What I Learned from Bertrand Russell and Doctor Who

I ran across this quote from Bertrand Russell's The Conquest of Happiness the other day:

Fundamental happiness depends more than anything else upon what may be called a friendly interest in people and things.

I think that this is fundamentally true. However, I must be honest: my evidence for this comes from a) my personal experience and b) Doctor Who. Yes, I know what you're thinking: Now she's taking life lessons from that silly show?! Well, yes. (And famous 20th-century philosophers! Don't forget about them!)

But, really, one of my favorite things about the Doctor is how excited he gets about things, even when he really doesn't have much reason to be enthusiastic. By most standards, he should be unhappy: he's a 900-year-old time traveler with no family, no home planet, no one to understand his crazy alien ways, a distinctly junky spaceship, a bunch of cranky alien enemies who would really enjoy killing him, and a really rocky love-life with his human lady friends. Oh, and he only owns one outfit, and it happens to be a pinstriped suit, which seems really inconvenient for adventuring. Not to mention the fact that he sometimes has to depend on 3-D specs to save the day. For realz.

But he's really, really, really fascinated by the universe and things and life and people, and so he manages to keep happy on a daily basis. Example: About to be killed by a clockwork android? Beautiful! He thinks it's a lovely bit of machinery and he'd like to meet whoever made it! Has to depend on a half-genius, half-birdbrained human scientist to bring him back through a worm hole and save the world? Great! Randy the Scientist is his new best friend when he's in south London! Meets Satan right on top of an inescapable black hole? Fantastic! It just means that he didn't know as much about the universe as he thought he did!

Pretty much every life-or-death situation turns into a kind of romp of appreciation for the Doctor, and it's contagious. Yes, he's a fictional character, but that sort of indefatigable enthusiasm for life, that giddy interest in our diverse and myriad world, seems like a great recipe for never really getting bored or growing old.

So for the last few months, one of my goals has been to get really excited over something, anything, everyday. It doesn't take much: some article about a crazy new scientific discovery, a mind-blowing Wikipedia article, a good trip to the gym, hearing to a fantastic song I've never heard before, listening to someone tell a crazy story about his/her life, whatever. The topic doesn't much matter. The point is to love something, anything, for the sake of loving, to appreciate something purely for the sake of appreciating anything.

Making a daily practice of loving some bit of the world: this seems like one of the easiest, more rewarding paths to happiness I can imagine. And I I'm glad to hear that Mr. Russell thinks so, too.