Who are the happiest people in Rhode Island?

In the opening line to Anna Karenina, Tolstoy writes,

“Happy families are all alike. Every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.”

YEARS AGO, in 1989, when assigned to write a piece for Rhode Island Monthly about “the richest people in Rhode Island,” I suggested, partly in jest, to then editor and publisher, Dan Kaplan, “Why don’t you write a piece about the happiest people in Rhode Island?”

“Who would want to read that?” he countered.

“Everyone would want to read it,” I answered, unsure of exactly how to prove that very intuitive thought.

“Nah,” said Kaplan, who believed he had the steadier finger on the pulse of what sells. “Keep working on the richest persons story.”

Which I wrote, and which appeared in Rhode Island Monthly, and, reportedly, was read aloud in parts by former Mayor Buddy Cianci, in his first go-round of being a convicted wrong-doer turned radio host.

According to the research, Doris Duke was the richest person. Yet, from all accounts, she led an absolutely miserable, unhappy life.

Over the next two decades, with each successive regime change at Rhode Island Monthly, I once again suggested that a “happiest people in Rhode Island” would be a great story. There were never any nibbles or bites.

The current editor, Sarah Francis, at least, recently put the challenge back on me, asking for a more developed query. “How do you define ‘happiest’? You need to flesh out this idea.”

A good response. So, here’s my answer.

First, it’s not necessarily about money. In my “richest” people story, it opened with quotes from an alleged literary exchange between Hemingway and Fitzgerald, in which Fitzgerald suggests that rich folks are different from the rest of us, and Hemingway replied, “Yeah. They have more money.”

But money can’t buy you love, as the Beatles sang. And, all too often, we’re reminded of the poem “Richard Corey” (by Edwin Arlington Robinson), the well-adjusted man about town who put a bullet in his head, when we read about the apparent suicide of the very rich Finn M. W. Caspersen in Westerly, on an exclusive golf course.

I once interviewed the writer, Tom Wolfe, who talked about what he called a “status” synapse that existed in the human brain, which switched on and off, promoting the social hierarchy. It certainly explains what makes the soap operas attractive; the continual episodes of girl meets boy, girl gets boy, girl loses boy, girl regains boy. Of course, Wolfe has made a career of writing about the pursuit of status and sex.

So, my first yardstick for defining happiness is that its pursuit is self-revealing. We seek what we think will make us happy, often defined by the influencers around us – society, parents and family, religious guides, even financial advisors. And, by definition, if we pursue it, if often means we don’t get it.

Needless to say, this pursuit is often misguided, like stalking your own shadow. All too often, the maxim, “be careful what you wish for,” applies. Unless you are as self-delusional and narcissistic as Donald Trump (and earned money the old-fashioned way, by inheriting it), attainment of success does not always equate with happiness. As Saul Bellow’s character once bellowed: “I want. I want. I want.”

Of course, my next yardstick to define happiness is the reverse, or mirror of the first: it is the search, not the attainment of happiness, which is important. At some point, we should recognize that we are all travelers, crossing the same river (or, in Rhode Island, the same highway bridge under construction) over and over again. The quest. The pursuit of the golden ring. The mythic challenge. The myth of eternal return.

Alas, the search for the Northwestern Passage often leads to a freezing, miserable death in Hudson Bay. The pursuit of happiness in the quest is an adrenalin rush, much like being a war correspondent, surviving while writing about others’ deaths. The absolute high of risk is probably more addictive than methamphetamines. But is it happiness? I think not; it’s more about the desire to disappear into thin air. Undaunted foolishness.


“So, if it’s not the attainment, nor the search, how are you defining happiness,” I can hear Ms. Francis interrupting, wanting me to get to the point. Editors are often like that (I say this as a recovering editor).

OK. The next yardsticks are the big things in our life – love, devotion, (as well as hate and self-loathing). Love is tough one; it is always changing, much as the weather does. Love when you’re 18 is very different than when you are 28, or 38, or 58. Endless love is a pop song, not a reality.

There are ecstatic moments of happiness – great sex, giving birth, being named a MacArthur “genius,” winning the Nobel Prize, or celebrating that the Red Sox finally winning the World Series. These are ephemeral moments in a lifetime, beautiful sunrises and sunsets. Our ecstasies, however huge the high, often don’t last. Happiness, perhaps, is more about the ability to stay in the moment, as we breathe in and breathe out.

