I interviewed my son Beo in the living room of our house today, March 27, 2019. He sat on (or perched on, or extruded himself from) a wooden chair that I had placed opposite the couch, which is where I sat and asked questions and took notes. Beo’s younger brother, August, played in the background and occasionally chimed in. In addition to taking notes, the conversation was also recorded. This is a transcription of the recording, with a few editorials for my amusement and a few emendations for clarity. One more item of note is that Beo is a very thoughtful young fellow, and the ellipses in his lines are sometimes representative of pauses of substantial length.
Ben: “What is something you do in your life to make yourself happier?”
Beo: “Build Legos!”
Ben: “What else do you do?”
Beo: “Umm, build Legos…I don’t know. Draw?”
Ben: “Yeah. Okay. Was there ever any time when you realized, like, ‘Oh, playing with Legos makes me happy. I’m happier when I play Legos.’”
Beo: “Yeah.”
“Did you ever realize that? Like did that thought ever come into your head?”
“No.”
“No. Okay. Well, that’s not very important then. So, okay, what about this: what would it be like if you were no longer able to play Legos?”
“It would be…”
“What would you do?”
“Then…”
Crash! August has just knocked my new computer charger off of a coffee table with alarming force.
“I would buy more Legos!” announces Beo, sounding triumphantly decisive.
But I am concentrating on August at the moment, and talking to him in a low growl:
“August…put that back. Stop. No. Pick it up by the heavy part. August. Just leave that stuff alone.”
Beo is eager to return to the subject at hand. “I would buy Legos,” he repeats.
“What if there were no more Legos on the face of the earth?” I ask, ready to give him my attention again.
“Hmm…”
“What would you do to make yourself happy then?”
“Draw?”
“Draw. Ok. What if you couldn’t draw anymore? What then?”
“Hmm…play outside?”
“Okay, well, I want to think a little bit more about what makes you happier. Aren’t there other things that make you happier besides Legos? Like, hmm, let’s just think, like–”
“Mom and you.”
“Mom and me, uh huh. Does any kind of food make you happy or anything?”
“Hmm…colors kind of make me happy.”
“Colors do?”
“Yeah. Like bright colors.”
“Bright colors.”
“But not white.”
“White doesn’t make you happy?”
“It’s too dark.”
“White is too dark?”
“Yeah.”
“That’s kind of a funny observation. How is it that white is dark?”
“Well like – in the house white doesn’t make me happy. Well white just doesn’t make me happy because lots of times when I go outside at school and there’s white snow and white sky it really hurts my eyes. But in here it doesn’t hurt my eyes because there’s brown stuff around it and on it and stuff.”
“Oh, yeah. Hm. So but bright colors make you happy?”
“Yeah. Like rainbows.”
“Rainbows. Cool. What about bright colors on their own? Like bright green – does that make you happy?”
“Yeah.”
“Interesting. So you said that me and mom make you happy. Does anyone else make you happy?”
“Umm, not really.”
“Not really? Like your friends?”
“Mm, no.”
“Or your brothers?”
Beo thinks hard about this one. “No.”
“Or your grandmas?”
“Yeah, kind of.”
“Grandmas, kind of. Okay. If someone where to give you a million dollars, would that make you happier?”
“Yeah.”
“Really? You just said that right away.”
“Cause then I could buy a house probably.”
“Then you could buy a house?”
“Yeah.”
“And why would a house make you happy?”
“Then I would have my own big space.”
“You’d have your own big space?”
“Yeah. And there would be no one to wreck my Legos and stuff. And no one to fight me and stuff.”
At this point, Beo and I get into a discussion about whether his current bedroom, which he shares with his brothers, could feasibly be split into three separate rooms. We have a disagreement about the possibilities offered by the available square footage, with me taking the position that partitioning the space is not an option, even as I sympathize with his desires. The discussion comes to a reasonably satisfactory conclusion when Beo assures me that “you would just have two walls and go ‘boop!’” to which I respond, “Well, we can look at it.”)
“So you feel like having a little more space could make you happier.”
“Yeah and it would be nice to do that cause no one would annoy me when I’m building Legos and I would have like my own Lego sets that would never get wrecked.”
“Hmm.”
At this juncture, we embark on another discussion, this time about how we would go about fairly dividing up the Legos, which are now housed in a common bin and shared between all interested parties. Beo has a solution to this problem, though his points eventually return to how, ideally, he would have his own Lego table. He briefly outlines the nature of said table, and concludes with satisfaction that his proposed design would be “super cool.”
