From an early age we are taught to translate the creatures around us -though they be toads that glisten or mica shining at noon – into clean surfaces on which we can project our dreams of total happiness. In this American capitalistic view the world is a kind of vast playground, with each object serving its purpose for pleasure. Who cares if what we normally call reality is forsaken?

[….] Entertaining this peril, these happy types really see only themselves. They colonise experience. They impose their imperialist egos onto the world.

[….] These types overly enamoured of security spend much of their energy trying to 'make permanent those experiences and joys which are only loveable because they are changing'. In attempting to make impermanent joys – dying roses, growing children – stable, these controlling sorts of people actually alienate themselves from what they most want to embrace.

[….] Performing the happy life is giving over to artifice. Enduring the sad existence is participating in life's vital rhythms. Pallid happiness is here hell, and melancholia, dark, is the way to earthly heaven.

[….] That's finally it; happy types ultimately don't live their own lives at all. They follow some prefabiricated script, some ten-step plan for bliss or some stairway to heaven.

[….] The problem is that these poor souls won't be aware of the source of their nervousness. They'll tend to blame others or the world, anything to keep intact the delusion that they're just find, thank you, anything to keep at bay the vicious fear eating at their hearts.

from Eric G. Wilson's Against Happiness