Chapter Thirty-Five: On a Scale of One to Ten

The Theatre of Dionysus, birthplace of Greek tragedy. The ancient Greeks came here to weep on purpose; I do the same thing on my couch with the door closed. (Photo taken by Author.)

June 20, 2026

Dear Diary,

I have a confession, and it is not a flattering one. Left entirely unsupervised, I will voluntarily watch television programs designed for the sole purpose of making middle-aged women cry. Grey's Anatomy. This Is Us. A Million Little Things. Anything apparently engineered in a laboratory to dismantle me by the third act.

And over the years my viewing has developed one strict, non-negotiable rule: I watch them alone. Door closed. Because what I am there to do, specifically, is ugly-cry (the full blotchy, hiccuping, where-are-the-tissues kind), and I would frankly rather perish than let another living soul witness it.

Here is the strange part. I always feel better afterward. Lighter. Weirdly scrubbed-clean, as though I've run my heart through a rinse cycle and hung it out to dry.

I only learned the word for this the other day, while standing in an ancient amphitheater in Athens, where a tour guide named Stavros was explaining that the Greeks built entire theaters around the principle. Catharsis, he called it: the idea Aristotle laid out in his Poetics, that the Greek tragedy art form exists to walk you through pity and fear so you come out the other side wrung-out and somehow cleansed.

A good cry as a laundry cycle for the soul.

Which is probably why I have not been able to stop thinking about it. Because lately I have been wondering whether happiness works the same way: not as a permanent state you arrive at, but as something you understand only after you have moved through everything that is not happiness.

And also because, in our family, happiness has an actual scoring system.

Here is the thing you should know about Hubby. For his entire adult life (long before I met him) he has been administering himself a happiness quiz. It is gloriously, almost militantly, systematic. There are ten categories, arranged in five tidy pairs: Business and Finance. Friends and Family. Health and Appearance. Sex and Romance. Peace and Adventure.  You rate each one from zero to ten, you add it up, and that is your number.

There are rules, naturally, because it's Hubby. You can't swing more than two points in any category within thirty days, which keeps you from rage-scoring your whole life a 2 because you stubbed your toe that morning. And (this is my favorite part) he refuses, on philosophical principle, to ever award a zero or a ten. Life, he maintains, is never so catastrophic as to be nothing, and never so perfect as to be everything. In all his decades of scoring, his whole life has lived inside a 30-point band, and he has never once cracked an 80. The man is a metronome.

I used to take the quiz with him, twenty years ago, when we were new and had much more leisure time. And here is what I discovered about myself: I am not a metronome. I am a car alarm.

On an ordinary day, I'd score myself in the high 80s: everything an 8 or a 9, the world basically gleaming. But the moment something went sideways, I'd plunge a category down to a 5, or as low as the thirty-day deviation rule would legally permit. Where Hubby moves through life in a narrow, sturdy band, I rocket between euphoria and despair like a toddler who has just been told it's bath time. Same marriage, same kitchen, same children; two completely different instruments measuring the same room.

I've come to think this isn't a flaw in either of us. It's just temperament. Some people experience life as a steady hum. Others of us are weather systems. Neither one is happier, exactly; we just keep different books.

But lately I've started to worry that an entire generation is being handed a broken set of books, and that generation includes my own children.

The numbers are not subtle. The CDC's youth survey found that in 2021, 42% of high schoolers reported persistent feelings of sadness or hopelessness, nearly fifty percent higher than teenagers reported in the decade prior. Among girls, it climbed from about a third to well over half. Gallup found the share of young adults with depression has more than doubled since 2017. And when you ask Gen Z what's eating them, they'll tell you plainly: they’ll say they're worried about the future, and the worries are specific and rational. They fear AI will swallow their jobs, that a house will forever be a fantasy, that the planet won't be habitable for the grandchildren they haven't had yet. It is, frankly, a lot to carry at nineteen.