For example, the pursuit of romantic love gets mixed up in the attainment, the desire. Or, as Stephen A. Mitchell describes it in his book, Can Love Last? The Fate of Romance Over Time: “In love, we are searching for points of attachment, anchoring, something we know we can count on. In desire, we are searching both for missing, disowned pieces of ourselves and for something beyond ourselves, outside the borders of self-recognition that, under ordinary circumstances, we protect so fiercely.” Translated: Those who define true love as happiness are always going to be disappointed in the long run.

For some, love can become confused with devotion – to religion, to work, to a family, all righteous things, but I’m not sure that the denial or postponement of life’s pleasures is really about happiness, but rather points toward obsession and compulsion.

Or misery. To complain, to share the grief, as if it were wealth.

And, history is filled with the stories of hatred of self-loathing of villains, who find happiness in the destruction of others. I don’t want to go there with this story.

So, where are we, then? The best benchmarks for happiness are the ones we define for ourselves. We can talk about what makes us happy. And, we can observe happiness in others, though they need to define it for themselves. Nor can we force anyone to be happy.

Let me try to define happiness, first, then, for myself, and for purposes of the story.

When I was in my late 20s, playing in a pick-up basketball game at a middle school, I found myself breaking down in tears while trying to run up and down the court. I walked off the court, sobbing. A friend ran after me, thinking that I had hurt myself.

No, I admitted, between sobs, “I’m just very sad.”

It had been a very rough year. My mother had been killed and my father badly injured in a car crash. I had just broken up with the woman who I had been living with for a year. My professional life was in shambles; I had given up writing, my plans for a TV production company had failed.

Concerned, the friend invited me over for dinner, to make sure I was OK. He gave me some good advice. “I remember when I first met you,” he said. “You were doing children’s theater, you were writing, you were playing softball, you were working on a cookbook. That’s the time I remember you as being the happiest.”

That summer, I recalled, was the first time I had been “free” to do what I wanted to do, without constraints and restraints – of parents, of school, of family, of having no money. I found I could sing in my own voice, however off key, with a little help from my friends and lovers.

I was living in an old house in a small, side-of-the-road town in Western Massachusetts. Rent was $75 a month; I had the house to myself for the summer. I was collecting unemployment from my last job, in which I had worked as a head cook at a local restaurant, Zelda’s. It was summertime, the blackberries were plentiful down by the nearby stream. On a whim, I did children’s theater every morning. I played softball in a men’s fast-pitch league. I had a tentative contract to write a Mexican cookbook for a local publisher.

OK, yes, Sarah, enough of my own story. Yes, I need to focus here.

The first thing about happiness is that other people will recognize and describe it about you, but you yourself often may not be able to see it.

So, for purposes of this story, in addition to the my piece, let’s also ask the readers of Rhode Island Monthly to make their own nominations in a readers’ poll, with the important caveat: You can’t nominate yourself, your partner, or anyone who’s a member of your own immediate family.

The second important benchmark: Being happy doesn’t mean that you cannot also be sad, too. It’s a sense of happiness over time, rather than tied to the rush of the moment, the ingestion of a drug. It’s not about “bright moments,” it’s about the people who seem to create bright moments around you.

The third important benchmark: It’s not about the work that someone does, nor the talent they have. To quote a lyric from Charlie King: “My life is more than my work; my work is more than my job.” It’s not about fame, winning the lottery, nor being a sports hero, or winning a TV reality show.

A fourth and final benchmark: While the pursuit of happiness, as well as unalienable rights, are proclaimed in the Declaration of Independence, it’s not about politics. No elected officials are eligible.

It’s still my intuition that this would make a great story. I hope that I have established the criteria for defining happiness in terms of the story. So, Sarah, what do you say? And, why not let the readers of Rhode Island Monthly participate, in one of those readers’ polls.

Who are the happiest people in Rhode Island? What makes them happy? Wouldn’t you like to read a story about the happiest people in Rhode Island?

P.S. The response from Rhode Island Monthly

Hey Richard - thanks for the follow-up. I read your column with interest but it doesn't work for us, I'm afraid. The features we run are based on journalistic reporting and the conceit you're proposing, of turning the content into a reader's poll, just doesn't fit.
I’m sure you can find a home for your idea in a more literary publication, however.
Thanks and best wishes,
Sarah F

P.P.S.
The current issue of Rhode Island Monthly that graces the supermarket checkout line, has a cover story entitled: “Finding Love in RI: A survival guide for dating,” which included an online readers survey, described in the following language:

“It's a date. We asked, you answered. Our ‘Love in RI’ survey respondents told us about getting it on, Ocean-State style.”

The “journalistic reporting” included “more than 330 people [who] took our online survey in June and July.”

Hmmm. To read the tea leaves, I guess it’s OK to have a story with an online survey about finding love, but not happiness.