The annual World Happiness Report recently ranked the happiest countries in the world. The U.S. dropped to number 24, its lowest position in the report’s history.

“That gradual decline is… especially driven by people that are below 30,” says University of Oxford professor Jan-Emmanuel De Neve, editor of the report.

The report went on to say that, if you assess only Americans below 30, the U.S. wouldn’t even rank in the top 60 happiest countries.

So, what IS happiness? What’s the official American definition? Even our American dictionary is unclear.

The dictionary says happiness is “the state of being happy.” But if you look up “happy” in the same dictionary, it says: “a state of happiness.” The writers of our dictionary are evidently the same people who write the U.S. Tax Code.

So, for this column, I have consulted the happiness experts.

To learn more about happiness, I first travel to the happiest place on earth. Mayberry County, North Carolina.

I interview local sheriff, Justice

of the Peace, and civic-choir member, Andy Taylor. Sheriff Taylor says he believes happiness comes from generosity.

“I firmly believe,” says Taylor, “you can’t give something without feeling good; it’s just like lighting a candle with another candle—you’re spreading light.”

After our interview, I catch a plane bound for Canada’s smallest province. Once I reach the Garden Province, I interview local author and schoolteacher Anne Shirley.

Shirley knows about the struggle for happiness, she was raised in an orphanage in Hopetown, Nova Scotia, before moving to The Island as a girl.

That said, Anne is not currently "happy with my tardiness. Her infuriated face is even redder than her shock of red hair.

Finally, she calms down, and we start the interview.

“Happiness?” Anne begins. “It's been my experience that you can nearly always enjoy things if you make up your mind firmly…

Our Father, which art in heaven, Hallowed be thy name. Thy kingdom come. Thy will be done. In America, as it is in heaven.

Bandage our wounds. Apply salve to each sore. Balm to each injury. Ointment to each bruise. Antiseptic to our bleeding lacerations, and medicine to our open gashes.

Undamage us. Or better yet, teach us to undamage ourselves. Show us how to heal.

Teach us the language of kindness, a language which the deaf can hear and the blind can see.

Show us how to talk to one another again. Without bias. Without agenda. With words of understanding. With sentiments of peace.

And, most importantly, teach us to listen. Teach us to hear without judgement. Teach us to speak without decision. Teach us to see without partiality.

Teach us prudence. Teach us rationality. Teach us non-assumption. Teach us fairness, reluctance, and restraint. Teach us composure.

Show us how to be gentle, we cannot do it on our own. In fact, evidently, we cannot do it at all. Not without help.

Namely,

because we are angry with everything right now. Angry with each other. Angry with people we’ve never met. Angry with things that don’t even exist.

Angry with systems. Angry with ideologies. Angry with foolhardiness, selfishness, and the inability to reason. Angry with idiocy in general.

Help us to love one another. Help us to find beauty in each fellow human being. Beauty within each soul who crosses our path today. Teach us to find beauty in our enemies.

Open our eyes, so that we may see each person’s intrinsic loveliness, instantly. No matter how different from us this person might be. No matter which group this person belongs to.

Teach us to put others’ needs above our own. Teach us to be considerate. Teach us to show our children how valuable they are. Teach us to give, even when it hurts. Teach us to love like…

A crowded restaurant-slash-bar. There is a band in the corner, playing music loud enough to threaten dental work.

An older man is on the bench beside me, waiting. The hostess tells us it will be a 40-minute wait for a table. Then she hands us both beepers.

The older man is quiet. Watching the frenetic insanity of modern life move about.

The patrons are mostly young. It’s a bar. So people are happy. They’re doing what happy people from their generation do. They take selfies for no apparent reason. They snap photos of their food when it arrives. They rapidly thumb away on their screens, largely ignoring the people in their party.

The older man is just taking it all in.

There is a family of three on our bench, also waiting for a table. Mom is talking loudly into a phone via Bluetooth. Dad is fiddling with a smartwatch, maybe playing a game? The kid is wearing massive, padded headphones that swallow his head, listening to tunes, blissing out.

