Chasing Happiness

I read a fantastic book over the holidays called Happiness: A History by Darrin McMahon, which was very apropos because I had been thinking about the subject a fair bit in recent months. As the title indicates, the book covers the history of Western philosophical thought, from the Ancient Greeks to the modern era, on happiness – what it is and how/where humans have tried to find it. For such a weighty subject, it’s an engrossing read. I haven’t read much philosophy since my early university days, but McMahon writes very accessibly and engagingly (and, at times, very colloquially); it reads like a narrative and not like a textbook or dry treatise. It’s hard to summarize 500+ pages of history and philosophy in one neat sentence, but my overall takeaway is that people have been obsessed with the idea of happiness for more than two millennia, and no one has managed to come up with any definite answers. 

Well, that’s not entirely true. There are no definite answers that everyone can agree on … and the book doesn’t even tackle the subject outside of Western culture. (I wish it did, but then it would have been 1,000 pages long, I suppose.) It was fascinating to see the evolution of ideas traced across centuries – from the early Classical Era, when people thought happiness could only be judged once a person died because it meant (to paraphrase) a life well-lived according to the ethical precepts of the day; to the medieval era, when people thought true happiness could only be found in the presence of God in the afterlife; to the Enlightenment, when the locus of happiness moved fully into the mortal/materialistic realm; to the 20th century, when technological progress and world wars made the whole notion of happiness more fraught than ever. But still: what is happiness? And how can we get it?

One thing that became clear in reading this book is that humans seem to have an innate longing/yearning/striving for something that appears to exist outside their day-to-day life, which they can’t quite define. Sometimes, they call it ‘happiness’. And, as with many things that are the object of longing, there is an impulse to want or expect that something to be, not simply attainable, but of permanence. It was fascinating to me that, across most if not all the various iterations of (Western) philosophical conceptions of happiness, there is this notion that, once we have the right idea of what happiness is and the right way to pursue it, we will achieve a state of everlasting happiness. That’s the promise of Judeo-Christian religion, but it’s not exclusive to it. And this is where it would have been interesting to have a broader, comparative approach – do other cultures also hold this belief? 

The book doesn’t get too deep into the empirical/psychological study of happiness that gained momentum in the second half of the 20th century and beyond, but does reference some of its findings – including the concept of the hedonic treadmill (to which some 18th philosophers had already alluded), the happiness set-point, and others. It’s been a long time since I read it, but Daniel Gilbert’s Stumbling on Happiness looks at the modern research on happiness in pretty comprehensive detail; I really enjoyed it, and I think it would be a good companion read to McMahon’s book. I would love a book that marries the two: a synthesis of philosophy and psychology, written by a practitioner of the former (lol!). There are so many books on happiness being written these days, but most of them seem to be of the self-help/pop psychology variety, which doesn’t interest me. 

My own current view on happiness can be summed up thusly: happiness is not what most of us have been taught to think it is. If happiness is the state of being happy – a feeling that is the opposite of sad or despondent, pleasure as opposed to pain – then it cannot be the answer to the yearning that is a defining part of the human experience. Feelings are fleeting, never permanent; they come, they go. You can’t build a stable foundation on shifting sand. As I see it now, what we yearn for is transcendence. Or, put another way, something reassuring to hold on to in the face of the two immutable, harsh facts of human existence: its impermanence and its randomness. We cannot truly transcend these things, but we need something that makes life worth living despite them. 

For me, that something is meaning or purpose – not happiness. I acknowledge the contradiction inherent in the pursuit/belief in the idea of meaning in a random world (what Camus called a ‘meaningless’ world). Camus thought the answer was to embrace the absurdity of the human experience without trying to transcend it. Actual transcendence is, of course, impossible … but everyone needs a reason to get out of bed every day. In my eyes, meaning doesn’t obscure the realities of the human condition; it simply makes them sufficiently bearable to make living worthwhile – and to make it possible to experience contentment within the confines of the human condition. [Contentment being something different from ‘happiness’ – closer, perhaps, to acceptance.] And I think meaning isn’t something we find externally, but have to define for ourselves. 

I would love to hear from you: what is your idea of happiness?