April Winchell wrote this piece a few weeks ago and it’s been on my mind ever since. It’s remarkable that I’ve recently been contemplating the same thoughts and I’m very grateful that she decided to record her feelings with such precision (I’d have made a pigs ear trying to say the same thing).

Lately, I've been thinking a lot about the nature of happiness. I've come to the concusion that happiness is a myth.

A few years ago, I was the most profoundly depressed person you could ever meet. I can't really describe it, but it was a very oppressive kind of heaviness that almost made it hard to breathe. I felt like someone was sitting on me all the time.

In the course of really examining myself and deciding to change my life, I realized that I identfied myself by that sadness. That is to say, I would describe myself as "a sad person". I had been sad so long, that I came to believe that it was who I was. And since it was such a huge part of my identity, I was reluctant to part wth it.

Fortunately, I soon came to the understanding that emotions are transitory. They come and go, much like Ted Danson's hair, or Lindsay Lohan's breasts.

What you feel isn't what you are. Let's say you want to track Ashlee Simpson down and beat her senseless with a bag of oranges. Does that mean you're an angry person? No, it means you're sensible.

Where was I?

Ah yes, happiness.

Now that my depression has largely abated, or at least, stays away for longer periods, I've made the surprising discovery that happiness is a transitory emotion as well. Just because you feel happy from time to time, doesn't make you a happy person.

So if you accept the idea that our emotions don't define us, you have to accept the idea that there are no happy people. Anywhere. Even at Wal Mart.

This reveleation is by turns depressing and liberating. On the one hand, it means you're never going to be a happy person, because there are no happy people. There are just people who feel happy, some more often than others. Which is kind of sad.

On the other hand, it releases you from that expectation of happiness, which always leaves you feeling inadequate somehow.

I think the best example of this is what happens to us during the holidays. We see manufactured images of truly happy people enjoyng their families and feeling "the spirit", and it makes us feel like hell. We're not having that feeling, are we? We don't want to knit mittens for the orphans or make snow angels in front of the rectory. We want to upend the table and shove a turkey leg down our sister in law's throat. And if we don''t want to do that, well, we'd at least like to just go the fuck home and jerk off. You know what I mean.

We think we are supposed to be happy, even though no one truly is. Other people seem happy, why aren't I? What's wrong with me? Look at that girl in the commercial. The one whose husband flies her whole family to Italy as a surprise, then gives her a 3 karat diamond and tells her she still makes his dick hard after three kids and a second mortgage. She's happy.

Yes, the girl in the commercial is happy. For 30 seconds.

Of course the actress who plays the happy girl is probably living in a shit hole in Van Nuys, making herself vomit after every meal and wishing she booked that Correctol commercial so she could keep her health benefits.

If you accept the idea that nothing will ever make you a happy person, because the idea of "happy people" is a myth created by advertisers and other groups trying to sell you shit, you can stop thinking there's an answer. You can put away your growing lists of disappointments. You can stop measuring yourself against what appear to be all those happy people out there. They're not out there. They don't exist.

Now this is not to say that happiness itself doesn't exist. It does, like any other emotion. But like all other emotions, it is fleeting. It marks a moment in time, not the quality of your life or your character.

Chances are, if I asked you when you were your happiest, you would relate to a single moment or an incident. Because that's what happiness really is. A hamburger. An orgasm. A winning hand.

You might relate to a period, like, "I was really happy when I was in college", but that would be an idealization, a romanticism that would not be accurate. Because no matter how much you loved those days, there were many nights you ate Ramen off a crappy hot plate, thinking, "Jesus, this fucking sucks ass".

I have to go. Dr. Phil is here with my enema.