The Museum of Other People's Happiness

I have always considered opera a fundamentally unnatural art form. People sing while dying, sing while betraying their spouses, and occasionally sing while discovering that the person they intended to marry is their own brother.

Real life, I have maintained, is considerably more realistic.

People simply talk nonsense.

Then I discovered Instagram.

I owe opera an apology.

My introduction to this remarkable institution occurred on an otherwise unremarkable afternoon, when I decided that a writer ought to make himself visible to the public.

Until then, I had entertained the old-fashioned belief that the purpose of writing was to produce something worth reading. I was subsequently informed that this was an admirable but commercially insufficient approach. A modern writer must cultivate an audience, establish a presence, develop a personal brand, and engage with his community.

I had no community.

I was also uncertain whether I possessed a brand.

Nevertheless, I opened an account.

Instagram welcomed me with the warmth of a hotel receptionist who has already charged my credit card. It invited me to select my interests, discover inspiring people, and share my story.

I had spent several years attempting to write a story. Apparently, I could now share one in fifteen seconds.

The possibilities seemed limitless.

My first impression was that I had accidentally entered a museum dedicated entirely to other people's happiness.

Here was a young woman photographing her breakfast with the solemn concentration of an archaeologist examining the remains of an extinct civilization. A cup of coffee occupied the centre of the composition. Beside it rested half an avocado, three blueberries, and something green whose botanical identity I could not establish.

The caption announced that she was grateful.

For what, precisely, remained unclear.

Perhaps the blueberries.

A little farther along, an athletic gentleman stood before a mirror, demonstrating that his abdominal muscles had survived another difficult morning. He accompanied this achievement with a philosophical reflection on discipline, ambition, and the importance of believing in oneself.

I believed in him immediately.

Any man capable of photographing himself lifting an enormous weight while simultaneously composing a moral lesson deserved my admiration.

Next came a woman standing beside an expensive automobile, a gentleman standing beside an expensive yacht, and a small dog wearing an expensive sweater.

The dog appeared to be the happiest of the three.

I continued scrolling.

An entire civilization unfolded before me.

There were people celebrating their birthdays, engagements, promotions, holidays, transformations, recoveries, and, in one particularly moving instance, the purchase of a new refrigerator.

Every occasion had been photographed.

Every photograph had been improved.

Every improvement had been accompanied by a declaration of authenticity.

I found this last detail especially interesting.

Apparently, the modern world had developed a technology so sophisticated that it could remove every visible imperfection from the human face while simultaneously encouraging its owner to embrace imperfection.

It was an extraordinary philosophical achievement.

The ancient Greeks would have required several additional centuries.

After twenty minutes, I had reached a number of important conclusions.

First, everyone was travelling.

Second, everyone was exercising.

Third, everyone was drinking coffee in establishments whose furniture had been selected specifically to suggest that furniture was unimportant.

And fourth, everyone was profoundly happy.

This final discovery troubled me.

I had previously considered myself a reasonably contented individual. I possessed several books, a functioning kettle, and a window through which I could observe the weather without being obliged to participate in it.

Yet compared with the citizens of Instagram, my existence suddenly appeared scandalously underdeveloped.

I had never photographed myself beside a swimming pool.

I had never described a sandwich as a journey.

And although I had experienced several moments of genuine personal growth, none had occurred while standing on a mountain at sunrise.

Perhaps I had been living incorrectly.

I considered the possibility with appropriate seriousness.

Then I discovered a gentleman who offered to teach me how to become the best version of myself.

He appeared to be approximately twenty-three years old.

His qualifications included a white shirt, an expensive watch, and a photograph of himself looking thoughtfully through an aeroplane window.

I was tempted to contact him.

Unfortunately, I had not yet established which version of myself was currently in operation, and I feared that the administrative difficulties might be considerable.

Instead, I returned to my original purpose.

I was here to establish a literary presence.

A literary presence, I reasoned, should require nothing more than literature.

I was wrong.

The first difficulty concerned my photograph.

Instagram wanted to know what I looked like.

I considered this an unnecessarily personal question.

A writer's face, after all, has remarkably little to do with his sentences. History contains numerous examples of distinguished authors whose portraits suggest that they had recently received disappointing news about the price of vegetables.

I therefore decided not to display my face.

Instead, I would use a tasteful image of a book and a cup of coffee.

This seemed both discreet and intellectually respectable.

It also required forty-three minutes.

The first book looked insufficiently literary.

The second looked too literary.

The third had an attractive cover but suggested a personality I was not entirely prepared to defend.

The coffee presented additional difficulties.

Its handle pointed in the wrong direction.

I turned the cup.

Now the book appeared crooked.

I straightened the book.

The coffee had stopped steaming.

I made another coffee.

By the time I had produced a photograph suggesting an effortless afternoon of quiet intellectual contemplation, I was exhausted.

Still, I was satisfied.

Nobody examining the image could possibly suspect how much effort I had invested in appearing not to have invested any effort.

I was beginning to understand the medium.

The second difficulty was my biography.

I had been allocated a limited number of characters in which to explain myself to humanity.

This struck me as an unreasonable demand.

I had spent a considerable portion of my adult life attempting to understand myself and had so far achieved only modest results. Now I was expected to summarize the investigation in a sentence.

I tried several possibilities.

Writer. Observer. Student of the human condition.

Too pretentious.

Occasionally writes things.

Too modest.

