No, Forrest, life is not a box of chocolates

It's a stack of mints

I have a PEZ theory of human happiness. And unhappiness. PEZ, for those who don't know, is a candy that used to be a breath mint. It was created by an Austrian named Eduard Haas in the 1920s. Haas marketed his mints to smokers who wanted to freshen their breath after a cigarette. Smokers had become good at feeding their habit one-handed, often while driving a car. With a practiced flick of the wrist they caused a new cig to slide far enough out of the pack to be pulled the rest of the way by mouth. Lighters too required but a single hand. Flipping the top open with a thumb lit the flame that lit the cigarette.

Haas and the PEZ team devised a mint dispenser that looked like a cigarette lighter and worked like a cigarette pack. A stack of mints was loaded into the spring-loaded dispenser, which then dispensed the mints one at a time in response to a flick of the thumb.

By the time I encountered PEZ dispensers the mints had become candies. I was quite taken by the idea that little bits of happiness were available at the tip of one's thumb. Take one candy out and the next one rose to the top, ready for dispensing.

At some point I began to imagine a universal PEZ dispenser, one that produced not just candy but wishes of any sort. And I imagined a fairy godmother who would load the dispenser with all these goodies. The dispensers held a dozen candies; I thought twelve wishes ought to be enough for anyone.

Perhaps I didn't aim high enough on the happiness scale, but my wishes tended to be of the negative variety. I didn't wish for a pony and a new bike but for less homework and fewer fish sticks on Fridays. My PEZ dispenser of happiness became a stack of annoyances, with the goal being to dispense with—get rid of—them one by one.

At this point I noticed something striking and, I thought, profound. I would mentally place my greatest annoyance at the top of the stack. Something would happen to resolve that annoyance, and sure enough, another annoyance would rise to the top. That annoyance, or source of unhappiness, would be dealt with, and another would appear. Extrapolating, I concluded that such was the lot of the human species. Fix whatever problem most vexed this person or that group, and another would take its place as primary vexer. Relief from vexation was always fleeting. Satisfaction invariably segued into dissatisfaction. Happiness could be chased but never grasped for long.

Years later I still find this argument persuasive. And I think it provides context for considering certain matters of politics and history. A last-minute compromise in Congress on Saturday prevented a shutdown of the federal government. Such cliffhangers have become a regular feature of life in Washington. It's tempting to think the rules ought to be changed for writing federal budgets. And they definitely ought to. But if those rules are changed, the two parties will find other ways of expressing their dissatisfaction with each other and the status quo. The PEZ dispenser will simply move something else to the top of the stack.

People unhappy with race relations in American history often look at 1619 as a moment when Americans made a fateful decision. If the inhabitants of Virginia had simply turned aside that first slave ship, the dreadful institution that corrupted centuries of American life need never have emerged here.

Leaving aside that it would be more than a century and a half before Americans had the authority to ban slavery—which authority rested with the British Parliament—it's an appealing thought.  But to imagine that this would have spared Americans difficulties of divisions within society is delusional. The PEZ dispenser would have delivered some other line of demarcation. Northern Ireland and Rwanda are two recent examples of countries that demonstrate that race isn't required to fuel murderous attitudes of one group toward another.

Nor is there any guarantee that if slavery hadn't existed there wouldn't have been a Civil War. New England threatened to secede over war powers during the War of 1812; South Carolina almost seceded in the 1830s over a tariff schedule it didn't like; California flirted with secession during the Civil War over the travel time to the East. Some state, sooner or later, probably would have tested the limits of states' rights. 

So when you see something wrong in your own life, or in the life of your country, by all means try to fix it. But don't think in doing so you’re going to reach some problem-free state of hakuna matata. Fix one problem and another will take its place. PEZ never rests.