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Public Intellectual with Jessa Crispin · Jessa Crispin

"Are You Happy?" (w/ Jennifer Porto)

July 4, 2019·1 hr 12 min·5 clips
Jennifer Porto finds wild happiness in simple moments, like riding her bike far from home.
The question is blunt: are you happy? Crispin asks it after a frantic month, half-dreaming of an easier podcast where friends drink, complain, and dodge the normal circuit of academics, writers, and philosophers. Jennifer Porto comes on to talk about happiness, though the word starts to look pretty useless once anxiety, exposure, and exhaustion enter the room. Success does not clean it up. Crispin's story about a friend's book release turns the big public milestone into something sour: edits, events, and the weird misery that can follow publication. Opera brings its own pressure. Traviata asks one thing of a performer; a solo show asks something more naked and more frightening. Happiness barely gets a foothold there. Before stage time, the feeling is dread, not a polished artist's thrill. Comedy shifts things. Porto says the first laugh at the Paper Machete can bring a rush that opera and solo performance do not always give. The room can lift you for a second, but it also trains you to wait for proof that you are okay. Social media sits behind the whole conversation, named early as a machine that can drain happiness out of life. The episode does not sell uplift. It treats happiness as too blunt a word for art, nerves, and being seen. Fantasy still matters, though. Porto's closing thought is that imagining the thing that will fix life may not fix life, but it can hold despair off for a while. Crispin lets that be enough. The ending feels less like an answer than a tired little truce with worrying less and calling that fine.

As heard by us

A loose, thoughtful conversation about happiness, performance, and the strain of making work public.

Jessa Crispin starts with a blunt question about whether happiness even exists, then lets the conversation move where it wants: into public life, performance, and the way social media can flatten ordinary satisfaction.

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Why you'd press play

For when you want a weird, candid conversation about happiness that keeps circling the hard part.

Read the full recommendation in PlayNext →
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