Whose job is it to make you happy?

Will having kids make you happy? Matt Walsh answers the question:

Funny, if kids are supposed to give me a happiness high, why are they sometimes such a buzz kill? Times, specifically, like when we’re on long car trips and they take turns screaming at a pitch so high it would make a dog’s eardrums explode. Or the times when they decide they’d like to get up and start the day early — at 2 AM. Or the times when I’d like to take my wife out for a date but we can’t find anyone to watch the kids. Or the times when they have their diarrhea set on a timer, ready to explode right as I’m taking off their diapers. If they are supposed to “make me happy,” what are they doing crying and crapping so much? Attention son and daughter: loud screams and messy diapers do not make Dad happy. Didn’t they get that memo? What’s wrong with them? They’ve clearly failed in their Divine Mandate to be the harbingers of my own personal happiness.

Or maybe no such mandate exists. Maybe no human being was put on this Earth to “make me happy,” least of all my children. The joy and happiness of parenting is like the joy and happiness that can be found in many good things: it comes from sacrifice, self denial, and self giving. It comes with work and effort. I have to be the sort of person who finds happiness in giving, and I will not automatically be that sort of person just because I had sex and made a couple of babies. In other words, my kids don’t make me happy to be a parent; I have to make me happy to be a parent. And I am. I am beyond words. But that happiness will decrease if I become more selfish, and it will increase if I become less selfish.

And then maybe we should stop worrying so much about this happiness thing, anyway. I think the happiest people are the ones who spend the least amount of time whining about their desire to be made happy. They do a thing because it’s right, or because they have a duty to do it, or because it is interesting, or beautiful, or enlightening.