The Danger of Happy Endings

First of all, not those. I love a story with a happy ending. In fact, chances are if I read a book or watch a movie with an ambiguous or an unhappy ending, I will feel disappointed. While I recognize that sometimes that may make sense from a plot perspective or may even prove the point the writer of the story is trying to convey, I still will feel what I am going to feel. While there are likely some exceptions to this, they do not spring to mind whereas the number of movies, tv series, and books I have experienced that left me with a dissatisfied feeling due to their ending would fill up the rest of the allotted words for this blog post. The problem that comes along with this though is that happy endings are dangerous. Not in the sense that they create a chance to lose an appendage or will result in death, but rather in the sense that happiness is transitory, it simply does not last.

With the realization that happiness is a short-lived thing and that it only lasts for a fraction of the time we have in each day, if we set our lives up in such a way that we pursue happiness as our sole goal, we will inevitably fall short and feel an intense amount of disappointment. In the same sense that a good romantic comedy should end in a happily ever after moment, I think the stories we enjoy should always put a bow on things. We invest in these characters and the lives they live on the pages we turn, the minutes of a movie we sit through, or across seasons of a television show. For us, their happy ending is a sense of closure, and we are able to step away and feel the story is complete, and the characters arced in a way that was satisfactory, and the conclusion had a sense of completeness. Yet that is not how life is lived. We do not get to wrap up a storyline and move on to a new season with a new protagonist, nor recast the role of someone who is problematic in our lives. While there are certainly people who have been in my life I would love to recast, write out of the story, or whose part I would like to remove entirely from the script, I am thankful I cannot.

If I could simply edit the painful moments out of my life and erase the memories where I got my heart kicked it, I might not be able to appreciate the moments of kindness, love, and tender care I have received the way I do. Sure, I could appreciate those things on their own merit, but I might also take them more for granted if not for those painful moments. Beyond those moments, there is also the realization that moments of my childhood I look back on inform who I am today. I have moments I both try to emulate with my own kids as well as avoid with them as a parent. My childhood shaped me, and it was not all rainbows and unicorns, even though by most standards it was a pretty good childhood.

If we expect things to always go our way, or to always be easy, we will inevitably wind up hurting and disappointed. Life will have plenty moments of both, even if we never set the bar high. We could look at that and argue there is no point to setting a bar whatsoever, but to my mind it makes more sense for us to try and exist in the moments. While we may not fully escape our pasts and the impact that has on our present, if we focus instead on where things are today, we can often find something to appreciate. It could be the feeling of a breeze, the softness of a dog’s fur, or on a hot day the fact that we grew up in a time where deodorant, indoor plumbing, and air conditioning all exist.

In any of the media we consume, the tale of the person or people we are following happens in the span of hours of our lives, even reading a series across years of our life, or watching a show that airs for many seasons, our overall time investment is relatively small. In that time, we experience the highs and lows of a life, but not the entirety of a life. The small moments of routine or tedium are never represented at least not with more than a passing mention. Yet our lives are filled with them, arguably more of those moments than all the moments of extreme joy or sadness combined. So, when we think life should be full of happy endings, we are trying to turn life into a scene rather than a series. We are attempting to create something that reaches a conclusion unnaturally early. Rather, we should be creating something that years on, as our time begins to dwindle on the planet we can look back with a sense of satisfaction and accomplishment. We can say we were kind, caring, and generous and that while there were moments of extreme sadness and hurt, there were also moments of tremendous joy and comfort. We can observe a series retrospective and appreciate the entirety of the story and the end result rather than trying to decide in a five-minute snippet if it is worth our time. So, stop trying to chase down happiness and the happy endings, and focus instead on living a life of fulfillment and meaningfulness. Seek connection and understanding, not simple fleeting moments.