The Things They Do To Make Themselves Happy That Actually Make Them Miserable

The Things They Do To Make Themselves Happy That Actually Make Them Miserable is the narrator’s wry catalogue of human efforts to secure happiness that instead deepen dissatisfaction. It begins as an alien’s comic diagnosis of ordinary habits, but its reach extends into the novel’s family relationships: education, ambition, and parental expectation can all become burdens when the people involved cannot give one another what they need.

The Catalogue of Human Pursuits

The narrator presents the list as infinite. Its entries range from shopping and watching television to taking a better job, acquiring a bigger house, writing a semi-autobiographical novel, educating the young, trying to look less old, and wanting to believe that life has meaning. The range matters: consumer choices sit beside intimate and existential desires, so the problem is not simply materialism. Even self-improvement and the search for purpose can belong to the same pattern of pursuing happiness in ways that make people miserable.

The narrator calls the list amusing, but only in a painful sense. That qualification complicates the joke: the human contradictions are comic to an observer who initially regards human customs as baffling, yet the pain within them is real. The narrator’s discovery of poetry, and the invitation to consider that earthly life might be cherished rather than merely feared or ridiculed, opens a counter-perspective. The catalogue remains a critique, but it is no longer a reason to dismiss the people who live inside it.

Education, Expectation, and Distress

The entry about educating the young gains particular force in the story of Isobel’s son Gulliver. The narrator finds him absent from school and walking alone along a street beside the park, trying to hide behind his hair. The moment unsettles any simple equation between education and benefit: Gulliver is supposed to be at school, but the narrator recognizes that walking and thinking might also count as learning. The scene places institutional expectation beside the young person’s immediate reality without resolving the tension between them.

Later, Isobel’s son Gulliver describes the pressure of being associated with his father, Andrew Martin. His teachers have read his father’s books and regard him through that reputation, while Gulliver feels reduced to a disappointing offshoot of the celebrated Andrew Martin. He also recalls being expelled from boarding school, setting things on fire, and feeling that his parents had given up on him. His account shows how education and achievement, ostensibly routes to a better future, can become entangled with shame and inherited expectations.

The Limits of Solving Unhappiness

The rooftop crisis makes the distance between practical intervention and understanding stark. The narrator calculates that Isobel’s son Gulliver could fall and die, and approaches him despite the difficulty of walking over wet slate. Seeing him as a person rather than as a collection of particles brings the narrator into a kind of connection that scientific description cannot account for. The crisis is not another item explicitly named in the catalogue, but it sharpens its central contradiction: a human being cannot be made happy by treating distress as a problem that logic alone can solve.

Gulliver reaches instead for a shared memory, recalling swimming with the narrator in France when he was eight and being taught to play dominoes. The narrator answers as if he remembers, meeting the appeal with recognition rather than explanation. Afterward, Gulliver says he had taken twenty-eight diazepam before going onto the roof. The disclosure gives the danger a concrete measure, while the narrator’s response—that Gulliver would have needed more—turns knowledge into a source of humiliation rather than comfort.

Family Life and the Phrase’s Wider Meaning

In a later conversation, Isobel’s son Gulliver explains that his distress is bound up with his family’s history. He says his father was often absent, or made life tense and horrible with his mother, and argues that his parents should have divorced years earlier because they had nothing in common. He also recalls the expectations attached to being Andrew Martin’s son and the painful image of himself as a bruised apple fallen from his father’s tree. His account makes the catalogue’s irony intimate: efforts and roles that may be intended to build a good life can leave a child feeling judged, neglected, and trapped by family reputation.

The phrase therefore works both as social satire and as a lens on particular relationships. Its list moves from houses and jobs to raising children and seeking meaning, but the scenes involving Gulliver show why those pursuits cannot be assessed by their intentions alone. A good education, parental ambition, or a family kept together may be pursued as forms of happiness; in practice, their consequences depend on whether the people involved are seen and heard. The narrator’s movement from amused observation toward connection supplies the phrase’s implicit counterweight: understanding does not erase human pain, but it changes how that pain is met.