[Pendant] This is What Happiness is

Trust Me | Thesis | What Happiness is Not | What Happiness is | Applications (e.g. effective task management; finding your soulmate)

“Trust Me”

Will you trust me for a couple of minutes? Just for these first couple of minutes. I’m asking because, on first blush, this essay will probably seem like it’s going to be pretty trite, to you. I won’t blame you anyway if that’s how you feel: it’s about something self-help-y like finding happiness in life, and in a few short moments I will be making somewhat general references to Ancient philosophy, and so, it will, at least for these first few minutes, seem very much like one of five thousand other posts on this website, with titles like “What The Ancients Can Teach Us About Living A Fulfilling Life,” or “Marcus Aurelius’ Formula For Dealing With Anything”. The Business Secrets of the Ancient Pharaohs. “Use This One Mental Trick From Ancient Greece To Reset Your Life.” Whatever. It won’t stay like that for long. I promise you. Rubber and road will meet quickly and we will start getting specific and substantive.

But yes. This is an essay about happiness; it is an attempt to think seriously through a good definition or model of what happiness is. I have tried to make it as fat-free and content-full as possible, this first little piece of writerly gristle notwithstanding. Here’s the plan: First, we think through what happiness isn’t, and then we think through what happiness might be, in light of that. Then we sketch how this understanding of happiness might change one’s daily living. Then we all go home a little wiser.

Thesis

When I first started learning about philosophy, when I was 14 and started attending the “Philosophy Club” at my Catholic high school, the discovery that first really delighted me was the discovery that “What is the purpose of life?” has not, historically, been seen as a terribly perplexing question by most philosophers. You’d think (perhaps) that it’d be the be-all-end-all, ultimate question of the discipline, something that’s almost only ever asked as a kind of joke, because of how obviously un-answerable it must always have been. But that is not the case. Instead, the response from the great thinkers of Ancient Greece, India, and China to the question “What is the purpose of life?” was united and regular throughout the ages: “The purpose of life is to be happy,” they said, unbothered, like a teacher clarifying the different types of triangle for a student.

I was delighted by that.

If it seems shallow and unsatisfying to say that the purpose of life is to be happy — this is because modern intuitions about happiness tend to be, themselves, shallow and unsatisfying. We naturally think of happiness merely as a feeling, as a kind of smiley-face feeling we feel when we do things that we enjoy; and certainly if we continue to think of happiness only in this way then, yes, it must seem low-minded to say that the object of life is just to pursue happiness. Just feel as good as possible — is that really the wisdom of the ages?

Of course, it isn’t. When the Ancient Greeks talked about happiness, they had a much denser, more complicated concept in mind than feeling good; something more expansive; something more deserving of being called the object of this life. Instead of taking a historical tour through the Greek philosophical sources like this is an online course, though, we’re going to talk our way to that conception of happiness right now, together.

I don’t like it when writers tease their readers so I’m going to lay my cards on the table: Happiness, properly conceived, is not best thought of as a psychological feeling or a mental state. It is better thought of as a state of affairs, something that has some material reality outside of your head, something that we work to build over an extended period of time. Happiness is best thought of as an achievement — like a well-maintained garden is an achievement — rather than a feeling we experience moment-to-moment. Things will get clearer as you read on.

What Happiness is Not

It sounds strange to say that happiness is not best thought of as a feeling because we all have such direct experience with feeling happy. When we spend quality time with close friends, for instance, or eat a meal we really enjoy, we have a good feeling, and we call this feeling happiness. Right? What needs correcting in this picture?

I guess my fundamental objection is this: If we say that happiness is just a feeling, or a mental state, then we are saying that happiness is about maintaining something that is by its nature transitory, something that is always changing, coming and going. Happiness is fleeting if this is how we think about it. We finish the meal that we enjoy and the feeling of satisfaction dissipates. Our friends return to their homes and, eventually, the warm feelings of their company fade. Is this all that happiness consists of then? Scuttling from one source of smiley-face feeling to the next, always seeking a temporary refuge? It’s like being consigned to some infinite game of devil sticks – like all there is to do in life is keep the stick in the air as long as possible, before it falls down, inevitably, and we must begin again. I find it unsatisfying.

Even if we try to be more high-minded about things, and dress up how we talk about the feeling of happiness, this problem remains. It will remain so long as we continue to think of happiness just as a feeling that we experience.

