Perhaps it was the fact that it was Tax Day in the U.S., but I forgot to blog this when it first appeared, an article by Tim Lott at Alternet, apparently reprinted from The Guardian: “Please, Everyone, Can We Stop Pretending We Must All be Constantly Happy?” There’s much agreeable here, especially the deployment of the useful descriptor “happiness fascism” and also this:

We can, it is suggested, find happiness through good works. This is also an ideology. I am as likely to be disappointed by “doing the right thing” as I am elevated. That’s why it’s so hard to do. The secret truth is that being unselfish can leave you just as empty as being selfish.

Well put, Tim Lott. I do wish I had a nickel for every time some sententious would-be wise person replied to someone’s enduring sadness or crushing disappointment with the advice that they ought to go work in a soup kitchen (or whatever) for a while, and that doing so will somehow give them “perspective” or fill their life with “meaning.” (It wouldn’t make me a rich man by any means, but I bet it would add up to enough to take myself and a friend out for a nice boozy lunch somewhere, and that’s not to be sneered at.) The brutal truth is that while it might be a fine and noble thing to work in a soup kitchen or otherwise volunteer one’s services to wretched of the world, it ain’t going to fix what’s wrong with you, your life, or human existence.

Now if only someone would tell Peter Singer…

Update: I must have been low on blood sugar when I wrote this post before lunch, because I left off the punchline. It’s something like this: if it were the case that do-gooding could heal the misery of the do-gooder’s life, well then we’d expect to observe a lot of do-gooding and not very much misery. Do-gooding would be like delicious ice cream that comes for free and never makes you fat, only better. But what we actually observe is only some do-gooding and a lot of misery. Therefore, by the logical magic of the modus tollens we can infer… (and the rest is left to you to work out yourself, dear reader).