Source: Bigstock

Here we go again, another Christmas issue and it seems only two weeks ago that I filed for the last one. This is a very happy time of year: parties galore, lots of love for our fellow man, and happiness all around. Mind you, there is an old calypso ditty that tells one, “If you want to be happy for the rest of your life, never make a pretty woman your wife…” Well, I’m not so sure about that; in my book, the prettier the woman the happier it makes me, but I could be wrong. My instinct tells me that a pretty woman keeps the man on his toes. No beautiful woman will stay with a man who doesn’t deserve her, not in the long run anyway. But I’ve also noticed that many—not all—very beautiful women are not very happy throughout their lives.

Why is that? Phonies like Freud and his ilk blamed it all on sexual dreams, but I don’t think so. Beautiful people are supposed to be happy, but their problem is that during their quest for happiness, they become very miserable. Dr. Taki is rarely wrong, especially about such matters. Expecting to be happy, which most people aspire to when young, is a trap many fall into later on. Planning to be happy is tricky, especially for the beautiful, because they expect it, but by the time it arrives, it is already outmoded.

Americans are desperate to be happy, more so than other people, at least if one judges by the self-help books to happiness that are published and sold each year in America. Apparently there are 17,000 books on happiness that have been published, which I guess is more than “How to murder whole tribes” books published in Africa. One theory about happiness that emerges from these ludicrous self-help manuals is that oxytocin, the pleasure hormone associated with attachment, brings happiness. In other words, when your dog looks at you and wags its tail, oxytocin kicks in. When I look at Keira Knightley and get a slight bump in my trousers, oxytocin is at work. What one should not do is strive for happiness nonstop. I don’t use or read social media, but I’m told that it exacerbates the malaise of people constantly striving to be happy by showing others with perfect lives, whatever that means. I don’t believe a word of it. When I hear someone use the words “totally amazing” I figure they are total idiots and amazingly inarticulate.

In the end, America’s obsession with happiness is better than Britain’s fixation with bitterness. A cheery nature is appreciated on American shores; on British ones, it’s ridiculed as common. I’ve noticed this many times, especially in the past, when I had many Brits stay with me in America and meet local friends of mine. They would call them hardy, frisky, or flourishing. And they were very condescending. I suppose the Brits feel insecure when faced with people whose snobbishness starts on the playing field, not in the drawing room. A good athlete outranks a tenth-generation fortune in most country clubs, a fact that makes me quite happy, although I no longer compete in the various sports I used to. Perhaps that is because money rarely, if ever, lasts through ten generations in the U.S., the Rockefellers only having reached five, but are still going strong.

There was a period during the ’60s and ’70s when Americans looked for happiness by becoming sexual misfits. They attended orgies, had sex with strangers, had orgasmic meditation classes, and received instruction on masturbatory fantasies. (I thought the latter was God’s gift to mankind.) Now they do all that over the internet, which is why the white race is disappearing but internet participation is growing by leaps and bounds. What dirty old men once did in boardinghouses when they looked through keyholes, much of the population does today online. It is enough to ban the damn thing forever and ever, but no one will, especially not the Donald, who uses it nonstop.

Mormons appear to be among the happiest people on earth, and I’m very happy for them because I trust and love Mormons. I suppose some of the unhappiest are people who hate everyone, beginning with the Saudi scum who behead adulterers and stone women to death for flirting. Finding bliss is hard for Gulf people; only hookers and those who are desperate to make money approach them. No wonder they look so unhappy in their silly sheets. I am convinced that the reason Saudis, Qataris, and Kuwaitis are so fat is because they eat alone. Unless they pay for company, which they do every time you see one of them not eating alone. People who eat by themselves tend to overeat, hence the obesity problem and general unhappiness of those ghastly Gulfers.

But hang on, this is our Christmas issue and I have to show some Christian charity. Old age has brought me great happiness, and however phony this sounds, I have simply stopped being anxious about women in general, and beautiful unattainable women in particular. (Well, not really.) But I do suffer less and think of others more, which is the whole point of Christmas anyway, so there: I wish you all a very, very, very happy Christmas.