happy jerry seinfeld

Do you see America returning to the simple life? Is that what will make us happy?
That's a crock. There's no going back. The thing that'll make us happy in the Nineties is that we know it's the last decade that we'll have to hear one of those terms like the Nineties. You're so Nineties, you're so Eighties. After the Nineties, what are we going to say? You're so zero number? It's so blank digit of you to have your own voice mail?

So we won't be returning to simpler values?
That's a hobby while we're waiting for the cures for a few things. For instance, sexually we're in the starting blocks, waiting for the gun to go back to the way we were in the Seventies. It's a hobby, this nurturing and nuclear family. [He pauses, then clicks into a monologue on a thinly related subject.] I've noticed lately in television, it seems like the speed of images keeps going up. As the speed of television goes up, the movies start going faster. I don't know if it's possible that eventually each frame of the film will be a different scene, different characters, different stories. You'll walk out with dilated pupils.
It's like when — this is a stretch — you take a bath and you watch the water coming up your stomach. It comes up a little one way and then it goes down a little the other way. It's the same thing with entertainment. It's "Hey, someone hasn't done this in the last 10 minutes." Then everybody does that, and then there's a hole on the other side and everybody goes over there.

Will Americans ever find happiness?
The thing about life that no one can believe is that what we're doing is actually it. When you're a kid, you look forward to it. You're seriously concerned when you're a kid that you might not be able to take the excitement of being an adult, of driving around and people calling on the phone and getting mail addressed directly to you. Now, it's like: "You drive; tell 'em I'm not here; and I can't believe all this junk mail!''
The point is not that youth is wasted on the young, but that everything is wasted on everyone. I look at kids and say, "Oh boy, it's the greatest life form of all; the only problem is your bike chain failing." That was the subject of Our Town — can you realize what life is while you're living it, or do you have to be dead? We'll be in heaven going, "If I just had the right robe, I think I'd be happy. I just feel this one is too big and I look ridiculous."

Are you happy?
I'm happy because I know that this is happy. I believe that people are happy and don't know it. People get this impression of happy from soft-drink commercials. You see these people in soft-drink commercials, they're literally airborne. You're thinking, "If that makes them feel that good, how can I feel good — I'm still just walking on the ground." Spiking a volleyball, that's happy. Getting a jet-ski six feet off the top of a wave....

You're not so happy when you land, but at that airborne moment anyway.
At that moment. It's gravity that makes us unhappy, I guess.

Finally, let me ask: Is consumerism dead?
No. [long pause]

OK. Well, thanks.
It's been fun.