In January 2023, Time magazine kicked off the year with a cover story sure to titillate check-out impulse buyers: THE SECRET OF HAPPINESS EXPERTS.
And Time wasn’t alone. Within weeks, happiness adorned the pages of our most prestigious newspapers. The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, The Daily Telegraph and The Guardian all reported on what Time audaciously touted as the “science-backed ways to find happiness at home, at work and in life.”
IT’S SCIENTIFIC…(ahem)
Hot topic though it may be, happiness is no stranger to newsprint, it has served as a perennial in the arsenal of journalists and admen for many decades. Indeed, the promise of happiness is the cornerstone of all marketing. And in that space, it is a blank screen on which to project anything up for sale, tangible or notional.
It can be a toothpaste, a new car, a hamburger, a movie, or a political candidate. Or it might just be a the next big cure-all idea (Capitalism, Marxism, Progressivism, Religious Millenarianism, Identityism and on and on). Whatever it is, the advertised property only possesses the power of seduction insofar as it promises happiness—it is the payoff, the thing we are really trying to buy.
We know this, and yet we bite on the apple despite ourselves. Happiness is charlatanism’s essential commodity and we are compulsively the chump.
It can be a toothpaste, a new car, a hamburger, a movie, or a political candidate. Or it might just be a the next big cure-all idea. Whatever it is, the advertised property only possesses the power of seduction insofar as it promises happiness—the payoff, the thing we are really trying to buy.
ITCHY
How does this idea of happiness possess such magic?
Maybe this: it works so well not because we know what happiness is but because we know what it isn’t. In this way, it is more about unhappiness than happiness. It is an itch begging to be scratched, a hungry void demanding to be filled. It’s this that gives happiness its chameleon qualities—anything might plausibly scratch the itch.
So, in light of that unhappy thought, if Time is truly onto a genuinely scientific salve to soothe us, that’s really good news!
But of course it isn’t as simple as that. Reading more deeply, we find that the science at the heart of the matter makes only modest claims. The real news was the publication of The Good Life: Lessons From the World’s Longest Scientific Study of Happiness, by Robert Waldinger and Marc Schulz. It’s an interesting study and not at all exploitative, although some of Time‘s listed (presumably scientific) tips are hollow and obvious, little more than a tease, an insult to our intelligence.
GETTING REAL
What to make of this? I tend toward an outlook akin to Schopenhauer’s. By that, I mean that any clear view of things is to see temporal life for what it is: short, frequently marked by anxiety and strife, and very often subjected to powerlessness.
And herein lies a paradox: Accepting this fraught reality is the key that opens the door to happiness on its own terms, a happiness that is free from being merely the salve of unhappiness.
DEFINING OUR GOAL
Let’s step back for a moment. Because we are so comfortable with the word, it’s worthwhile thinking about our relationship with it. When we speak of happiness as an aspiration, where does that come from in our experience?
It’s not an easy question. Is happiness even real? We certainly treat it as a reality, but that’s mainly because we want to have it, or perhaps because we imagine someone else has it. In that way, it is a condition that we believe to be fundamental, something that ought to be normal. And yet, despite that certainty, there is no way to reify, commodify, quantify or define the parameters of happiness. Therefore it is impossible to legislate its universality or otherwise structurally guarantee it.
But that too is a clue to the reality of happiness, as all realties transcend our capacity to assess or corral them. Realities cannot be captured and caged—reality is beyond that. Happiness in its refusal to be a thing is therefore more credible as a truth, even if it makes pinpointing it as difficult as pinpointing God. And like with God, our words about happiness are not definitive, the best they can do is shine light around what we hope to see. The discussion is worthwhile then, not because we can define our subject, but that we might see it directly. Our discussion is a meditative light, our words do not hope to define, but to illuminate.
So, to that end, I’ll say this: Happiness is a sea-level condition, fundamental and equanimous. It is not undone by hardship nor endowed by luxury. It is a sublime state. This frustrates us: we want it to be tangible, we want to be able to buy it, and hold it. Alas, that is not possible, and consequently there is no scale upon which to weigh happiness, nor a way to compare one’s happiness against another’s. Happiness exists in perpetuity and yet only in the present moment.
LIFE, LIBERTY AND THE PURSUIT
We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.
In shining our light around happiness, we should certainly consider these familiar words. The idea of the ‘Right to pursue Happiness’ (which we usually understand to mean a ‘Right to Happiness’), is fundamental to our view.
