A Foolproof Plan for Happiness

It's time to break out the sweaters, bitches!

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Human life is fraught with existential and metaphysical quandaries, and one must deal with certain hard facts. Christmas simply is when and where it is, although the Christmas season surrounding it is more subjective. For some people, the Christmas season may begin after Halloween, and for others after Thanksgiving; but for everyone, it ends before the new year begins and cannot just last for as long as a person needs or wants it to. Now that we’ve hit a hard pivot into the undeniable holiday time of the year, the weather outside is a bit aesthetically dispiriting, so I’m in the market for anything to take the edge off. Recently, I have discovered sweatermaxxing. I have a few Pendleton cardigans and some J. Crew Nordic sweaters, and not only are they warm, but they also carry the ambient joy experience of making everything seem not serious. Whenever I rock a sweater, something clicks within me that makes me not care. I don’t know what it is.

The War on Christmas and fretting over how someone wishes you a holiday salutation is an incredibly embarrassing thing to get pedantic about, so my approach to these coming weeks is liberated from traditional norms. Wearing a sweater in any circumstance is bold, bracing, and totally justified. I have earned a reputation as The Guy Who Wore Sweaters at my job, and it’s because I’m rocking my obnoxiously red one with a picture of a gingerbread man with most of his head bitten off and it says I Can’t Feel My Face When I’m With You. When I show up to the office in that drip drip, no one cares if I’m 15 minutes late to a client call, dicking around on my phone during all-staff meetings, or miss five project deadlines because I was playing ping-pong all day. If I’m wearing a fisherman’s knitted pullover to a fancy restaurant, I’m empowered to crush an entire bottle of pinot before the appetizers arrive.

Without a sweater, I am irritable, anxious, feeble, and too serious. When I’m wearing a sweater, I am fun, charismatic, somewhat drunk, and also hot and itchy but it doesn’t matter because I’m vibin’. When someone compliments you on your sweater game, you can caper about and feel the rush of an immediate self-esteem boost, then binge-watch a new Netflix series for the remainder of the day while constantly asking yourself Is this show actually good? and refuse to turn it off. Steve Jobs wore a sweater and look at what he accomplished; he couldn’t stay still because he was hot and itchy all the time so he had no choice but to keep innovating.

Think about it: Has anything bad ever happened to you while wearing a sweater? If you have a sweater on, you legally can’t be broken up with or fired. If my boss called me into his office and saw me in The Dude cardigan, there is no way I’m getting canned. My girlfriend could be fuming about how I forgot to wash the dishes, but there is a zero percent chance she could break up with me while I’m rocking a fuzzy sweater.

For the next few months, I’ll be wearing sweaters and eating soup and listening to the new Father John Misty album and everything will be a joke. This is what God intended.

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