“So let’s go back to this discussion about a million dollars. You said you’d be happier if you had a million dollars because you could – ”
“Buy a house!”
“Buy a house, that’s right.”
“And then I would have my own room. And there would probably be a table in there…yeah.”
“Is there anything else that you would want to do with a million dollars that you think could make you happier?”
“A property!”
“A property?”
“Yeah.”
“What would make you happier about a property?”
“Because I would have my own giant space outside.”
“Yeah?”
“Well actually not really.”
“That wouldn’t make you happier?”
“No.”
“How come? Why did you think it would make you happier and then you decided it wouldn’t?”
“Well like…I don’t…know, really.” Beo’s words are interrupted here by his own self-conscious giggling.
“Is there anything else you would like to do with a bunch of money?”
“Buy…like, I could buy a table out of a little bit of it…for me.”
“A table to play Legos on?”
“Yeah. And I could buy some Legos too.”
“Well, so since you’re not just going to get a million dollars – like that’s probably not something that’s going to happen – what is something that you could do right now to make your life happier?”
“I could buy a house.”
“Well, you can’t buy a house because you don’t have enough money. I’m just saying if we’re talking about real life, like what’s going on now.”
“Then I would buy…I would probably buy a table for my Legos.” The phone rings. Beo answers it, but it’s for me. Something about health insurance.
I sit back down.
“Hmm…can you afford a table?”
“Now I only have this many dollars. I have this many [Beo holds up ten fingers] or this many [holds up seven]. I could buy one of those Lego dinosaur sets that I already got.”
“But is there anything else you could do that isn’t buying something? Like could you…I don’t know…”
Beo is clearly thinking about this.
“I could build a table,” he considers.
“Well, sometimes when people want to make themselves happier they think about new habits they could develop, or different ways they could think about things, or relationships they could make better. You know? Anything like that – like ‘I think I’d be happier if I had more play dates.’ Or if I cleaned up my room better, something like that.”
“More play dates would be fun.”
“Beo what did you say?” asks August from across the room.
“More play dates would be fun,” repeats Beo, with emphasis.
“Beo, what’s in your mouth?” I ask.
Beo takes out a small black object from between his lips. “Don’t chew on Legos,” I tell him.
“I wasn’t chewing on it.”
“Well, don’t suck on them. Okay, well, final question. Tell me about a memory you have of a time you were happy.”
“Well, I was pretty happy at Parker’s birthday party.”
“Yeah?”
“Cause, I kind of got really full and I only ate like this much of the cake.” Beo demonstrates this quantity by holding both of his hands in front of his chest, his fingers forming an irregular circle about the size of a silver dollar.
“Okay.”
“Cause I ate a lot of pizza and I ate a lot of whip cream – cause there was ‘Pie Face.’”
Do you know this game, “Pie Face?” I barely do – I only know that it involves launching actual pie tins full of whipped cream into peoples’ faces. What am I to make of such debauched revelry at such a tender age?
“Right. So are you saying you were happy because you were full or because– ”
“I was happy because I ate a lot of yummy food.”
“You ate a lot of yummy food.”
“Yeah.”
“Huh.”
“It was good.”
“But don’t you get yummy food at other times, too?”
“Yeah but that was a time when I got a whole bunch of kinds of yummy food.”
“Okay. Cause you got the cake, and the pizza, and the soda, and the whip cream. Wow.”
“Yeah.”
“Do you think it was also fun because –”
At this point, August calls out from across the room, almost yelling.
“Was that when we played ‘Pie Face’?”
“We played Pie Face at Parker’s birthday,” replies Beo, catching up his younger brother.
“So, was it also kind of fun because all your friends were there, or was it mostly just the food?” I ask.
Beo considers this.
“It was mostly the food. Cause all my friends, they were kind of playing with other people.”
“Sure. So maybe when it’s your birthday we should have that kind of food again, because you enjoyed it so much?”
“Yeah. Pizza…and maybe if you guys got me, like, a table.”
“Yeah? A table. What would it look like – how big?”
“Maybe like…” Beo shows me a shape with his arms.
“Is that kind of like the Lego table? How would it be different than the Lego table?”
“It would pretty much be the Lego table, but it would be mine.”
“Just yours.”
“Yeah.”
“Okay.”
WHAT IS HAPPINESS? 