New Yorkers aren’t the happiest bunch. For any number of reasons (working too much, subsisting on mercury-laden tuna, living in $3,000-a-month concrete boxes surrounded by two thousand other concrete boxes at even more laughable prices) those who chose to live here don’t tend to be the happy-go-lucky type.

In a way, it’s a matter of self selection: those who are born here and stay have the unhappiness already implanted, while the rest of us don’t move here to be happy — we come to be successful, to be big, to beat out everyone else, and chase and devour the single biggest carrot that society can deliver. We want more and we want better, and until then, everything’s crap. Give us your neurotics, your depressives, your grim and fidgety, hypercritical and melancholy, uptight and panicky. Millions of smart and ambitious people packed in together, all on a default setting of anger, dejection, or disdain.

March around in this soupy funk long enough, and it gets pretty comfortable — kind of like plodding through raw sewage until the smell doesn’t bother you. We get used to our unhappiness, to the point where its absence feels like a lost limb.

So on the rare occasion when we have cause for collective joy (like, say, a massive Superbowl upset leading to a heartwarming New York victory, with the added bonus of delivering a crushing loss for a cadre of cheating thugs), we can barely figure out how to claw our way out of the perma-gloom to properly celebrate:

“Wow, what an amazing comeback!”
“Yeah, but the game sucked ’til then. I wasn’t even paying attention in the 4th quarter.”

“Eli Manning was amazing!”
“He better be - he was garbage all through the regular season.”

“Did you go to a Superbowl party?”
“Yeah, for a couple minutes - I barely made it out, I was so tired from working all weekend.”

“Are you going to the parade today?”
“Are you kidding? The weather is horrible, I’ve been sick for 3 weeks with that thing that’s going around, and I have about 18 hours of work to do today.”

“So I guess it’s a relief, then, that the season is over?”
“What?? How can you say that?? What will I do without football? It gave me something to be happy about!”