Nearby, a group of young women

in heels is huddled together, staring at someone’s phone, laughing at a video, but not conversing. Their phone volume is cranked so high you can almost hear it above the band.

Which is really saying something inasmuch as the band is playing “Truck Yeah” by Tim McGraw. And if this isn’t the worst pop-country song ever written I’ll kiss a grown man’s astrological sign.

The older man finally flashes me a smile. We notice each other amidst the madness. Two humans. Stuck in chaos.

He is missing a few teeth. His nose looks like it’s been broken a few times.

We introduce ourselves. His name is Joseph. He has an iron handshake. His skin is weathered, like he’s been outside a lot. There are tattoos on his forearms and hands.

Joseph says he’s meeting his daughter here. But he feels weird being out…

The 20-year-old girl is sleeping when we enter her hospital room. But her mom tells us to come in anyway.

I’m carrying my fiddle case. My friend Bobby is carrying his banjo.

The patient is sleeping on her side. We see her violent red ponytail spilling down her shoulders. There are cords and tubes exiting her body from all angles.

The girl’s kid sisters rush toward us to give quiet hugs. Then, Bobby and I hug her mother.

The young patient hears all this commotion. Hark. Fair Juliet awakes.

She opens her eyes. She sees me. She smiles. The 20-year-old girl sits up in bed and, without saying anything, opens her arms for me to embrace her.

There are green Band-Aids on her inner forearms, from where nurses have endlessly searched for new veins. And she has lost weight since I last saw her, which was only a few weeks ago. She is a tiny sparrow.

We embrace. I am careful not to squeeze too

hard. I can feel her ribcage beneath my arms.

“You’re here,” Morgan says in a half whisper.

“How’re you doing?” I say.

As soon as the words exit my mouth, I wish I could take them back. What a pig-ignorant question to ask to someone who just spent Christmas and New Year’s Eve in the ICU. How are you doing? What an bonehead.

Morgan smiles and answers, “I am doing great!”

I’ve never heard say things weren’t great. Not once.

She’s paralyzed on her left side. She uses a leg brace to walk. She is nearly blind. She lives on a form of life support called total parenteral nutrition (TPN), which is a feeding tube that supplies nutrition directly through her bloodstream, mounted in a backpack, which she wears all day, every day.

Currently, however, she has a blood infection. The infection…

The old timers in my childhood used a word I never understood. The word was “Providence.” The old timers couldn’t give me an exact definition of this word. Probably because it had more than two syllables.

To be fair, Providence truly is a difficult word to define. Even now, when researching this column I couldn’t find a concrete definition.

One dictionary called the word “archaic.” Which is true. Today the term is so outdated that, if you’re a younger reader, I’ve probably already lost you.

So I’ll explain Providence by telling you how the word was invoked by the rural people of my youth.

Okay. Let’s say there was no rain, the world was dry, farmers were losing money. It wasn’t “bad luck.” It was Providence. And when the rain finally began to fall; also Providence.

When two people fell in love? Providence. If someone got cancer and died, people prayed for the family to receive solace in Providence.

Job promotion? Providence. Finding $20 in your coat pocket? Big-time Providence. The electricity goes

off? Divine Providence.

My people, you see, did not believe in good luck, coincidences, or even flashy miracles. There were no mistakes. There were no accidents. It was all Providence.

To my people, life was a trapeze act. Mankind was always swinging recklessly from trapezes, back and forth. Sometimes man fell, sometimes he didn’t. Either way, there was a divine reason for everything—good and bad. You weren’t supposed to know the reason. That’s Providence.

The thing is, nothing makes sense in life. Not a single thing. I’ve been trying to figure the world out since I was a kid but I’ve never been able to.

I went through a period of sad living, when I believed this universe was against me. I lost faith in everything: in people, in goodness, in miracles. For a while I quit believing in God. I told him…

There were 26 of them, altogether. High-school kids. Not one cellphone among them. Neither were there TVs, airpods, gaming devices, or tablets. No tech at all.

