Quote of the Day: Julian Casablancas on Happiness

Notice he chooses “common” rather than “shared.” “Shared” can sound like a negotiated arrangement, something parceled out and divided. “Common” is blunter, almost biological: a baseline condition we return to no matter how quirky our tastes get. That distinction sharpens “Desire is individual. Happiness is common.”

Desire is the most private currency we spend. It’s minted from specific memories, insecurities, and ambitions, your particular childhood ache, your oddly precise hunger for admiration, your exact image of “enough.” Even when two people want the same thing, a career breakthrough, a relationship, a home, the wanting is never identical. Desire makes us legible as individuals, but it also keeps us slightly lonely, because no one else can fully inhabit the inner weather that produces it.

Happiness, meanwhile, has a strange way of flattening differences without erasing them. It often arrives when the self loosens its grip: laughing at the same line, exhaling in the presence of someone safe, feeling a song lift an entire room at once. Desire can be an engine of success, but it’s also a factory for comparison, fueling the suspicion that life is a competition we’re losing. Happiness is “common” because it’s recognizable; it tends to bloom in connection, in love, in moments when the boundaries between “me” and “us” thin out.

Julian Casablancas, as the voice of The Strokes, has spent a career turning private restlessness into communal catharsis, proof that the most idiosyncratic longing can still land as something everyone understands.

August is a month of thresholds: summer fading, routines returning, the mind already bargaining with what comes next. Apply the line today by treating desire as a personal clue, not a public scoreboard, and by measuring happiness by its simplest test: does it bring you back into touch with other people, or push you further into yourself?