I like to think of myself as a fairly intelligent person. I may not be the smartest person on earth, but I'm able to figure things out more often than not. But sometimes things happen that I just don't understand.

Take my work, for instance. I work in an office (not unusual for a lot of us) and there is a group that I tend to eat lunch with. We have a pretty good time, and if we tend to be a little louder than most…well, where's the harm? But we have a pretty strict set of guidelines that you have to follow to be involved in our little clique:

You have to show up.

Yep, that's pretty much our prerequisite to gain access to our little group. Of course a good dose of humor helps, and you have to be willing to be the brunt of jokes if the opportunity arises. I've taken and given my share of lunges and ripostes (oh, ok, I've given a few more than I've taken; you can thank my parents for my most…unique sense of humor). But it's always in good fun, and we always have a pretty good time. And nobody ever goes away angry. (Well, once someone did. But that was more on their end than ours.)

Yet there are those that will not join our group because they feel they're not wanted there. This is the part I find most puzzling, since nobody has ever said anything to that affect. Indeed, we've gone out of our way to let people know they are welcome to join us at any time.

So why do they suffer through solitude then? I've heard them complain that they hate eating lunch alone, yet never once have they tried to join us. What is it about some people that make them want to play the martyr? If you can make yourself even a little happier with such a small thing, why would you pass up the chance?

I had a relationship with a girl for a while that nobody liked. There was always something about her that I could never put my finger on, something very unsettling. I finally figured out the problem: the girl simply had no sense of humor. My friends used to joke that they had to illuminate the "No Fun" signs when she came around. She always claimed she had an excellent sense of humor. I suppose that's true; it was like new, since it had never been used. And I think that's where a lot of the problem lies. I've never seen a happy person that didn't have a sense of humor. And the people I know that are perpetual downers have no sense of humor whatsoever.

So why do these people stay in this constant state? Many times I have people tell me how sick they are of their job, and how they wish they could just walk out. They seem rather surprised when I tell them to walk. There are no guards where I work, no bars on the windows. They can leave any time they like. Or the people that complain about something their spouse is doing that really, really annoys them. When I ask them if they've talked to their spouse about it I always get a long-winded explanation that amounts to "no".

So many things that make people unhappy that could be so easily taken care of by a simple action. What am I missing here? Yes, bad things sometimes happen to good people. And yes, being sad on occasional is good for you; it can be a catharsis for the soul. By why would someone stay like that all the time?

If you can help me out on this, drop me a line.

Back to the columns page