Now, the honest footnote (and I think it matters) is that some of this is that they're simply telling us. My generation white-knuckled through the same private weather and called it "being fine," because our parents treated a feeling as something you kept in a drawer. So I don't entirely know whether kids today are sadder or just less willing to lie about it. Probably both. But here's what genuinely unsettles me: at the very same moment they're more anxious than ever, they also seem to expect more than any generation in history. Scroll for ninety seconds and the message is unmistakable: you could be a billionaire, a founder, a famous person, the main character. Ordinary is failure. The feed has quietly abolished the middle of the scale. And a happiness quiz with no available scores between "viral" and "worthless" is going to average out catastrophically low. They've been handed Hubby's quiz with the 5s and 6s torn out.

Which brings me to one of the happiest people I have ever met. He's a landscaper up in Santa Barbara. His father was a Mexican immigrant who put a tool in his hand young; he grew up with very little and never went to college. And he is, by any honest measure, thriving. He loves being outside. He loves the genuinely creative work of designing someone's backyard into a place they'll be happy in. He owns his home. He has a wife he adores. They camp and hike and disappear into the mountains on the weekends. He does not need to be a billionaire, and the thought has plainly never cost him a night's sleep. The only thing that troubles him is watching his own kids absorb the idea that what he has (which is, let me be clear, the whole thing) somehow isn't enough.

Michelle Obama has talked about this, about parents who were simply content with their lives, who had figured out how to be whole inside ordinary means. I think contentment of that kind isn't luck. I think it might be a skill, or maybe a setting. The landscaper scores his life the way Hubby does: no zeros, no tens, no need for either, the dial parked somewhere honest and warm in the middle and left there.

So how do we measure happiness? Is it the likes on the story, the comments under the post, the little dopamine slot machine in our pockets? Is happiness even something a person can have all the time, or is the wanting-it-all-the-time the very thing that breaks it?

Here is where I have to come clean about my own number, since I've spent this whole entry scoring everyone else's. A while back I started writing the featured-resident profiles for our neighborhood magazine: real people, real journeys, the long conversations where someone hands you their entire life and trusts you to set it down right. I did not expect what it would do to me. The notes I get back are not "nice article." One woman wrote that she was reading hers at her desk and literally crying at work, that she felt seen, heard, and held. Another said it made her cry a few times, in the best possible way. A couple told me their cover story read like it could have been their wedding ceremony speech. People keep reaching, without knowing it, for the exact word the Greeks used about the audience: they feel cleansed.

And here is the loop I did not see until I was halfway through this very diary entry: the thing I sneak off to do alone (door closed, good drama, full box of tissues) is the thing I am apparently doing for other people when I write. I am, it turns out, in the catharsis business. I hand strangers the good cry. And nothing, not one category on Hubby's quiz, lights me up the way that does.

Which is, of course, where I catch myself. Because my very next thought is never how lovely; savor it. It is: how do I do more of this? How do I make it bigger? How do I make it pay? I spent this entire entry diagnosing a generation that can't let a perfectly good 7 simply be a 7, and here I am holding the truest 9 of my life, already reaching past it for the 10. Apparently the disease isn't generational. It's just human, and I have it too.

Maybe the Greeks understood something we've gotten backward. Maybe you can't feel the full weight of joy without the ballast of sorrow underneath it; maybe the cry and the laugh aren't opposites at all but two halves of the same cleansing, and you need both for either to mean anything. Maybe Hubby's steadiness isn't the absence of sadness; maybe he's just learned to let the bad day be a bad day, and then walk out and order a glass of wine.

I don't have the number. After all these years I still don't know whether I'd rather feel everything at full volume like I do, or hum along at a serene and unbothered 71. But I think I've decided that the truest happy people aren't the ones who somehow always score a ten. They're the ones who stopped reaching for it, who looked at a perfectly good 7 and thought, yes, this, this is the whole thing, and meant it.

So tell me, Diary. Is a good cry more cleansing than a good laugh? Or are they exactly the same size?

I'll let you know if I ever figure out my score.

Very truly yours,

Maya