The Happily-Ever-After Trap

The sun’ll come out tomorrow … whether you like it or not

I have a tendency to be a bit of a contrarian late-adopter, especially when it comes to the media I consume. If everyone around me keeps calling a show/book/play good, I’m naturally skeptical and generally resistant. “You have got to see this!” gets filtered through my listening centers as “if you take this in right now you’ll be a sheep: wait a while until the hype dies down.” For better or for worse, it’s how I roll. 

I’ve played Dungeons & Dragons since the 80s, but didn’t read Tolkien until college (I read Howard instead, but that’s a whole other story). I was in high school when Webber’s Phantom of the Opera blew up Broadway and became the inescapable darling of teenage theater-dorks everywhere. I kept my vow to never watch it until decades later. In the mid-90s when I decided I’d better reinforce my masculinity by picking an NFL team to root for, for laughs I chose the then-hapless New England Patriots (which actually turned out pretty well, allowing me to credibly claim “I was there for them when they sucked!”). I cast my first-ever presidential vote for Ross Perot; the other two options were clearly overhyped, which to me spelled “untrustworthy” (I have no regrets). Lost? Never bothered. The Walking Dead? Nah. Breaking Bad? Maybe someday. Game of Thrones? Get outta here. 

The point is, I tend to shy away from anything that thought-leaders or influencers pronounce awesome. Sometimes it means I miss stuff that’s pretty good, sometimes “discovering” it for myself well after the hype has passed. Sometimes it means I get to feel smugly justified, when the new hotness fades and the pretentiousness of it all is realized and everybody pretends they never thought about wearing a Phantom half-mask to school.   

I Told You That Story So I Could Tell You This One

I mention all that as a lead-in to Stephen Sondheim’s Into the Woods. This was the other big play premiering the same year that Phantom of the Opera sucked all the oxygen out of the room; it’s the Pulp Fiction to Webber’s Forrest Gump. Sondheim’s fractured fairy tale still gets put on in high schools and community theaters and whatnot now, probably as a result of dodging that early hype; no new staging has to be measured against some kind of “beloved” Platonic ideal original. Still, that means it’s the hipster choice from the era (“real musical aficionados knew this play was better from the start!”) and that always kicked me into contrarian resistance, so it wasn’t until Disney made the 2014 movie version that I actually saw it. I still think it’s overhyped in its own way, but it carries a crucial lesson about life I want to explore here today: “happily-ever-after” is an unattainable fantasy.  

Very briefly, Into the Woods is a fairy tale mashup. A Baker and his wife (seriously, the role is “The Baker’s Wife”) become the pivot point for a bunch of characters everybody knows: Jack (of beanstalk fame), Little Red Riding Hood (and the Wolf), Cinderella (and the stepsisters), Rapunzel (and the Witch), a couple of princes of varying charm, and eventually even Snow White and Sleeping Beauty. All the stories intertwine through each other on their way to something resembling a happy ending. And that happy ending indeed arrives, and everybody gets their hipster Sondheim happily-ever-after. 

Except then you realize it’s just the end of Act 1. It all goes bad in Act 2 as the chickens come home to roost. The play’s particular chicken is the Giantess, the beanstalk-giant’s wife, who comes whomping into the action to avenge her dead husband. The characters start pointing fingers at each other to save themselves. The cast breaks the fourth wall to sacrifice the narrator in hopes it will mollify the Giantess. It turns pretty dark. 

And it teaches the Big Lesson of the play: there is never a happily-ever-after, because life doesn’t stop. Tomorrow always comes, and will always bring fallout and consequences for the things you do today. New choices will need to be made in the wake of yesterday’s choices. No “win” is forever.

But hey, without that we probably never would have gotten these two. Your mileage may vary on that. 

The Last Choice You’ll Ever Have To Make

Look around. How badly is this lesson needed today? How ready are thought-leaders, influencers, politicians, and other snake-oil peddlers to sell us the cure for whatever ails us today? The ubiquitous example here is the pill for everything, from birth control to eczema to cholesterol to diabetes to weight loss to erections that might last four hours. Remember the last couple of years when masks would fix everything? And then social distancing? And then “the vaccine”?  