Exploring the absurdities of love and modern existence.

Too much like a man who owned several scarves.

Eventually, I settled on something sufficiently dignified to suggest intelligence without providing any concrete evidence of it.

I pressed Save.

I had entered the museum.

And, without noticing, become one of its exhibits.

For the next half hour, I devoted myself to a detailed study of human vanity.

I examined photographs, captions, carefully arranged interiors, declarations of spiritual independence, and people who appeared to have developed unusually intimate relationships with their own reflections.

I observed everything.

I judged nothing.

Or rather, I judged everything, but with such intellectual elegance that I mistook the activity for observation.

Then I encountered a photograph of a woman standing in a kitchen.

It was not an especially impressive kitchen.

There was a crooked cupboard, a collection of mismatched plates, and what appeared to be the remains of a minor domestic catastrophe.

The woman held a cake.

Or at least something that had originally been intended to become a cake.

It had collapsed in the middle and was leaning dangerously towards one side.

She was laughing.

Not smiling delicately for the camera. Not gazing into the distance with the expression of someone who had just discovered the true meaning of existence.

Laughing.

Her caption read:

We followed the recipe. The cake had other plans.

I stopped scrolling.

This was unexpected.

Here, in the middle of the world's most ambitious exhibition of perfection, someone had voluntarily published evidence of failure.

I examined the photograph.

The woman had flour on her sleeve. A second person, whose identity remained a mystery, was attempting to rescue the cake with a spoon.

There were no motivational quotations.

No declarations of gratitude.

No promises to become a better version of anyone.

Just a ruined cake.

I found myself smiling.

Naturally, I attributed this reaction to my appreciation of comic structure.

Then I looked at the photograph again.

I was particularly interested in the caption.

At least, that was what I told myself.

I considered writing a comment.

This introduced an entirely new category of difficulty.

What should one say to a woman whose cake had collapsed?

An expression of sympathy might seem excessive.

A compliment might appear inappropriate.

A joke might fail.

I drafted a response.

Deleted it.

Drafted another.

Deleted that one too.

For a man who had spent the previous half hour ridiculing people for their excessive concern with public appearances, I was behaving with remarkable caution.

Eventually, I wrote:

Have you considered that the cake may have been expressing its individuality?

I examined the sentence.

It was clever.

Perhaps too clever.

I removed the question mark.

Put it back.

Then, with the recklessness of a man crossing an unfamiliar street, I pressed Post.

Nothing happened.

I waited.

Still nothing.

I reminded myself that I was an independent intellectual who had entered this digital establishment for professional purposes.

The opinions of strangers were of no concern to me.

I put down my telephone.

Picked it up again.

There was a notification.

My heart performed an entirely unnecessary manoeuvre.

Unfortunately, the notification came from Instagram itself.

The application wished to inform me that I might enjoy following several gentlemen who specialized in financial independence.

I declined.

Ten minutes later, another notification appeared.

This time, it was her.

I think the cake was trying to escape the expectations society placed upon it.

I laughed.

Aloud.

This was a serious development.

I had spent the afternoon examining hundreds of photographs of perfect people enjoying perfect lives. I had witnessed tropical beaches, extraordinary bodies, spectacular sunsets, and at least three marriages that appeared to have been organized primarily for the benefit of professional photographers.

None had produced the slightest disturbance in my emotional equilibrium.

And now a collapsed cake had accomplished the task.

I considered replying.

Then I reconsidered.

There were, I suspected, established rules governing the appropriate interval between receiving a message and answering it.

I had recently written about such rules.

I had also expressed a number of strong opinions concerning their absurdity.

Nevertheless, I waited four minutes.

One must not appear desperate.

That evening, I published my first photograph.

It was the same book and cup of coffee I had spent forty-three minutes arranging for my profile. I made a few final adjustments, including eleven minutes of deliberation over whether a fountain pen would make the composition appear more authentic.

I eventually removed the pen.

It looked contrived.

The photograph showed a book resting beside a cup of coffee on a small table.

The light was soft.

The composition was elegant.

Everything suggested that I had been interrupted during a spontaneous moment of literary reflection.

For the caption, I chose:

An ordinary afternoon.

I admired the result.

Then I checked whether anyone had liked it.

Nobody had.

I checked again.

Still nobody.

I began to suspect that the public lacked aesthetic sensitivity.

Perhaps the algorithm was malfunctioning.

Perhaps the photograph had been published at an unfortunate hour.

Perhaps the world was not yet ready for my particular interpretation of ordinary afternoons.

I was considering these possibilities when a notification appeared.

The woman with the collapsed cake had left a comment.

How long did it take you to arrange that cup?

I stared at the screen.

My first instinct was to deny everything.

My second was to explain that the photograph represented a carefully considered artistic exploration of the relationship between domestic objects and contemporary solitude.

My third was to laugh.

I chose the third.

Then I replied:

Forty-three minutes. But I had to make the coffee twice.

Her answer arrived almost immediately.

The cake took less time.

I looked at my beautiful photograph.

The carefully positioned book.

The immaculate cup.

The soft, apparently accidental light.

Then I looked at the ruined cake again.

For the first time that afternoon, I began to suspect that the museum contained something considerably more interesting than other people's happiness.

It contained other people.

I put down my telephone.

A moment later, I picked it up again.

I wanted to see whether she had replied.

Naturally, this had nothing to do with vanity.

I was conducting research.