We’ve heard about this pursuit of happiness since we were consumer-age twentieth century kids. Now as adults, the consumer context of our first brush with the Declaration’s happiness clause clings to us. We see the pursuit of happiness as a race, often run in a contest against others. In that conception, our liberty is the freedom to join the race on equal terms, everyone at the starting line together. (We know this is rarely the case, but we’d like to think we’ve taken penalties for our privilege, which makes it OK, even if we’ve suffered nothing to make that true.)
In any case, the implication of the race is that there is a reward, a prize to be won. So here, happiness is implicitly a material reward and thus our modern context holds liberty and the pursuit of happiness in a framework of reductive materialism. This is true even for those who know better. We can’t help ourselves: we chase material pursuits driven be something deep in our gut that insists there is happiness across that finish line.
IT GETS WORSE
Let’s look at that a little more closely. Most of us are aware that winning the prize of material ease does not equate with happiness. Many, having achieved their goals and confronted with a lack of happiness, simply keep running, feeling that there must be something more, and the race continues…and continues…and continues…to exhaustion.
In the crassest terms, liberty and the pursuit of happiness becomes the modern free-for-all shopper’s licentiousness of limitless options. It is the well-stocked supermarket and the endless possibility of buys at Amazon.com and Costco.
Beyond that, the same interminable variety of choices—from what religion we espouse (maybe one this year, another the next), to what community we relate to, to our sexual and other “identify-as” preferences. We pursue and pursue and pursue. We are at liberty to shop, and happiness is surely to be found on those shelves somewhere. Haven’t found it? We are at liberty to keep trying.
The pursuit of happiness can be endless—a purgatory of unfulfillment.
HEAVEN ON EARTH
This misapplication of liberty and misunderstanding of happiness is a thing of endless escalation, titillation, and drawn out promises. It leaves us empty, exhausted, regretful, and wondering where our lives have gone.
Is there no correlation then, between our pursuits and a happy life? Certainly, in the West, we have it good: housing, income, health, access to education and job equality—it all improved by leaps and bounds over the past 150 years or so. So, the question is simple: Are we happier by leaps and bounds too?
Apparently not. As Anders Dræby Sørensen convincingly shows, a subjective lack of happiness is pervasive. Not that we can compare our state with our predecessors, but we know this much: we’re in bad shape. We report emotional pain, anxiety, and dissatisfaction with life. With all our affluence and ease, longevity and easy relief of pain, people are still miserable. We drug ourselves with complex pharmaceuticals just to get through the day. We obsess over our state of mind and evince a panicky lack of contentment. We feel alienated and lonely. Meaningless plagues us.
HEAVEN ON EARTH OR ELSE!
Sørensen’s point, moreover, is that it is the incessant drive, the demand upon ourselves “to be happy” that fuels this angst.
Sørensen observes that this was not always the case, however. Previously, happiness was about heaven, a state that transcends the material world. Now, in that scheme of things happiness could be experienced on earth paradoxically because it was not compulsory, whereas in a modern context, where there is nothing transcendent of gross physical matter and the short human lifespan, happiness presents itself as a desperate demand. In modern times, life in the material world must be made Paradise, for there is nothing else. Again, it is the mistaken “pursuit of happiness,” a desperate drive that ends in burnout and despair.
So, if happiness is not measurable or obtainable as a commodity, if our consumerist misunderstanding of its pursuit is wrong, how are we to understand the idea of the pursuit of happiness as connected to liberty as per Thomas Jefferson? What did TJ have in mind?
While he doesn’t explain himself, we can be sure he took his cue from the influential John Locke, for whom Happiness was indeed an important aspect of Liberty. You can read a good account of Locke’s take on it here. As for our present meditation, a quick introduction to Locke’s idea of liberated happiness comes from a simple example he gives, one that resounds with the overtones of the happiness paradox, for Locke describes Liberty not as the freedom to do things, but rather as the freedom not to do things. The point is that a multiplicity of choices is not a benefit; Locke’s idea is that happiness rather comes from the freedom to limit our options.
