Not that happiness is dull. Only that it doesn't tell well. And of our consuming diversions as we age is to recite, not only to others but to ourselves, our own story.
Interpretation
Happiness is often overlooked in storytelling, which tends to focus more on struggles and challenges.
In this quote, Lionel Shriver suggests that happiness, while not boring, is less compelling as a narrative compared to life's challenges. As people grow older, they feel compelled to share and reflect on their own experiences, often emphasizing the more dramatic or difficult moments over the quieter joys.
In practice
In a speech about personal growth, one could use this quote to emphasize the importance of sharing meaningful life stories.
Yet if there's no reason to live without a child, how could there be with one? To answer one life with a successive life is simply to transfer the onus of purpose to the next generation; the displacements amounts to a cowardly and potentially infinite delay. Your children's answer, presumably, will be to procreate as well, and in doing so to distract themselves, to foist their own aimlessness onto their offspring.
For pity's sake, if you don't take a shine to a novel, there are loads more in the world; read something else. Continue suffering, and it's not the author's fault. It's yours.
In my country, we're sufficiently consumed by the concept of happiness that the right to its pursuit is enshrined in the Declaration of Independence. But what is happiness?
You were always uncomfortable with the rhetoric of emotion, which is quite a different matter from discomfort with emotion itself.
In the big picture I write for an audience of people I've never met. By the final draft I'm looking for anything in the prose that's prospectively boring to strangers.
Children live in the same world we do. To kid ourselves that we can shelter them from it isn't just naive it's a vanity.
There is nothing quite so satisfying, and so healing, as a good cry.
Happiness is not a state to arrive at, but a manner of traveling.
Subtly, in the little ways, joy has been leaking out of our lives. The small pleasures of the ordinary day seem almost contemptible, and glance off us lightly...Perhaps it's a good time to reconsider pleasure at its roots. Changing out of wet shoes and socks, for instance. Bathrobes. Yawning and stretching. Real tomatoes.
What humans want is not just happiness. They want justice; they want meaning.
By talking to yourself about the things you have to be grateful for you can fill your mind with thoughts that soar and sing.
Blustery cold days should be spend propped up in bed with a mug of hot chocolate and a pile of comic books.
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