Why the long face, Columbia?

Whither happiness?

We live in a community that has banished it to the realm of juice boxes and Rice Krispies squares, of coloring books and crayons, of Berenstain Bears and Sesame Street. There, forsaken and forgotten, a quaint vestige from a puerile past, happiness weeps, trampled beneath size-13 boat shoes hurtling toward the future.

We’re grown-ups now, and grown-ups—especially Ivy League grown-ups—can’t be happy. As we learn more and more, we find less and less about which to be happy. The world, in all its discombobulating complexity, defies our grasp. The past is too ponderous, the present too unwieldy, and the future too dismal to permit happiness. We sink into malaise.

And we begin to take perverse pleasure in our displeasure. We even convince ourselves that it is wrong to be happy. We freely indulge in the privileges of gentrified Harlem, and we’re going to be ostentatiously happy about it, too? We cling to a world spinning in poverty and hunger and crime and terror, and we’re going wallow in mirth and revelry? Joy, we proclaim, is for the naïve.

We go on, beginning to boast that it is the hallmark of the educated to be cheerless. We take it for granted that smart people are grumpy, and, pretending to be smart ourselves, we act grumpy, too. Increasing knowledge correlates to diminishing happiness—it is an axiom at the core of our culture. We read so many books at Columbia, and how many of them are written by apparently happy people? Was Nietzsche happy? Marx? Freud?

But we must rescue joy, bring it back, and call it our own.

In a desert of Core dolor, “Don Quixote” seems to stand out as a lone, sad oasis of happiness. Literature Humanities was the first time I encountered “Don Quixote,” and it lit a fire inside me. The ecstasy, the exuberance of the protagonist, the rebelliousness of someone too drunk with joy to care about the world—it all made me feel like I wanted to be Don Quixote.

Still, despite my visceral appreciation of his joviality, Don Quixote in fact epitomizes the problem with our collective view on happiness. Don Quixote is happy because he is, well, quixotic. Caught in a callow world where windmills are enemies, he is able to be happy perhaps because he lacks any appreciation for the complexity of the real world. Eventually, though, he, too, is forced back down to earth where real people with real knowledge fail to find real happiness.

But knowledge should not be the harbinger of discontent, and we should not seek to quarantine happiness in a sterilized world of childishness and naïveté. Certainly, there is much to be unhappy about in this world. Even in our quotidian existence, in the vicissitudes of college life, there is ample reason to be bitter and despondent. Joy does not suggest obliviousness to these austere aspects of life. Rather, it represents a conscious decision to choose happiness in spite of these realities, or perhaps even precisely because of them.

Borne not by the passing peaks in the undulating emotions of normal college life, perhaps our happiness can derive from the inexhaustible knowledge we gain at a place like Columbia. Knowledge alerts us to the darker aspects of life, but it also endows us with the capacity to cast a light on those shadowy spaces and disentangle happiness from the cobwebby corners of academia. Knowledge can bring us down, but why not channel its energy to lift us up to a plane where, suspended high above the constant ups and downs of college, we can gaze down upon life’s crevices and clean them up?

Often, the noxious fumes of our caustic, acrimonious academic discourse seep into our dorm rooms and pervade the rest of our lives, crowding out happiness. The conflation of maturity with discontent—and, on the other side of the coin, of immaturity with happiness—scares happiness, who is too shy to mingle with intellectuals and scholars, away.

But let’s save a seat for joy. Let’s help it grow up through middle school and high school unabashed and unadulterated, and let’s welcome it with open arms at the gates of 116th and Broadway.

Amin Ghadimi is a Columbia College junior majoring in East Asian Languages and Cultures. He is a former Spectator editorial page editor, a former senior editor of Columbia East Asia Review and served as secretary of the the Bahá’í Club of Columbia University. He is studying abroad at the Kyoto Consortium for Japanese Studies. The Way That Can Be Told runs alternate Tuesdays.