LOCKE AND LIBERTY
In particular, Locke describes the liberty not to drink. In positive terms, it is the freedom to choose sobriety. His idea is that God gave us the liberty to choose the best and most noble course for ourselves. Quite the opposite of the shopper’s unfettered choices, Locke’s is the liberty to not mistake (in Locke’s words) “imaginary happiness” for “true happiness.” So, rather than sifting through the unending choices for the one that we imagine might make us happy, Locke would have us be free of all that and simply find true happiness itself.
Locke talks about alcohol as an illustration, saying that alcohol provides short-term relief and even pleasure (imaginary happiness) but nothing more. Now, I drink, so this is not meant to be preachy, but his point is spot on—we should not mistake the buzz of alcohol, or sugar, or shopping (whether for stuff or religion or politics or identity) with happiness. His liberty was freedom as temperance, surely a lesson for our age.
WHAT WOULD JESUS DO?
And true Happiness? It’s just there, fundamental, at the place of rest where there is no strife or struggle, no clamour, nothing to choose—just the equanimity of life itself, and indeed of its passing and then the hope of eternity—that which is not merely mortal and material. That’s hard for us in this day and age.
We can learn something from Jesus, who taught that happiness was indeed in the paradoxes: “Happy are the poor in spirit…Happy are those who mourn…Happy are those who are persecuted…Happy are you when others revile you….” (Matthew 5:3–4, 10–11)
There is no hint of material prosperity, emotional bliss or perfect political circumstances in any of that. On the contrary, Jesus said that those who would see the Kingdom of Heaven—which we can read as meaning the Paradise place of happiness—must “deny themselves and take up their cross and follow me.” How is it that Jesus proposes embracing a symbol of adversity as a condition for happiness?
AND PLATO SAYS, AMEN?
To begin with, Jesus’ happiness unflinchingly observed the temporal nature of things in all its hardships. His idea is to live with a deliberate reminder of death, a meditation on the impermanence of material existence. This is the dead opposite of modern material scientism that pins our hopes on technologies of longevity and the solace of drugs. “For whoever would save his life will lose it, but whoever loses his life for my sake will find it. For what will it profit a man if he gains the whole world and forfeits his soul?” (Matthew 16:24–28)
Plato would have said “Amen!” He used the same Greek word that Jesus did, translated here as soul (and as life). And he used it in the same way as Jesus: “For I go about doing nothing else,” says Plato, “than urging you, young and old, not to care for your persons or your property more than for the perfection of your souls.” (Plato, Apology, 30a–b)
SOUL AND LIFE
The translators of the Gospel of Matthew choose to render this word as life in one verse and soul in the next—but it’s the same word and highlights the difference between contingent material life and the primary life that generates our temporal existence. Life here does not mean gross material life—it is the metaphysical breath of life—the animating force—the soul. Their message is that in trying to preserve ourselves and material “life,” we will lose the animus or “soul” that continually gives rise to it. It’s to do with impermanence and transcendence and what Nobel Prize-winning physicist Sir Roger Penrose would argue is the primacy of the immaterial—things that we will discuss at another time.
Was Jesus or Plato happy, then? Or Buddha, who taught similar ideas of non-self and impermanence? If we stand in their shoes and experience what they experienced, would it make us happy? I believe they were, yet strikingly their choices were extremely limited. They had few choices in the way of housing, location, healthcare, investments, entertainment, sexual identity, or much of anything else. They suffered. It’s a good test, then, of whether we understand happiness or not. Can we imagine being happy in their shoes? If we can’t happily see ourselves in their circumstances, we probably don’t yet quite understand what happiness is.
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NEXT POST: Artificial
A discussion of simulacra, AI and Reality.
(editor’s note: Oxford English Dictionary and Thesaurus: 1564–
Contrived or fabricated for a particular purpose, esp. for deception; resulting from artifice; feigned, fictitious. Cf. quot. 1616 at sense A.I.2b.)
POSTSCRIPT:
Does Sayyid Qutb Agree With Locke?
Sayyid Qutb’s ideas profoundly impacted Muslim communities around the world. His influence crossed the divide between Sunni and Shiite, giving inspiration and direction to the Muslims Brotherhood, the Iranian Islamic Revolution and by extension today’s most powerful Islamic political movements. He should be counted as one of the most important and influential leaders of the twentieth century.
His thoughts on freedom and choice in the West should be considered if we want to better understand not only Western (and Christian) relations with political Islam (and for many Muslim scholars all Islam is political) but also as part of this reflection on Happiness.
IMAGE: Anne Frank passport photo, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons