It starts with legislation.  There are laws enacted to stop you from doing just about anything fun.  You can’t even ride in a car without your seatbelt any more.  Everything is morally wrong for some reason or another.  “Politically correct” has reached a point of disgustingly squeeky cleanliness.  Everybody takes themselves too damn seriously.  The vaguest insult would send your average american into a tailspin.  Many parents are so scared of their children being abducted that they hardly let them leave their sight.  People take medications for the vaguest of ailments, and new ones are invented every day.  If you’re unhappy, there must be something clinically wrong with you.

This is also reflected in business today.  The government no longer lets large companies fail!  It used to be that only treasury bills were government-backed, but today the entire stock market is.  Companies try to smooth their earnings each quarter to place them within a tightly defined range, and any deviation from that path is unfavorable.  More and more derivatives are created every day, in an attempt to insure every company in america against default.  Obviously this is impossible and doesn’t work during times of extreme stress, as we’ve recently seen.  Nevertheless, all of corporate america is trying to appear perfect, to pad their operations with nice fluffy pillows.  Everyday people do the same.  Nobody will admit that there are problems, until it blows up in everyone’s face.  If everybody just keeps buying, prices will rise and we can continue to live in denial of underlying reality.

America is coming closer than ever to achieving its goal of every citizen believing that we live in a disney movie.  Problems?  Well, maybe you have problems… not I.

The awful thing about all this, and I’m echoing Palahniuk here, is that without real lows we can’t achieve real highs.  Our emotions are being padded in both directions to keep us in line and generally calm and orderly.  X-rated content is filtered from television and the radio, and every few monts a disc jockey is kicked off the air for a joke somebody didn’t like.  Dirty bums in every US city are overlooked as if they don’t exist or swept away into shelters where they won’t bother us hardworking, taxpaying citizens.

People working in corporate America are encouraged to leave their personalities at the door while they spend the majority of their week chipping away at excel spreadsheets until the time comes when they can be completely replaced by computers.  Until then, they’d better pretend to be one.  They’d also better carry their blackberry around 24/7 so they can respond to emails at night and on weekends.  Every day they hear that they’re “just lucky to have a job during times like these” … meanwhile piss-broke people in Guatemala are some of the happiest people in the world, with an (embarrassingly?) low GDP per capita of just $4,155.  Seems like they’re the really lucky ones.

People in this country are scared of their own shadows, scared that they’re living a lie.  Their egos are their best friends.  Sheep who spend all their energy trying to conquer their neighbors, while paying lip service to charity and spirituality.  Phonies, as Salinger would put it.

If you ask most people what the purpose of life is, most would probably answer “happiness” or something along those lines.  If you went on to ask them what makes them happiest, most people know factually and will tell you that things like family, friends, exercise, gratitude, etc. makes them happy.  But what do people spend the vast majority of their time doing?  Watching fucking TV, when they’re not at work trying to suck up to their boss.  Escaping reality.  I hate TV.

The bottom line is this:  People don’t chase happiness, they run from fear.  Constantly sleepy, they gravitate towards their beds, their padding.  Most people never take proactive steps, because they’re afraid to be different, to be ridiculed.  They do what they’re told, and copy what they see around them.  They hold their beers the same way, they buy their cufflinks at the same stores, and in unison, they scoff at people who are different.

This is why successful entrepreneurs tell you to surround yourself with other successful people, and to get a mentor.  Because without that, just wandering around learning life from the people you happen to bump into will almost certainly place you in the status quo, not in the top 1% of the nation that pays a staggering 37% of America’s taxes, because they’re so staggeringly rich.

Not to say money buys happiness, I’m using it simply as a metric of success.  If we analyzed the ratio of successful to unsuccessful people in any endeavor, including just pure pursuit of happiness, I bet we’d come up with similar statistics.  Do 1% of the nation generate 37% of the overall happiness for everyone?  I wouldn’t doubt it.

So what do you do?  Face the music.  Figure out what the hell you want to do.  Make goals for yourself.  Find others who agree with you (searching forums on the internet is very useful).  Meet these people in person.  Pursue your common dreams.  Then take a minute to be proud of yourself for chasing your dreams, and continue down that path, ad infinitum.