For a long time in my life, for instance, from around the ages of 14 to, hell, 21, – I constantly looked for happiness conceived as a kind of “flow” state that I would want to live inside of for as much as possible. I had found it in life, more than a few times, and so I knew that it existed: walking along a path or looking out the window by my desk while I worked, listening to just the right song while the light around me played in just the right way, thinking and remembering just the right things in that moment to make the scene around me and my life join together in my mind’s eye as a beautiful whole while I engaged in my chosen activity. This could last minutes, up to the better part of an hour. It was such a mystical, ecstatic experience every time that it came together – and I thought that that feeling, and emanations of it, was what happiness was.

Not some grubby “smiley-face feeling” to be sure. But we can still see why it’s unworkable to think of happiness this way: maybe we can see it more clearly, even: these moments of feeling are just too hard to come by. They cannot be reliably reproduced and when they do appear they don’t last long enough. They are effervescent little bubbles of magic and should be appreciated as such — they are to be cherished, remembered — but they are not to be what we fix our life’s happiness upon. Neither is tasty food nor fun with friends nor any other single activity.

What Happiness is

Okay, so, what do I want, then?

Well—

In a lot of ways this essay is written in response to a philosophy article titled “Happiness as Achievement” by Julia Annas, a professor at the University of Arizona. Annas’ article is itself a very lucid communication of the same Ancient consensus I mentioned at the beginning of this article, a consensus that people sometimes call eudaimonism. The core ideas of this consensus, as Annas puts them, are “the [idea] that happiness has an essential connection with my life as a whole and the [idea] that happiness is an achievement on my part”¹. If we can understand both of these ideas we will start to think about happiness in a way that doesn’t just make it into a feeling that we should try to have as much of as possible.

“Happiness has an essential connection with my life as a whole,”

Annas says, and I agree, that a good way to understand this first idea is to consider how parents think about the lives they want their children to lead. Ask any parent what they want for their child, and the response will likely be that they want their child to “be happy,” or “have a happy life,” or some other variation. The contention here is that when a parent says they want their child to “be happy,” they (most likely) do not mean they want their child to have as much dopamine as possible in their brain over the course of their life, or to be in a state of flow as often as they can; they do not mean that they hope that their child will have a maximal number of fungible individual moments of joy. Rather, when they say they want their child to “be happy,” they have some notion of a full, fulfilled, good, well-rounded human life that they want their child to build for themselves and then enjoy. The exact specification for what that good life actually entails can, and will, vary greatly. But the point remains: when we are being thoughtful about happiness — for instance, when we are imagining the kind of life we would want for our children — we think of it as something that has to do with a life on the whole, rather than feelings in any given moment.

Annas writes about this kind of thinking and its benefits here:

Why should I even bother thinking about my life as a whole? It can seem, from a modern point of view, like an excessively cautious thing to do – prudential in the way that people are prudential who save and buy life insurance. But it is actually rather different, and it is something we all do all the time, since there are two perspectives which we take on our lives.

One is the linear perspective, from which we think of our lives as proceeding through time, one action being followed by another as we slowly get older. The other perspective opens up as soon as we ask of any action, Why I am doing it? Why am I getting up? A number of different kinds of answers suggest themselves, but we readily recognize one kind that is purposive: I get up in order to get to my classes. Why am I going to my classes? In order to major in Spanish. Why am I majoring in Spanish? In order to get a job as a translator. The answers collected by this question will not all be on the same level of generality. Taking a course is a particular goal that gets its salience from some more general goal, such as having a satisfying career. Our goals are in this way nested.

One feature of this way of thinking that soon becomes clear is its capacity to unify. I cannot have as concurrent aims the ambition to be a great ballet dancer and the ambition to be a lieutenant in the Marines; I have to find a way to sequence these aims coherently. As this way of thinking reveals to me what my aims are, I realize that they are constrained by considerations of consistency, available time, resources, and energy. These constraints come from the fact that my aims are the aims I have in the only life I have to live. Confused or self undermining aims force me to get clearer about my priorities and to sort out competing claims on my time and energy.

Now.

This whole exercise might seem a little confusing, because it might not seem like we’re really doing anything to get away from the idea that happiness is some kind of feeling or state, as I said we would at the beginning of this essay. After all, Annas’ advice here, — isn’t it just a recipe for maximizing the number of individual happy moments in one’s life? Of course if we mindlessly pursue pleasure from one disconnected moment to the next, we will start to have a very bad time very quickly. Of course, if we think of our life in this purposive, healthy, global way – with all of our carefully nested life goals always at the forefront of our minds – we will enjoy a greater number of individual happy feelings in the long run. Isn’t that what’s going on here, at the very bottom?

