When our neurochemicals get the better of us, we grow less empathetic to the faceless and the voiceless that do not have the privilege to smile.

This hurts all of us.

Sitting on a stool at a table at the corner of a takeout Japanese restaurant, I felt a smile come over me while opening up my order of chicken teriyaki. The bed of rice was firm, with vegetables at the side. Above it laid cleanly cubed chicken breasts. This was (and is) the best chicken teriyaki in town, and perhaps in the Greater Toronto Area, run and staffed by a Japanese family. It was cheap, it was good, and for a while it made me feel glad.

Happiness was a fading feeling. I couldn’t help but feel that I had done wrong. That I had thought wrong, and perhaps even felt a way about my lunch that was problematic. The teriyaki, as always, was perfect. Rather, it was that fleeting feeling of happiness over something seemingly so trivial that I had trouble with. I didn’t feel so wrong about it, until I realized that this feeling of being content with the status quo in that particular moment was part of the problem.

Some say money can’t buy happiness, and perhaps in a spiritual sense this axiom is true. Nevertheless, studies have been conducted that show a modicum of correlation between happiness and income. This trend caps off once we surpass a threshold of income, approximately $75k USD, wherein the marginal increase in fulfillment in our lives afterward becomes relatively minimal as our salaries increase. Furthermore, the study points out the percentage of individuals that feel happiness on a daily basis.

The authors found that most Americans — 85% — regardless of their annual income, felt happy each day. Almost 40% of respondents also reported feeling stressed (which is not mutually exclusive with happiness) and 24% had feelings of sadness. Most people were also satisfied with the way their life was going.

Given the 85 percent number is well beyond the range of a parliamentary and/or congressional supermajority, it’s not so difficult to conclude that such feelings of happiness each day may very well be responsible for the lack of action on key issues concerning social justice. The 15 percent that do not have the luxury of feeling happy, which are likely included in the 24 percent that had feelings of sadness, are the oft forgotten disadvantaged minorities and people of colour.

After all, consider yourself feeling happy: a state of mind that is inherent in its vanity and lack of critical introspection as it is a function of one’s own neurochemicals for the purpose of self-aggrandization. You smile, you laugh, you feel good, and this is celebrated and promoted by corporate media and a majority of society. The propagandist agenda to maintain a sense of contentment with the status quo, through marketing and promotions, as a result only serve to benefit those that reap the rewards of maintaining white supremacist institutions, patriarchal hegemony, and capitalism.

In a world where capitalism has figured out a way to commodify happiness and subsequently dole it out on demand, this feeling can no longer be seen as innocuous as it is initially billed.

Herein lies the problematic nature of happiness.

The willful promotion and adulation of happiness is a veil over our faces. It hides injustices plaguing society by making ourselves, first and foremost, feel good. It removes us from the realm of empathy from those that may not be in the same emotional state as us. It reduces the mutual understanding we may have for one another, by sharing in one another’s plights. For one thing, how can we ensure that privileges we may have are checked while we are all smiles?

Most often it is people of colour, women, and the LGBTQ community who are relegated to the sidelines of income distribution, which is incredibly problematic when money is a precursor to a base level of happiness. The impact of their incomes on their level of happiness, in tandem with the effects of historical systematic oppression (racist, sexist, and other equally destructive -isms) and remnants of colonialism, show that something as simple as smiling while being middle class and a white cismale is illustrative of sociopathic tendencies (privilege entails power, and wanton abuse thereof, after all). It is happiness at the expense of the oppressed. At it’s core: a symbol of social evil.

A smile is, as a result, inherently a show of smug social dominance to the underprivileged.

Next time when smiling, laughing, or feeling happy, understand the role that your privilege plays in what lets you express yourself, or feel this way. When feeling happy, understand the empathy that you invariably forgo in doing so. You may not forget about groups less privileged than you, but when you try to forget your own despair and unhappiness you remove yourself further from the marginalized who would have it worse than you. You can never fully understand the oppression faced by the underprivileged, as they are experiences learned only through being in their shoes. However, the closest thing is understanding one another’s emotional state, and that comes with knowing that happiness is a luxury that not everyone may share.

One might argue that laughter is contagious, and happiness spreads amongst us. While this is true, it must be noted that sharing in such happiness is effectively a short burst of neurochemicals that clouds our judgement, and serves as an opiate that continues to entrench the underprivileged within the confines of white supremacist, patriarchal, and imperialist capitalism. It paints us the illusion that our societal ills don’t exist, and slowly disintegrates the solidarity through indignation that binds us against this oppressive and exploitative system.

…we mustn’t derail the solidarity built through indignation and empathy that is necessary to demolish oppressive systems…