A friend wrote:
Warning: this is more of a rant than anything else. I wish people would laugh more. Seriously, go outside, and go to any random place you want. I dare you to find someone that’s laughing, or even smiling. Step into your car, drive around, and look for a happy face. All you’ll find is people crammed into their individualistic cars, with an angry/sad face. It’s really depressing.
To be fair, driving doesn’t make me happy (unless I’m listening to Henry Rollins or Billy Connolly or Bill Bailey through the iPod hookup) and even then they’re making me laugh as opposed to happy. Now, sit me beside people I love and it’s a different thing altogether.
I think a lot of people are actually unhappy. It’s not even whether they are smiling, it’s in their eyes, the way they talk to their kids or spouse, it’s in the food they place into their basket at the supermarket and the TV they watch at home.
I like my job in IT support because I was helping people. People are so overjoyed to find they haven’t lost the infant pictures of their now-grown-up sons and daughters because of a hard drive cockup. I like reducing the stress level for under-pressure people because I figure in some karmic sense they’ll be ever so slightly nicer to the drivers on the way home, the kids before they go to bed and their lover as they cuddle in the darkness.