In Defense of Happy Endings
How to resist nihilism one chapter at a time
I Love Happy Endings
I used to be embarrassed by this.
Mature storytelling is supposed to authentically represent life, and life doesn’t give you happy endings. Life gives you suffering to pay off your hopes. Ashes for dreams. Death after dancing.
The problem with every perfect picture is what happens outside the frame, and everyone knows how to zoom out.
The princess kisses the frog and marries the prince, but then the prince turns out to still be a bit amphibious, if you know what I mean, and frankly the princess was always a little more entitled than she let on.
And sure, the scrappy founder sold his SAAS company for a billion dollars, but then he lost most of it in a crypto bubble and is slowly putting the rest into his veins.
While the stand up comic gets his big break and rides a wave of money and public love for years, but then, whoops, turns out he ruined a bunch of women’s lives before he even got famous, and let’s just say the fame didn’t slow him down.
Pinch to pull in the edges, and every story turns sad.
Chumps
Hoping for something opens up a threat vector, makes you vulnerable. Hope gives you something to lose: itself. It means you want something, very earnestly, and it seems like you’re going to get it! But you might not. Otherwise it wouldn’t be hope, it would just be expectation.
And if we’re smart we take great care with our expectations. We call this realism. We try not to expect things to be better than seems perfectly reasonable. Because when reality underperforms full expectation, well that’s just about the worst. That can ruin your day.
Be careful with your expectations, and leave hope alone altogether. Hope is for chumps who never learned how to not get their day ruined.
Except I still love stories full of hope. They make me feel good.
How cute!
How quaint!
How positively provincial!
Also, psst, isn’t a story with a happy ending basically just pornography?
Trust me, I could write that essay.
But not only is that perspective condescending and foul, it is also wrong.
We Crave Confirmation
If I believe in virtue and justice1, and in the eventual2 triumph of good over evil, then I am going to crave stories that confirm these beliefs.
If, on the other hand, I am jaded and cynical and happy people piss me off, I’m going to crave stories with tragic endings, where bad people get away with doing bad things, and good people suffer for their goodness.
The stronger your belief, the deeper your craving, and satisfying your craving strengthens your belief. The wolf you feed is the one that wins.
Hence, reality
Storytelling is and has always been the way we structure our comprehension of reality. This is true to the point that we tend to entirely ignore anything that doesn’t fit within our narratives.
We also consciously (and often unconsciously) bend and shape reality for ourselves and the people within our spheres of influence, which are always much larger than we can know.
We build, we destroy, we speak, we write, we move things around.
We call this “behavior,” and all of it, every single bit of it, emerges from the stories we’re made of.
Which begs the question: What will a person do whose heart is full of tragic endings?
Nihilistic Tantrums
While cynics love to zoom out, nihilists love it even more.
They love to zoom out so far that Earth becomes an invisible speck in an infinite ocean of night. They love to zoom out so that the billions of years the universe has lived are but a blip in the cosmic timeline that terminates in an endless miasmic ether of slowly cooling particles.
“How could anything possibly matter?” they ask, as they point to the pale, colorless revelations of modern science.
As though science was even trying to answer that question to begin with.
“Yes,” they concede, “making meaning is the work of bipedal animals who have fooled themselves into thinking they need it.”
But let’s not get baited into that argument right now. Instead, let’s point out that nihilism is attractive for the same reasons that toddlers love knocking down towers of blocks.
Which is same reason that it’s easier to write a sad ending than a happy one.
Earning the End
Sad endings are easy because they are so very familiar. Good people suffer for no reason. Bad people get away with it. Things fall apart. Etc.
You don’t really have to earn a sad ending. Life gives them out for free.
If you’re interested in writing tragedies, here’s the cheat code:
Construct a character.
Give him something to want very much.
Ruin his day.
Fin.
Happy endings are harder.
Why?
Because happy endings must be earned. They do not work if they feel false, or easy. They do not work if the storyteller’s contrivance is obvious. Unearned happy endings feel like cheating, because we know, in our bones, that life doesn’t just go handing them out. Happiness is hard won.
And as a teller of stories, I can tell you that earning a happy ending is really damn difficult.
Impossible, actually, if you’re intoxicated by cynicism.
But in order to resist the cool seduction of this intellectual drug, you must be the kind of person who writes happiness into the real world.
In other words, in order to write happy endings, you must believe in them.
Faith
Well, first, let’s ask what it is, exactly, that you need to believe. Don’t worry, it’s not dogmatic. It’s actually pretty straightforward and universal:
You must believe that there is such a thing as Good, and that Good is worth doing for its own sake.
Let’s call this faith.
There are countless ways to intellectually justify this faith, just as there are countless ways to dispute it.
But faith is not an intellectual exercise, it is an embodied phenomenon. You cannot think your way to belief in Goodness, you must instead live your way into it.
In other words, you have to try to do Good. And the more Good you try to do, the more you come to believe in it.
Writing a story that earns a happy ending is the storyteller’s way of doing Good. It is a way of exercising faith.
And it is rigorous exercise, indeed.
Stories Don’t End
How about, instead of “happy endings,” we say, “happy ends.” Then that lets us go one step further, to “happy objectives.”
Thus, a defense of happy endings is a defense of happiness itself as the objective.
True stories, after all, don’t ever end. Chapters end, but the objective is always the same: a happy conclusion to the current situation. We know we often don’t get it, but we keep trying anyway, because there’s always another chapter.
And who knows but that all our trying to get to a happy end in this chapter will make all the difference in the next.
As my favorite philosopher/theologian posits, true justice has nothing to do with punishment, and is instead about doing whatever good is needed in any given situation.
I’ll admit here, in the footnote, that in order to sustain this kind of positivism, the scope of human consciousness must not be limited to biological lifespans. In other words, it is necessary to believe in some kind of life after death.
This is why some version of life after death is often tied so closely to the faith that happy endings are possible. Everyone dies in the middle of a story. If the nihilists are right, then death writes most stories into tragedies. Happy endings are basically impossible. How few people have reached their flat line with no regrets? It is not a large demographic.
But why resist Nihilism when you can become one with it?
It’s that unfortunate George RR Martin tendency to take down stories with good endings that really rubs me wrong. His “What was Aragorn’s tax policy” rant was I think the thing that finally dropped the scales from my eyes. Some things we don’t NEED to know. There is a wellspring of hope and, dare I say, faith, that abounds from stories that end happily. Even the saddest ending ever of an innocent man nailed to a tree to die has an ultimate happy conclusion. We need to know that this world of suffering isn’t the end, and that there is, at the bottom of the box, hope.