It was a party. An apartment downtown. The kids gathered here sometimes. To blow off steam. To socialize in-person. They heard their ancestors used to do this. Their ancestors called it “hanging out.”

What a weird term.

Some teens were cooking in the kitchen, using cookbooks made of actual paper. They were books manufactured before the paper bans of ‘84.

Most kids had never seen a paper book before. They had only heard of them. Other kids were lounging in various nooks and corners, drawing, writing, or making art on their black-market notepads.

Light music came from a record player someone scored in an antique store. The music was Louis Armstrong. They had never heard anything like it. In fact, they had never met anyone who could actually play an instrument. Today, most kids interested

in music used AI-composition software. Although in the mall there was a humanoid bot who could play violin.

So they were breaking the law. Gathering here. Being without phones. Going phoneless was a crime in their society. A misdemeanor.

Mandatory phone laws had been established long before they were born. The laws were intended for safety. “Real-name registration,” “ID-linked SIM cards,” and “biometric data” had only been concepts 50 years ago, but now they were a global thing.

Even so. It’s a well-known fact that teens rebel.

Teens must rebel. It’s their DNA. Teens have been rebelling ever since two teens named Adam and Eve got the ball rolling.

These particular teens called themselves the “Luddites.” A name they found an antique history book. The first Luddites, they read, were rebels from old England, textile workers and craftspeople, at the dawn of the Industrial Age.

The original Luddites…

Pull into the parking garage. It’s packed. No parking spaces. Behind your vehicle is a line of vehicles, headlights blaring.

In your mirror, you can see motorists behind you, all shaking heads, because you are all playing the infamous parking-lot game, Follow the Leader. And apparently you’re the leader.

When you finally find a parking spot, you’re already late. You jump out of the vehicle and watch the angry motorists speed past you.

You half-jog to the elevators. You’re running VERY late.

In the elevator is a little boy and his mother. They are both carrying overnight bags. Mom looks like she hasn’t slept in eight years. The boy looks worried. He’s so serious.

“Mom?” the boy asks. “Do you think Caleb’s surgery worked?”

Mom flashes an uncomfortable look and tells the boy to hush because they are in an elevator with strangers and it’s not polite to blab your business to strangers.

The boy falls quiet. But there is genuine angst in his mannerisms.

And you’re wondering who Caleb is.

You all get off at the second floor and disappear into the hospital. You are now walking through a huge glass crosswalk, with downtown Birmingham traffic far below you.

You keep pace alongside a gaggle of young, college-age women in pink scrubs. They are laughing and carrying UAB backpacks.

Behind them are two men, doctors maybe, also in scrubs, stethoscopes dangling from their necks, with briefcases, carrying on an in-depth discussion about football.

When you arrive in the lobby, you can tell this hospital was specifically designed for kids. The bright colors. The wacky, vivid artwork everywhere.

In the lobby of this great building are people from all walks, standing around, all waiting for Heaven knows what. Mostly families. There are families of every shape, color, and creed.

You see a family of five, all wearing…

Marriages are down 60 percent since the ‘70s. Divorce rates are soaring. And the New York Times reported that more 40-year-olds are choosing to live alone than ever before.

Another recent survey of U.S. high-schoolers showed that the percentage of 12th graders who have ever dated has fallen 85 percent since the ‘80s. It has fallen another 50 percent within just the LAST FIVE YEARS.

What the heck is going on? Why aren’t people dating, or getting married? What’s to blame? I can’t answer that, I’m too busy scrolling my phone right now.

Nevertheless, one marital expert chimes in.

“The problem is risk. People want guarantees these days. We are a nation of consumers, and consumers require return policies. We need guarantees.”

Another psychologist has a different assessment. “It’s helicopter parenting that’s killing marriage. How can a 20-year-old decide to get married when they haven’t ever built a fort in the woods or ever played House?”

Well, I decided to approach the marriage crisis by asking random people to

give their opinions and advice on the institution of matrimony.

