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| I know I've touched on this theme before, but I don't think I've shared this particular article. It's from BBC, and it's a few years old. Why our pursuit of happiness may be flawed  It is an emotion linked to improved health and well-being, but is our obsession with being happy a recipe for disappointment, asks Nat Rutherford. Well, for starters, what's a Brit doing talking about a concept enshrined in the founding documents of the rebel colonies? Okay, fine, I'll give them a pass on that one. Perhaps you want to spend more time with your family, or get a more fulfilling and secure job, or improve your health. But why do you want those things? Chances are that your answer will come down to one thing: happiness. Our culture’s fixation on happiness can seem almost religious. By "our," I don't know if he's talking about British, Anglophone, or generally European and its derivatives. Because not all cultures are obsessed with happiness, but it does seem to be a Western thing. It is one of the only reasons for action that doesn’t stand in need of justification: happiness is good because being happy is good. But can we build our lives on that circular reasoning? As regular readers may remember, I distrust "happiness" as a goal. I think it's what happens (yes, those words, happy and happen, share the same proto-English root, one that meant something like "luck") when you're doing other things. A survey in 2016 asked Americans whether they would rather "achieve great things or be happy" and 81% said that they would rather be happy, while only 13% opted for achieving great things (6% were understandably daunted by the choice and weren’t sure). Fortunately, it's not a binary choice in reality. Neither is wealth and happiness. The idea that rich people are miserable while poor people are happy is a lie we tell poor people to keep them from getting too uppity. There is some evidence that the obsessive pursuit of happiness is associated with a greater risk of depression. While I don't trust "some evidence" necessarily, this tracks for me. In his recent book, The Enlightenment: The Pursuit of Happiness, historian Ritchie Robertson argues that the Enlightenment should be understood not as the increase in value of reason itself, but instead as the quest for happiness through reason. Oh look, it's a book ad. That should make the author happy. Or rich. Or both. It’s easy to assume that happiness has always been valued as the highest good, but human values and emotions are not permanently fixed. Some values which once were paramount, such as honour or piety, have faded in importance, while emotions like "acedia" (our feeling of apathy comes closest) have disappeared completely. From what I understand, honor (or honour, depending on your geographical location) is still paramount in some cultures. Not just Klingon, either. Self-help books and "positive psychology" promise to unlock that psychological state or happy mood. But philosophers have tended to be sceptical of this view of happiness because our moods are fleeting and their causes uncertain. Instead, they ask a related but wider question: what is the good life? I believe Conan the Barbarian answered that question definitively: "To crush your enemies, see them driven before you, and to hear the lamentations of their women." In short, I'm pretty sure the answer is different for each person. For example, lots of people find having children makes them happy (or at least claim it does). For me, that would be the very definition of Hell. One answer would be a life spent doing things you enjoy and which bring you pleasure. A life spent experiencing pleasure would, in some ways, be a good life. But maximising pleasure isn’t the only option. Every human life, even the most fortunate, is filled with pain. Painful loss, painful disappointments, the physical pain of injury or sickness, and the mental pain of enduring boredom, loneliness, or sadness. Pain is an inevitable consequence of being alive. Oh, you've been listening to Buddhists? Yeah, life has its ups and downs. In my view, the downs help us appreciate the ups. Studies have shown that having loving attachments correlates with happiness, but we know from experience that love is also the cause of pain. What if pain is necessary and even desirable? Yeah, no, not unless you're a masochist (not that there's anything wrong with that). But there's something to be said for purposely enduring the painful parts in hope that things will improve. Like getting a root canal, known to be painful and boring (that's a pun, by the way) in the short term, expecting that your toothache will go away. Less dramatically, all the good things in life entail suffering. Writing a novel, running a marathon, or giving birth all cause suffering in pursuit of the final, joyous result. I question those examples, especially the last one, but I wouldn't know. Well, except for the "writing a novel" part. I didn't suffer while writing mine; it was challenging, but I enjoyed the process. The "suffering" happened when I went to edit. Friedrich Nietzsche, in The Genealogy of Morals, saw that we do not merely endure pain as a means to greater pleasure because "man…does not repudiate suffering as such; he desires it, he even seeks it out, provided he is shown a meaning for it, a purpose of suffering". In Nietzsche’s view, pain is not alleviated through pleasure, but instead through meaning. Ah, well, too bad there's no meaning, then. The American philosopher Robert Nozick came up with a thought experiment to make the point. Nozick asks us to imagine a "machine that could give you any experience you desired". The machine would allow you to experience the bliss of fulfilling your every wish. You could be a great poet, become the greatest inventor ever known, travel the Universe in a spaceship of your own design, or become a well-liked chef at a local restaurant. In reality though, you would be unconscious in a life-support tank. Because the machine makes you believe that the simulation is real, your choice is final. One wonders if he came up with these things before, or after, Star Trek's holodeck and The Matrix, both of which came out during his lifetime (yes, I looked up his bio). Would you plug in? Nozick says you wouldn’t because we want to actually do certain things and be certain people, not just have pleasurable experiences. Okay, Nozick wouldn't. As I mentioned above, I'm pretty sure there are people who would. If the simulation feels real in every way, what's the difference? That you won't be remembered by history, like Einstein or Curie? News flash: most of us won't, anyway. But this touches on my own philosophical point, which is that we get happiness not by aiming for it, but through accomplishment. Nozick’s experience machine aimed to disprove the essential claim of utilitarianism, "that happiness is desirable, and the only thing desirable, as an end". But I can't fault the guy for railing against utilitarianism. Dissatisfaction, unhappiness, and pain are part of the human condition and so "it is better to be a human being dissatisfied than a pig satisfied", according to Mill. He continued to believe that happiness was deeply important, but came to see that aiming at happiness will rarely lead to it. Fuck me, I agree with John Stuart Mill about something. Shoot me now. (In my defense, with this philosophy, he contradicted his own earlier works.) What Mill recognised was what Aristotle had argued two millennia earlier – the passing pleasure of happiness is secondary to living a good life, or of achieving what Aristotle called eudaimonia. Why'd he have to name it in Greek? Oh... right. Eudaimonia is difficult to translate into our contemporary concepts. Some, like the philosopher Julia Annas, translate it directly as "happiness", while others scholars prefer "human flourishing". Whatever the translation, it marks a distinctive contrast to our modern conception of happiness. Literally, I believe it translates to something like "good spirit," but the problem with that translation is that "good" and "spirit" have multiple definitions. For instance, for me, Scotch is a good spirit. But I think the sense is more like virtue and a pursuit of perfection (though without expecting actual perfection). Virtue, also ill-defined and culturally relative, has fallen out of favor as a goal, replaced by the selfish "happiness." Like our modern conception of happiness, eudaimonia is the ultimate purpose of life. But unlike happiness, eudaimonia is realised through habits and actions, not through mental states. Happiness is not something you experience or obtain, it’s something you do. It's not necessarily the "ultimate purpose of life," but okay. There's more at the article, of course, but I've said what I needed to say. I think that, while the author is better-versed in philosophy than I am (and British), we've reached similar conclusions. And that makes me happy. |
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