Are you a trans kid? Surgically mutilate yourself and you’ll live happily ever after! Are you black? After reparations you’ll live happily ever after! Are you an evangelical? After we outlaw abortion (and/or porn, and/or gays) you’ll live happily ever after! Want to retire? Get a 401k and you’ll live happily ever after! Are you retired? Get a reverse mortgage (and/or a Medicare Part D plan) and you’ll live happily ever after! Want “health care”? Let government form a titanic bureaucracy to manage it and you’ll live happily ever after! Somebody got shot? One more gun control law will ensure “we” live happily ever after! 

And that last one reveals the lie. Happily-ever-after is always just one more program tweak away. There’s always, mysteriously, one more step “we” need to take. One more initiative to pursue. One more foreign aid package to send. One more consultant to hire. One more committee to produce one more report, upon which “we” can base one last solution. And then it’s happily-ever-after for sure! 

It’s always a lie. Gun control is a great example. It doesn’t reduce violence, no matter the tweak to the scheme, and it’s worth asking why we need it at all. I mean, we banned murder, right? Wasn’t that the fix? Why is there still murder? Wait, you mean banning murder didn’t bring us the happily-ever-after where nobody would ever get murdered again? 

And that reveals the real lie. Happily-ever-after ultimately means the end of choice. Happily-ever-after means everything after is on autopilot, so you never have to make another choice. Just make this one choice, and you’ll never have to make another. You married the prince, and now will live in a fine castle with your every desire satisfied forever. You rescued the princess, so will always have a hot, smart, fun wife that will always love you (and put out, in your castle), forever. You don’t have to choose ever again. This choice is forever. But you will have to make more choices, because you will learn something tomorrow, in the wake of today’s choice, that will require you to. 

“I was raised to be charming, not sincere,” says Cinderella’s Prince. Wait, what?

You will have to get up tomorrow and keep living your life. And that tomorrow could include some giant-level fallout, like, say, realizing you had your breasts and uterus removed and demolished your body chemistry with puberty blockers, and now your body will be a wreck for the rest of your life. You had to wake up in that body today. You have to wake up in it tomorrow. And you have to wake up in it every single day. And you will have to figure out how to live in your now-mangled body every day.

Addicts have to figure out how to fight the monkey every single day; there’s a reason those sobriety chips are so prized. And always in the back of the addict’s mind, there’s that siren song: just take the drink. You’ll feel better. You’ll be happy, ever-after even. You won’t need to keep fighting to choose anymore; make this one choice, and the tequila/cigarettes/heroin/porn will take it from there. The addict has to keep choosing, every day. Sobriety is awesome, but it doesn’t last on autopilot. 

We all have to make choices every single day. Anyone trying to sell you a scheme where you won’t have to make choices anymore is lying to you. Anyone promising you happily-ever-after is lying to you. Anyone selling an autopilot story about the thing “we need to do to move forward together” is lying to you. Beyond the basic “we” trap loaded into a statement like that, it typically fails to acknowledge that everything has consequences, and very little ever turns out as planned.

This is an open-air drug market in San Francisco. The building on the left is the FBI field office. It’s time to be a good sport and congratulate drugs for winning the war on drugs

Perfect, the Enemy of Good

A final note to close this out. It is easy to read everything above and see a roadmap to total decision paralysis. A certain corner of the happily-ever-after trap is when you don’t do something, on the basis that “this won’t fix the problem entirely.” You’re waiting for a deus ex machina, hoping something else will come along and relieve you of making tomorrow’s choices. Alternatively, you may get stuck trying to predict the aftermath of a choice, planning too many moves ahead; you spend so long contingency-planning that the opportunity you are trying to pursue passes you by. 

This is a real danger that is intellectually poisonous, because it renders you inert. Stop it. Make your move, knowing (consciously understanding and admitting) it will not be the last move and tomorrow will require another move. 

Stop using forecasts of all the possible results you might have to deal with tomorrow as excuses not to make a good choice today.