Runaway Future

A long time ago I read the book “The Know-It-All” about a guy who read the whole Encyclopedia Britannica set and wrote a book about the process. I think I might have mentioned it before. Either way the book sits on a side table with a bunch of notes stuck in it of things I found interesting and wanted to write about.

Flipping through it recently, I came across a mention of facial feedback. The basic idea is that if your brain feels your face in a happy position (like smiling), then your brain figures you must be happy and thus it puts into play all those chemical reactions that happen in your body. It’s an interesting concept, the idea to smile when you are feeling blue.

In the same breath, there’s this entry from Scott Adams’ blog, which basically says that it is society’s tendency to bring everyone into the norm. So if you’re sad, everyone wants you to be happy. If you’re too happy, then they want to bring you back down a peg or two. It’s a bit of a scary idea, but it makes plenty of sense. Adams even talks about a few ways to protect your own feelings of happiness so that the mass majority doesn’t eventually bring you down. (Basically inwardly happy, outwardly complaining).

Reading the Scott Adams’ entry makes me think of Matt Good’s latest record. Good went through a lot of crap, involving a divorce, a near death, a hospitalization and some ongoing psychiatric problems. Through it all, he wrote music, eventually releasing the CD “Hospital Music”. It’s a pretty amazing record. I’ve since gone to see him play live once in September, and will undoubtedly go again when he returns in May. The record has been successful, with a strong niche of his fans forming almost a support community that can be found on his website. Applying that whole scenario to the Scott Adams’ post, one has to wonder if the record would have been as well received and as successful if Good was not as open and forthcoming about what inspired the record.

While it’s not nice to think that if you are happy, something will inevitably bring you down (the ol’ ‘this too shall pass’), it is nice to see the world itself bringing people back up. Obviously, Matt Good’s example isn’t a good reflection of this happening for everyone, but it’s the most visible one. Everyone finds happiness in different ways and everyone has different levels of feeling good.