Another track: If Annas kept asking Why? of her motivations in the second paragraph, what would come at the end of that chain of questioning, if not an answer like “To produce a good feeling” ?

Why become a translator? Because I find translation endlessly interesting. Why do a job that centers on something you find endlessly interesting? Because doing it will make me feel interested, active, capable. Why do you want to feel these things? Because these are good feelings at a basic, unanalyzable level – in other words: it makes me happy to feel these things.

Looking at it this way it seems happiness only has to do with your life as a whole insofar thinking about your life as a whole is the most reliable way to feel as much happiness as possible, in the long run. We seem to be back to where we started. Having to choose between being a great ballet dancer and a lieutenant in the Marines doesn’t have to do with some essential feature(s) of happiness as a concept – it has to do with the fact that pursuing these goals at the same time will almost certainly end up with you failing at both of them and experiencing the feeling of that failure, rather than the feeling of happiness. No? Is this wrong?²

This will bring us to the second idea Annas mentioned.

“Happiness is an achievement on my part,”

The second part of this more Ancient conception of happiness, probably the greater part of it, is the idea that the struggle of building a truly happy life for ourselves, itself, forces us to grow into better versions of ourselves. So that happiness doesn’t just have to do with the possession of things — agreeable life circumstances; the good feelings they produce — but also with the process of how we attained those things, and who we became to attain them.

Consider the comparison I made at the beginning of the essay: happiness is an achievement, like a well-maintained garden is an achievement. How is a garden appreciated? Let me play Socrates here for a moment: Who enjoys the garden more, the one who simply eats the fruits and vegetables that it produces, or the one who digs, weeds, plants, waters, and maintains the garden — making it their own — before, of course, also eating the fruits and vegetables that it produces? I would say it is the second person. Because the joy of a garden is not just in eating the fruits and vegetables that come out of it. It’s knowing that you grew them, that they are a reflection of hours of straining and sweating (as well as the fickle grace of Mother Nature.) The pride in the work done well that resulted in the delicious tomatoes, peppers, and cucumbers — that’s where the better part of the satisfaction comes from. Otherwise one might as well just buy organic produce; all inputs considered, it will still be cheaper.

Annas writes about this idea using another example:

We are used to theories that take happiness to be a state – a positive one, of course. On this view, shared by consequentialists of all kinds, aiming to be happy just is aiming to get myself into this positive state. In principle, somebody else could do the work for me, and if the work is laborious it is hard to see why I would insist on doing it myself.

But could happiness be a state of myself that I (or if I am lucky, others) bring about in myself? Here it is relevant to mention a discussion with students that I have had many times, but which I first borrowed from a former student, Kurt Meyers.

Kurt asked the students in his business ethics class, mostly business school students, what they thought a happy life consisted of. All mentioned material things like a large salary, a nice house, an SUV, and so on. Well, he said, suppose you find in the mail tomorrow that an unknown benefactor has left you lots of money, so that these material things are now yours for the having. Would this make you happy? Overwhelmingly they said no (and this is uniformly what I have found also).

What this little thought experiment shows is that it was not really the material things, the stuff, that they imagined would make their lives happy. Rather, they thought of a happy life as one in which they earned the money, made something of their lives so that these things were an appropriate reward for their effort, ambition, and achievement. Just having the stuff was not all they wanted.

Bringing it all together

So this is the more positive vision of happiness we have been straining toward: happiness is a shape of a whole, fulfilled human life. To me that means a life that allows one to exercise their talents in the pursuit of goals they find meaningful, to master their hobbies, to love, to laze, to indulge in their vices with moderation, to explore the world, etc. Happiness consists in the struggle to build this kind of life for ourselves: it consists in becoming the better, more integrated versions of ourselves that can successfully create this well-rounded life and then enjoy it. It is in this sense that the Ancients considered the pursuit of happiness the object of life.

Now, more than writers teasing their readers, I hate it when writers do not get concrete and specific with their abstract ideas. And so to wrap up we will discuss how working with this model of happiness would influence daily living.

Application (e.g. effective task management; finding a soulmate)

It’s a shame that the term “goal-oriented” has become one of the most cliched in the language, because it is an accurate description of the mindset recommended by the idea of happiness that we’ve been hammering out here. Instead of just trying to maximize how much time we spend feeling good and minimize how much time we spend feeling bad, we should always be looking toward what kind of life we want to be living: we should always try to orient ourselves toward that goal. Note: this does not mean all work and no play. But we’ll get to that in a moment.

