But happiness, or rather an epidemic of unhappiness, is, in Holmes’s mind, the single greatest problem facing our species. When considering the speech topic, “I thought, What do people need to hear about it? It had been growing in me and was bubbling up. I felt like I had to do that talk.”
An epidemic of unhappiness. “How many of us are truly happy?” I ask. I take another stroke with the paddle, and small ripples roll out across the otherwise still lake.
“Most people have glimpses of happiness, but the number of people who really seem joyful or content or appreciate the richness of life or are grateful, that number is small, maybe five percent are really tuned into it,” Holmes says. The good news is that the reasons for happiness are obvious and available to everyone, but they are so obvious we overlook the evidence. “But today is easy,” he says, and sweeps an arm to indicate the sky, trees and lake, “the reasons are very obvious.”
One reason so many people are unhappy is that there are thousands of people in our nation and around the world who are paid large salaries to convince us that we are, in fact, unhappy, according to Holmes. Hmm, I pause with the paddle and size him up—do I have a conspiracy theorist in my canoe?Holmes says the evidence is everywhere, put right in our faces, blatant, and the convincing begins at a very young age. For proof, just watch TV. An average child sees 30,000 television commercials a year. “Relentless—pow, pow, pow, pow, pow.” He smacks one hand into the other each time he says pow. “So 30,000 times a year, and the message is you are not happy. I will tell you 30,000 times a year you are not happy.” Commercials persuade people that something is missing from them or their lives and the only way to resolve that is to purchase what’s being sold. The message: Happiness is external, not internal and it is material. He’s disheartened that 25 percent of 2- to 4-year-olds have TVs in their bedrooms. The number of commercials adults see is similar to what children see. Years of psychology study have convinced Holmes that we, as humans, are especially vulnerable to the main message, that something is wrong with us, or missing.
If you read books about child advertising, you learn that the goal of the ads is to turn children into surrogate salespeople for a product, according to Holmes. “They’ve studied kids’ nagging and have determined there are nine types of nagging,” he says. The goal is to make kids unhappy (“I’m not happy because I don’t have that.”) and then nag in the style that is most effective in convincing their parents to buy—a sort of transference of unhappiness. It’s not all television, of course. In Holmes’s presentation he showed print ads that reveal the same point. His favorite displayed an image of a grandfather holding hands with his granddaughter and the copy read, “Sometimes I wonder which of us has more wisdom, or more joy. And we both thank plastic.”
People accused him of making up some ads because they seemed so outlandish. “I couldn’t do it, I don’t have the kind of mind to think of this stuff,” he says. He laughs with incredulity, and the canoe rocks. “It’s not subtle, it’s right there. You don’t need to go to a secret seminar on some island to learn about it.”
Even some religions, or what Holmes calls “misinterpretations of religion,” feed the epidemic of unhappiness by preaching that we shouldn’t expect to be happy during our lives on Earth. Some religious leaders say “this is not paradise,” he says. “That it’s a way station, a place to kind of wait for a train that will take you later to the real place of happiness. If we suffer enough, we get chips that we can cash in for the big prize.”
During his studies, Holmes learned of a set of gospels called the Gnostic Gospels, which were discovered in Nag Hammadi, Egypt, in 1945 and dated to 100–300 A.D. In the book of Thomas, the writer quotes Jesus as saying, “Heaven is spread across the face of the earth.” “I take that comment literally,” Holmes says. “I believe that we are born in paradise, we live in paradise, but we don’t think that we are. I believe that this is it, and the fall of man is believing or thinking we are not in it, that there is something missing.”