Consumer culture proclaims that happiness is having things and doing things. The advertising industry has from the dawn of its existence parked its considerable haunches on this belief. But having things and doing things is the opposite of happiness. True happiness has no reason.
We go to the movies to be, well, moved. To have a sensory experience. To feel, in orderly sequence, mad, glad or sad. To identify with a hero, repulsed by a villain. A soundtrack carries us along, like leaves on a river. When the movie ends, we leave the cinema and go home. Where the movie continues but the sense of watching it disappears.
Men who haul their bodies from this place to that place tend to be more interested in their experiences than they are in themselves.
If everyone seeks to be happy—through pleasure, acquisition, travel, sex, food, religion, drugs and a myriad of other means—then why is that result so seldom achieved? Why don’t we die laughing?
The director calls “Action!” We hear “Activities!”
Men's Work 