will make them afraid, for the Lord Almighty has spoken.”

I really love Schlesinger’s contribution, which posits that we have a natural right to be happy. It reminded me of a paywalled piece by staff writer Kelsey Piper which ran over Thanksgiving. We usually go dark on federal holidays but instead, I’m bringing it out from behind the paywall because I think it’s a great reminder of the modern miracles that come with being an American.

Day to day, what makes people happy are friends and family, yes, but also, stuff! The blast of AC when you come in from a hot day, a glass of wine with some friends on your front porch, a bouquet of flowers from your spouse, a place to call home …

Your happiness isn’t trivial, it’s your God-given right.

—Jerusalem Demsas, editor in chief

---

No one thinks of themselves as rich when there’s always someone richer. I live in one of the highest-income regions of the wealthiest state in the wealthiest country in the world. I know people who have started successful companies, who live in the nation’s most expensive ZIP code, who are CEOs.

My home — which I share with 10 other people — cost $2 million; I’ve been in houses that probably cost 10 times that.

Our society makes it remarkably easy to fantasize about what you would do if you had $100,000 more, or $1 million more, or $10 million. Maybe then my kitchen would look like the ones on Instagram; maybe then my kids would play in the idyllic yard for which landscapers will quote me more money than the average American makes in a year.

I have never quite had the nerve to ask a billionaire whether, when you have that much money, you finally feel content. It wouldn’t surprise me if you don’t.

Humans are very sensitive to the wealth of the people around us, the people to whom we compare ourselves. Our life satisfaction often depends more on how rich our neighbors are than how rich we are. This suggests a very straightforward life hack for eternal happiness — change your comparison group.

I would not recommend moving to a poor country where you can hire dozens of employees for practically nothing. Instead, I try — once a year or so, perhaps around Thanksgiving — to surround myself with the thoughts of all the people who have ever lived.

Almost every single human who has ever lived was very poor.

With them accompanying me, I walk through my house and try to see it through their eyes. Here is my tea cupboard, stuffed to the brim with packets and boxes that prevent the drawer from closing properly. I count 27 varieties of tea. I cringe at the 20 boxes of Celestial Seasonings Mandarin Orange Spice that piled up because of an Amazon subscription I forgot to cancel.

I accumulated more tea by accident than most people ever drank in their lives. I should probably give some away so that the drawer will close.

Medieval kings would envy me.

I turn to my left and see my bookshelves. When the Library of Congress was founded, it owned 740 books. I have more. In 1815, after the British burned the Library to the ground, Congress approved the purchase of Thomas Jefferson’s entire, and unusually comprehensive, personal library. That amounted to just 6,487 books. It cost them the inflation-adjusted equivalent of $500,000, almost $80 per book.

I buy books online for $3 to $5 apiece; a used bookstore near me offers two for $1.

The only reason I don’t have a library to rival Thomas Jefferson’s is that the homeschooling co-op is out of space on the shelves. And because I don’t need one; the Oakland Public Library system has 2.2 million items in circulation.

I walk past my glass windows — a luxury adornment for the homes of the ultra-wealthy since the time of Rome. Though, that’s underselling modern windows; they weren’t transparent back then.

I meander past my closet, which contains more clothes than any 30 of my ancestors would have owned. I pass my refrigerator, which all of my ancestors who lived more than a century ago would take as flatly miraculous. And this here is my bathroom, where hot water pours forever from the ceiling.

I pay less than $1 for every 30 gallons of water I use. That’s actually one of the highest rates in the country. It’s still low enough that I never have to think about it.

When the White House was built, it had no indoor plumbing. Flush toilets weren’t introduced there until the 1840s. My ancestors weren’t presidents, so they got them much more recently: 1940 was the first census to find that more than half of American households had indoor plumbing.

And these, over here, are my children. We have three; we are expecting the fourth this spring (Editor’s note: Kelsey and her wife now have four beautiful children). For as long as we have written records, and probably much longer, parents were willing to pay nearly any price to keep their children alive. But they couldn’t, no matter how rich they were. Every day of the not-too-distant past carried horrors that would make the front-page news if they were to happen today.

Go click your way through the English royal line and check the numbers:

King James I and his wife had seven children and buried five.

His son Charles and his wife had nine children and buried five.

His son James had eight children by his first wife and buried six, then had seven children by his second wife and buried five — not including several miscarriages and stillbirths.

Can you call them rich, the royals of the past? Every last one of them would envy me.

According to the World Bank, the deadliest place in the world to be born is Niger. More than one child in 10 there dies before age 5. Those are better odds than the children of 17th-century English kings had.

---

Thanksgiving at my household is an operation planned with military precision. We usually have 30 to 40 guests, with five of us doing all the cooking. We’re serious about our planning, prep, and timing: There is a spreadsheet documenting each of the available ovens (anywhere from three to five if we include the neighbors’) and to what temperature they will be set, at which times, so that every dish can hit the table at the exact right minute.

We generally have something like 25 entrees. We use spices that 100 years ago could be obtained only by the richest people in the world — and spices that could not be obtained at any price.

In 1900, Americans spent nearly half, 43%, their income on food. Even this absurdity of a feast will not cost half my income for Thanksgiving week (and a week will not suffice to finish the leftovers).

I do not say any of this as a substitute for meaningful action on the real grinding and horrific poverty that still exists in our world. I like Max Roser’s mantra for these things: “The world is awful. The world is much better. The world can be much better.”

But on Thanksgiving, I like to linger on that second part. It’s the part we skip over too often in our haste to go from lamenting the horrors still with us to the plans to fix them.

We are rich beyond our ancestors’ wildest dreams. We casually discard things for which they would have worked all their lives. In the background noise of our lives, there are staggering wonders. When you look at yourself through your ancestors’ eyes, you should see an astoundingly rich person, a life lived in the lap of unfathomable luxury. Delight in it.

And we should feel, too, a sense of responsibility: Whatever obligations you believe attach to the rich, they attach to you. The things that we enjoy are not the default state of affairs. They are not universal. What we have in the modern world is precious and rare, and it should make us generous.