Conditional Happiness

I realized today that although last class-time I told everybody what I was going to talk about, I never actually posted my topic online. So here it is, for archival purposes. =)

For me, the idea of suburbia is on the whole a positive one. However, I also believe it is a completely unrealistic and impossible way for people to behave. Just like the ideals of communism, utopia, and the hippy movement, I think the suburbia concept is doomed to failure due to the inescapable reality of human nature. Chiefly, I find that on the whole people validate their existence by how much they must struggle to achieve something. Once they achieve it however, discomfort sets in and they become unhappy. Imagine you've toiled and saved your paychecks for the past five years in order to put a down payment on a nice house in a nice neighborhood. When the day finally comes that that house is yours, you feel elated. Unfortunately, inevitably you look at you neighbor's house and realize his patio is bigger, or his front yard is better landscaped, or his lawn is lusher. (The phrase "the grass is always greener on the other side" exists for a reason...) Eventually, after their "big struggle" to achieve the suburban middle-class dream is over, most people begin to quantify their happiness not by what they do or what they have, but by comparing themselves to what their neighbors do and what their neighbors have.
I had a friend in middle school who lived in a very nice brand new neighborhood, the epitome of suburbia, where all the houses where painted in the same color family and everybody's driveway had a minivan in it. When we were younger (and I suppose more innocent to the ways of the world), we both defined out happiness by what we had. She had a favorite doll, and playing with it made her happy. However, and we started to grow up, I noticed that she would increasingly define her happiness by how happy her friends were- if one of them got a new doll or a new dress, she seemed to suddenly feel inferior. It was almost as if she liked it when a friend was down about something because then in comparison she was doing much better than them, and that brought her happiness up. But when something went right for someone else, but not so much for her, that brought her down because now when she compared herself to that person, she was doing worse. This competitiveness in her eventually made our friendship a little cold, but I do think it's a good example of the contradicting nature of suburbia. Suburbia stands for harmony and equality and peace, but people need to struggle to feel alive and in such a setting, this translates to hyper-competitiveness and jealousy. We've all heard the stories of suburban mothers and the way they compete for power in their school's PTA.
Unfortunately, I have not escaped being touched by all this. I do sometimes catch myself becoming slightly depressed when on of my friends' life is suddenly coming together and I'm kind of just coasting along in mine. I am trying to be a better person though, and be happy for other people instead of constantly comparing my achievements to their own.