Happiness is Boring

I find myself preferring Tragedies to Comedies. I find the latter unsatisfying and unrealistic. This isn't to say that happy endings do not happen in real life, but rather that they lack the grander of Comedies. Happy endings are boring and happy people are boring, as they should be. I would go so far as to say that to be boring may be a blessing since you will probably be happy. This relates back to the reason that I hate Comedies: there has been a purposeful attempt to make happiness seem exciting and I find it distasteful. I also find it damaging. I am sure many a happiness has been ruined by people asking themselves why their happiness is not exciting, when the simple answer is that happiness itself is unexciting. You won't find that message common in a lot of popular culture.

There are, of course, exceptions and the reverse is also not true. Tragedies often are interesting and they show the negative side of that. It should be noted that a lot of popular culture attempts to tell an exciting story so that they were bound to get one of the two right and one of the two wrong. This does not mean I find the excuse valid or any less damaging.

The major exception I have in mind is Tolstoy's Anna Karenina: "Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way." Although this can be interpreted in many ways, the way I choose to interpret it is that unhappy families are fascinating because of their differences while happy families are boring because of their similarities. It would also be possible to say that the nature of being happy means being boring, and thus being similar. While the nature of being unhappy means being interesting, and interesting things are often new and different. The casual relationship is of secondary importance to the more important facet, that of the inherent boringness of happiness.

Happiness is not fighting a dragon to save a princess. Happiness is the 30 years of living with a princess and taking care of cows and peasants. The fight with the dragon is tough, dirty, interesting, and possibly tragic. The dragon might have killed the princess, or she might be in another castle, or you could even die fighting it. The elements of the tragedy are so varied that I could come up with something even more ridiculous such as the dragon was protecting the prince from the evil princess, and the slaying of the dragon will spell doom for the naive prince. That is interesting. That is a twist worth reading about.

What is there to know or learn or excite once the prince and the princess are safe? Nothing. Boring, boring happiness. The goal of pop culture should be to tell fascinating stories, and I just find the happy ones to be incredibly boring. I would rather have real life be boring and happy, while the fantasy world should be exciting and tragic. Isn't that a more noble and awesome (in the sense of awe inspiring) goal than to try to sanitize the boringness of happiness? At the very least it seems more honest.