Parenting & Family Quote by Thomas Szasz

Szasz treats happiness less like a feeling than a rumor: something always located safely in someone else’s life, preferably someone who can’t contest it. The line is built like a neat little relay race of projection. Once, the living sentimentalized the dead - “at least they’re at peace” - a consolation that flatters survivors with the idea that suffering ends in a tidy moral afterlife. In modern secular culture, he argues, the fantasy gets reassigned: adults mythologize childhood as a prelapsarian zone of uncomplicated joy, while children imagine adulthood as total freedom, money, and agency. Nobody gets to stay in the present tense.

The intent is characteristically Szaszian: to puncture comforting psychiatric and cultural narratives that rebrand dissatisfaction as a problem to be diagnosed, treated, and managed. By calling happiness an “imaginary condition,” he’s not denying pleasure exists; he’s attacking the way “happiness” becomes a social alibi. If it’s always elsewhere, then your own restlessness can be framed as personal failure, or medical defect, rather than a rational response to constraint, grief, monotony, or politics.

The subtext is cynical but surgical: idealization is a form of avoidance. The dead, the child, the adult - each becomes a screen for adult anxieties about meaning and responsibility. The quote works because it makes a bleak observation feel almost playful, using symmetry and timing to expose the scam: we keep moving the goalposts so we never have to admit that ordinary life is messy, and that “happiness” is often just a story we tell to make that mess seem temporary.