ON HAPPINESS

Happiness is the supreme good in life. Everything we do is for its sake.

Yet pinning down a satisfying definition of happiness is hard. Aristotle, the Stoics, Spinoza, Emerson and countless others have grappled with happiness, as has the self-help book industry which releases works on the topic at an incredible speed. For myself, I have found some such works to be profoundly influential, yet despite all that consensus on what it means to be happy remains out of reach.

One explanation might be that happiness differs for each of us, but I find that unsatisfying. Shallow differences exist between humans of all sorts; some are short, tall, fat, slim, dark skin, light skin, and so on. However the characteristics that make us most human—that is, the ones that differentiate us from non-humans—are rather similar. The capability of our brains, for example, is comparable for nearly all humans. Inasmuch as happiness lives in the brain, I guess that the conditions of happiness are proportionally similar between people.

I want to explore then what happiness is. I’ll start with what happiness is not. In this way I hope, once I’ve cleared away the cruft, to more vividly see happiness itself. I hope as the years go by my sight become even more clear.

What happiness is not

I think happiness is neither wealth, pleasure, health, nor reputation, each of which i discuss below. These are broadly considered to be good, but each is neutral and can be good or bad to someone depending on how it affects that person. For example, wealth may help one person’s life but harm another’s.

Being neutral, as they are, means they are examples of what happiness is not, since happiness is not neutral, but a good in itself.

It is not wealth

This is the most open-and-shut. Wealth is only a means to an end, something acquired for the sake of something else. I have met affluent people who are visibly unhappy.

It is not sensual pleasure

This is adequately refuted for me by imagining an extreme case: if I were to take the most pleasurable moment in my life and have that feeling persist until I die.

Such a life would be inadequate. Humans have evolved to live on this world and it is in our nature to feel and act in it. Sensual bliss is sublime but it dulls the view of the broader world. A life consisting of such sensations would therefore require missing out on the moments that make a life human.

Not health

We can see health as the “natural” state of being, and so the one needed for happiness, but that is not the case. It is natural for our health to deteriorate as we age and even to drop sharply in the case of some accident.

If health were to be happiness then we would expect the young to be happier than the old. In aggregate I’ve see slight difference between them.

Not reputation

In my own experience the people I’ve known who seem most happy are stable in that way, with not much change from year to year. Contrasting that with the fickleness of reputation betrays a weak correlation, if any. Also, I’ve known several well-reputed folks that I would not describe as deeply happy.

It is not cheerfulness

Those that are happy are cheerful, but cheerfulness is a useful mask for even the unhappy. A cheerful disposition can convince others and even oneself, that it is a reflection of true happiness. That is comforting, but none the more true for the comfort it brings.

Not momentary

We often say that a promotion, a kind message, or an accomplishment made us “happy.” We could argue that it is the density of these moments in a life that makes it a happy one, but I find that unconvincing. Its the common experience that such moments are necessarily rare and often out of your control. Such a sparse speckling of delightful moments cannot decide whether a person has lived a happy life

What happiness is

It seems I’ve painted myself in a corner. In the above section I’ve said that happiness is not wealth, pleasure, health, or reputation. If I were to do a good job describing what it is I would have to paint a picture that would show how a poor, sick, loathed person could be happy. I will come back to this person and so I’m giving her a name: Alice.

I don’t have a mic drop at the end, but here are some things that I think happiness is.

Natural

Whether you believe in evolution or that god made us as we are, we are clearly supposed to be here. We are designed (iteratively or all at once) to be here. If Happiness is the supreme good for our life then it seems to me to be in our nature to be happy.

Resilient

Misfortune strikes everyone, some more often and harder than others. A happy person will, like the unhappy person, certainly feel sadness when they lose a loved one. The difference between the two is that the happy person will understand that these misfortunes are natural and so their happiness will run deep enough to withstand the storm surge of hurt. The unhappy person, by contrast, is consumed by their sorrow.

Understanding

I’ve mentioned resilience through understanding. The more one understands of the world the better equipped they are to greet life’s ups and downs with equanimity.

Let me recall the wretched Alice. If I were to presume that despite her poor, unhealthy, disreputable condition he were to have a total understanding of the world and all its causes and effects, could he be happy? Could he have that warm feeling of contentment in her heart? Crack a smile?

Understanding is a necessary but inadequate condition for happiness. I cannot imagine someone without an understanding of their nature being truly happy. It doesn’t matter whether this lack of understanding is because it was never attained, taken away by illness, or drowned out by extreme pain. Without understanding, there can be no happiness.

Still, even equipped with understanding , I could imagine Alice being filled with regret and, so consumed, unable to be happy.

Acting in accordance with nature.

Despite her knowledge Alice could have spent her life acting against her understanding of the world in the same way that one eats another cookie when they know they’d be better off if they didn’t. One misjudged cookie certainly doesn’t preclude happiness, but a life full of acting against your judgment, particularly judgment such as Alice’s which we’ve established is excellent, will necessarily result in a regretful situation that is not at all conducive to happiness.

On the other hand, if Alice’s life had been filled mostly with actions driven from her fine understanding then he would be able to calmly bear her wretched condition secure in the knowledge that what he did what was right and her circumstance is natural.

I’m going to try this for a definition:

Happiness is understanding and acting in accordance with your nature

Implications

This feels like an okay conclusion as but it raises the question: what is my nature and what actions are in accordance with it?

The short answer is ¯\_(ツ)_/¯. It’s a big question, but one I’ll leave for another day. The only thing I’ll say now is that I feel reasonably confident in damning a whole class of things: things that try to put ideas in your head for profit.

Profit itself isn’t good or bad, but neutral. It is bad to the extent that it detracts from your understanding of the world and your nature. Its my perception that today most of the mediums for transmitting ideas are optimizing for profit in a way that is not aligned with your increased understanding, and, so being, are bad.

But what does that mean? Ignore all algorithmically generated feeds? Some of them? Use them in some different way? I’ll touch on that another time.