No, I don't want to be happy. You might think that happiness is the reason for everything we do. The idea goes back a long way. Since happiness is the end of action, we choose to pursuehonour, pleasure, reason, and every virtue. Self-help is a billion dollar industry.
Critics have been present. The English are the only ones who strive for happiness. The point of morality is to achieve the greatest happiness for all, and that's what Jeremy Bentham and John Stuart Mill were trying to achieve. Mill also had doubts about the pursuit of happiness. He realized that the craze for contentment could subvert itself.
Mill was the first person to understand the paradoxes. The 20-year-old philosopher was raised in an academic hothouse and had a nervous breakdown. Mill looked at his mental crisis in his later memoir. He said that happiness can't be achieved by making it your primary goal. Those who have their minds fixed on something other than their own happiness, on the happiness of others, even on some art or pursuit, followed not as a means, but as itself an ideal end. Aiming at something else makes them happy.
We’ve built a multibillion dollar industry around this all-consuming aim
The argument is straightforward. When we see our desires fulfilled or when we care about something, we are happy. We have to care about things other than ourselves in order to be happy. When we care about something, it isn't just a way to make money. It makes us happy because it matters to us in its own way.
Mill was correct about this. Nothing will make us happy if our final goal is always our own happiness. When we achieve happiness it is a result. His argument isn't enough. Happiness is the test of all rules of conduct and the end of life according to Mill. He argued that our pursuit of happiness has to be roundabout and that it shouldn't be the "direct end". Happiness is a false god.
What should we strive for? To find sufficient meaning in the world that we are glad to be alive
It's a subjective state of happiness, you could be happy while lying. When what we care about goes well, we are happy. When we think our desires are met, we are happy. It doesn't matter to us if these beliefs are true or not. It's important to us in our lives.
A thought experiment is how we can show this point. Imagine Maya being submerged in fluid and being fed a stream of consciousness that mimics an ideal life in a virtual world. Maya is perfectly happy, even though she is being deceived. Her life is not good. She doesn't do most of what she thinks she is doing, doesn't know most of what she knows and doesn't interact with anyone. To be imprisoned in a vat alone for the rest of your life is not something you would wish on a loved one.
Sim life may be better than it looks, according to recent philosophers. They deny that a simulation is deceptive because it creates its own reality. They concede that living well is not the same as feeling happy because contact with reality is key to living well. The pain of grief is bound up with love. It isn't something we'd be better off without.
Trying to live as well as we can is what we should aim at. There is more to life than how we feel, so we shouldn't try to be unhappy or indifferent to happiness. Living well means living in the real world, engaging with people we care about and activities that are worth our time. We are responding to what matters as we should when we do that.
The quotation I began with was also seen by the author. The Greek eudaimonia is a happy word. The ideal life is a close match. Where the pursuit of happiness is too low, the aim is too high. When it comes to the best, it's often out of reach and you can't get it if you try. The same mistake can be made if you aim for an ideal life. We must live in the world as it is, not the world we want it to be.
Should we try for something? To find meaning in the world that we are happy to be alive, and to cope with grace when life is hard. Our lives may be good enough even though we won't achieve perfectness. We're not the only ones. We should treat other people the same way we treat ourselves. One of the first steps in self-help is beyond the self.
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The author of Life Is Hard is a professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
Further read.
W D Ross translated the Nicomachean Ethics from Greek to English and edited it.
John Stuart Mill wrote an autobiography.
Susan Wolf wrote meaning in life and why it matters.
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