A nifty little rundown of child intransigence at Why Is Daddy Crying got me thinking about why I enjoy hearing about how stubborn other people’s kids are.
Of course, I like it because it absolves me of a certain amount of responsibility for my kids’ ill-behavior. Dalia can be a world-class obstructionist, but if other kids are just as bad, then it’s not my fault.
But there’s something else going on, something that may explain why I dig the DadBlog concept–reading them, writing them, whatever. To put it simply: misery loves company.
That’s a frickin’ cliche, you say. Yes, I know. But the science behind it is pretty interesting. Especially the science coming from Sonja Lyubomirsky, a UC Riverside professor of psychology who researches happiness. Actually, everything about her seems pretty damn happy: she’s happily married; her pictures show her looking all pretty and pleased; and her name even means, if I’m not mistaken, something like “loves the world” in Russian. You get the picture.
So what does she have to say about happiness? Is it in your DNA? Can you buy it?
Not really. Much of her work seems to point to social comparison as a key to happiness. That is, you’re happiest when you know that others are going through the same crap (or preferably something worse) as you. As she puts in on her home page:
Social comparison [has] hedonic implications – that is, positive or negative consequences for happiness and self-regard – and thus [is] relevant to elucidating individual differences in enduring well-being.
In less academic terms, she wrote a piece for the New York Times a year ago about why people were still mostly happy in the middle of an economic downturn. The secret: everyone was doing worse, so everyone felt OK:
For example, Andrew Clark, an economist in France, has recently shown that being laid off hurts less if you live in a community with a high unemployment rate. What’s more, if you are unemployed, you will, on average, be happier if your spouse is unemployed, too.
There you have the naked truth. The world of dad-blogging is animated by a sort of Dadenfreude: your misery will make me happy.
That’s messed up.