Gary and Delores have been married for 54 years. Gary says: “My 38-year-old son has never been married. Recently he asked what it’s like to be married, so I told him to ‘LEAVE ME ALONE!’ When he did, I asked why he was ignoring me.”

Simon and Anne have been married 62 years. They were married the same year Kennedy was shot. “Marriage is simple. You can either be happy or you can be right. But you can’t be both. Too many people want to be both.”

Lydia and Eddie, 48 years: “Nobody tells you that you don’t fall in love before you’re married. It takes years and years to fall in love. A little more every day.”

Pearl and Jacob say: “People don’t realize that you actually can survive on love. They’ve been told otherwise.”

It was almost kickoff. All my gameday preparations were in order. Life was good.

We were all gathered in the backyard, bundled in warm clothes, with lows hovering around 50°F. The fire pit was roaring. The beer was cold enough to break your molars. My dogs were begging for food from anyone who could fog up a mirror.

The television was sitting on my deck, with extension cords snaking across our yard. The volume was at the maximum setting.

The televised tumult of a 90,278-person crowd inside Los Angeles County’s Rose Bowl Stadium was blaring through the feeble Samsung speakers.

God wanted Alabama to win. That much we knew.

The Rose Bowl pregame segments were steadily broadcasted on the screen. Lots of player footage. Lots of round-table discussions. And an onslaught of roughly 10 million prescription drug commercials.

Also, there were many expert commentators appearing on the screen, administering their deep analyses of what “needed to happen” in this game.

These pregame commentators earn millions of dollars per TV appearance, and here is an example

of the wisdom they impart:

“Yeah, John, listen, this game is about running the ball, you have to run the ball, running the ball is key, even when you don’t want to run the ball you have to run the ball, then you have to run it again, you keep running the ball, because running the ball is everything, John, and if you run the ball, the fact is simple, you’re a team who runs the ball…”

I don’t want my dogs hearing this.

So I mute the TV. Then, I tend to the fire while Alabama rushes the field. Soon, we are all hollering. Even my dogs are making noise.

Alabama has a chance at the National Championship this year. And even if you aren’t a football fan, you know the National Championship is a big deal simply because of its namesake.

I have…

The Old Year is perishing into oblivion. The New Year is crowning, with new blessings to bestow. And I am standing in a self-checkout lane listening to a computer tell me there is an unknown item in the bagging area.

There is no cashier around to assist me. At least I THINK you call them “cashiers.” Although they don’t handle much cash anymore.

Yesterday, for example, in a big-name retail store, my cashier paged his manager for help because he didn’t know how to make correct change when I asked him to break a $100-dollar bill. This cashier was in his mid-thirties.

“You can’t call them ‘cashiers’ anymore,” says one fellow shopper, whose self-checkout computer is also saying there is an unknown item in her bagging area.

We are both waiting for assistance. That’s what the computer tells us to do.

“Saying ‘cashier’ is outdated,” my new friend says. “You’re supposed to call them ‘checkout associates.’”

Meanwhile, both our machines are speaking to us, at the same time, using loud, authoritative, apathetic, computerized voices, akin to a 1968 Stanley Kubrick sci-fi film.

My fellow shopper is frazzled, like me. Our self-checkout warning lights are blinking, with huge monolith beacons above our heads.

The whole store is staring at us. Two felons, caught redhanded, committing the very serious offense of forgetting to weigh our produce.

There are flashing messages on both of our display screens, reading, “¡Artículo desconocido en el área de empaquetado!”

Finally an employee finds us.

The young cashier/sales technician/digital-sales associate comes jogging from the breakroom. She is wearing her work vest. She is chewing food, as though we have interrupted her lunch.

She looks just as disgusted with these machines as we are.

She scans her card, punches in the correct code. “We’re short staffed,” she explains.

“I’m sorry,” I say. “It looks like we’ve interrupted your lunch.”

The employee shrugs. “It’s no problem. I’m used to it.…