Anyway, for a civilization increasingly defined by doomscrolling, insecure attention spans, and a lot of sports-gambling, I think this shift in perspective is important. When we think of happiness as just feeling good, we naturally tend toward the kind of moment-by-moment thinking that is, as we’ve said, not conducive to a happy life. Following our impulses without further consideration leads to days spent flitting from task to task to assuage worries / desires that coalesce and dissipate on an hourly basis. We do a little cleaning, but not enough. We do a little reading (maybe). We watch two and a half episodes of something we kind of like while we peck at our phones, switching between email and some feed of social media. We lay in bed. We wonder as we fall asleep: What did I actually do with my time on Earth today? Am I fucking things up right now? I can’t even tell. It feels like none of the days build to anything — like we are just waiting. For what?

I say again: if we constantly orient ourselves toward what kind of life we want to be living, we can thwart this tendency. And if you haven’t figured out what kind of life you want to be living, you should get on that. It’s a hard question, but pursuing that life with intention — and, one hopes, some success — is what happiness truly consists of, so it’s not really a question you want to avoid. Am I beating you over the head with it too many times at this point?

Also: this sounds impossibly Type-A, doesn’t it? Maybe painfully obvious? Oh, so if I just always stay organized and optimize my time to constantly pursue my long-term goals I’ll be more successful? Gee, thanks. Look — that’s not what I’m saying. What I’m saying is that it’s important to figure out the kind of life you want to live, and that to be happy you need to try as consistently as possible to think about, to have at the forefront of your mind, to orient yourself toward that life as you decide how to spend your time. Efficiency or productivity have nothing to do with it — I am just asking you to keep asking yourself “Why am I doing this?” I am not saying that you have to always be directly pursuing your life goals for your time to be well-spent, either. Quite the contrary: it is only by having this mindset, by keeping our life goals in focus, that we can give meaning to the menial tasks and mindless pursuits that will always be present in our lives, and so enjoy them for what the are. For example:

Doing the dishes, by itself, is a meaningless activity. They will always return; they will always get dirty again. Woe to you who leaves the sink untouched for more than a day. It certainly doesn’t feel like washing them builds to some greater project. No: considered in isolation, it is merely an unavoidable waste of your time, brute maintenance. But let us work backwards from this task like Annas does in her example of waking up for Spanish classes. Why do we do the dishes? So the kitchen can be clean. Why do we want the kitchen to be clean? So that my home overall can feel clean. Why do we want the home to feel clean? So it is a space conducive to doing the things I want to do, like reading, and drawing. I want to apply to better jobs too and it feels like I can focus better when it’s clean. We can continue asking our Why questions — Why do you want a better job? — and eventually we come to those topline goals, like securing a certain career, or building a family. Now doing the dishes is connected to things that matter, now it is plugged in to the system. Now meaning flows through it, and doing the dishes isn’t brute maintenance— at least, it’s not just brute maintenance — it is a very small step toward a very meaningful goal. It’s been made part of the plan.

For what it’s worth, it is trivial to concoct some connection between any given activity – “I am commenting on Reddit” – to one of your main long-term aspirations – “I comment on Reddit to develop my rhetorical ability, which is an essential skill for my planned career as a writer or lawyer, or whatever” — but this is a trick you would only be pulling on yourself, and I think you would immediately know what you were up to.

Finally: I want to talk about what all this means about Love.

Being with the person you love isn’t just about them making you feel happy – we’ve exhaustively walked through how that’s an unhelpful way to look at things. (Though, certainly: they should be making you feel good things, rather than bad things. Free advice.) No, rather, with happiness properly conceived, as a kind of life and version of ourselves that we strive to build, we can see: love is what happens when another person’s life interlocks with yours. When the complex hierarchy of your hopes for your own time on Earth intermeshes and combines with the hierarchy of another, and becomes something more, something unalloyed and entirely new. And you transcend your own lonely self.

1. Note that Annas is where some of my own key phrasings come from — happiness as an “achievement” and the “smiley-face feeling” theory of happiness.

2. Annas actually does not address this exact argument in her essay. My response to it, though, is similar to one that she would give, I think. It is a simple enough little terminological two-step: we call the good sensation at the bottom of everything ‘pleasure,’ while the life circumstances that facilitate that feeling of pleasure are what we call ‘happiness.’ That’s all. She writes about something like this in the paragraph that begins “Is it pleasure? We now know that the right answer to this question must recognize…”