Pages & Perspectives

Children Laying in the Grass (1890) By Max Bohm

Happiness is one of those things that nearly everyone talks about, and almost nobody can point to. Philosophers have tried to define it, poets have tried to describe it, religions have tried to tell us where to find it, and the rest of us usually just know when we have it and when we do not. You cannot hold happiness in your hand or put it on a table, yet it can decide whether a day feels worth remembering. However much chemistry sits underneath it, to the person feeling it, happiness is not small at all. But it makes us wonder from time to time: if happiness feels this important, is it actually the goal of life?

My first instinct is yes. It seems almost silly to ask people whether they would rather be happy or miserable because, unless there is some very strange catch in the question, we already know the answer. Even people who say they do not care about happiness usually want one of its relatives. They want peace, satisfaction, calm, pride, love, contentment, or simply the feeling that life is not fighting them every morning. Think of these as the family of happiness. They are not the same emotion, but they all seem to live in the same house.

If being around your family makes you happy, that happiness belongs to you. If writing does it, then that is yours. Somebody else might find it in football, prayer, money, cooking, running, music, travelling or sitting alone with a great book to read. This is partly why the advice to “just be happy” is so useless. Happiness may be universal as a desire, but the route towards it is personal.

The argument for happiness

One of the oldest arguments in philosophy sides, at least partly, with happiness. Epicurus believed pleasure was central to a good life, although the word pleasure makes his philosophy sound much wilder than it was. He was not telling people to spend every evening eating until they could no longer stand up. His version of pleasure was freedom. Freedom from unnecessary pain, freedom from fear, enough food, good friends, and a mind that was not constantly disturbing itself.

If you could build a life with friendship, peace, modest pleasures and less pointless anxiety, why would you not? We sometimes speak about suffering as though it automatically makes a person wiser, as if every terrible experience arrives carrying a lesson underneath its arm. It does not. Some pain teaches, but some pain is just pain, and there is no wisdom in making yourself miserable when you do not need to be.

The same idea later appears, in a different form, in utilitarianism. Jeremy Bentham thought actions should be judged largely by the pleasure and pain they produce. John Stuart Mill agreed but argued that some pleasures are higher than others. The pleasure of thought, friendship, or learning, for example, is not quite the same thing as the pleasure of eating sweets or lying in bed all afternoon. You can disagree with them, but their basic point is hard to completely throw away. Surely a world with more happiness and less suffering is better than one with less happiness and more suffering.

But wanting happiness is not the same thing as saying happiness should be the goal. I want good food, but I would not say eating is the purpose of life. I want sleep, but I do not spend every waking hour trying to return to bed. Something can be good, even necessary, without being the thing everything else has to serve.

The problem with the word happiness

There is also a problem with happiness itself because we use the word for far too many things. I can be happy because something I ordered twenty days ago finally arrives. I can be happy because I did something difficult, because somebody I love is doing well, or I have just finished a long classic book. These feelings belong to the same family, but they are clearly not identical.

Some members of the family are also much easier to find than others. Excitement is cheap. Order something you really want and make the delivery take three weeks; you will probably understand excitement very well by the final day. Peace is harder because you need to let go of everything. Pride normally asks you to do something first. Contentment may require you to stop wanting something rather than finally get it.

So whenever somebody says happiness is the goal, I want to ask which happiness they mean. Do they mean pleasure? Peace? A good mood? Satisfaction? The feeling that life itself is worthwhile? A person can have a very enjoyable evening while living a life they secretly dislike, just as somebody can have a terrible week while still believing their life as a whole is worth living.

Aristotle gives us a useful way out of this problem. He used the word eudaimonia, which is often translated as happiness, although “flourishing” is probably closer to what he had in mind. He did not believe the good life was simply one in which you managed to feel pleasant most of the time. The good life involved developing your character and abilities well. Courage mattered. Friendship mattered. Judgment, reason, and self-control mattered.

That changes the question quite a lot. Instead of asking, “Does this make me happy?”, you can ask, “What is this making me become?” Sometimes the answers will be the same. A good friendship can make you happy while also making you more patient, generous, and open. Meaningful work can give you pleasure while developing your abilities. But sometimes the two questions point in opposite directions.

Telling the truth might make your afternoon worse. Keeping a promise can be inconvenient. Caring for someone who is ill can leave you exhausted. Admitting you were wrong rarely produces instant joy. If happiness means feeling good, then quite a few good actions are strangely bad at producing it.

What if character matters more?

The Stoics go further than Aristotle. Thinkers such as Epictetus and Marcus Aurelius argued that a good life should depend as little as possible on things outside our control. Money can disappear. Health can fail. Praise can become criticism almost overnight. If your happiness depends entirely on these things behaving themselves, then your happiness is always partly being held hostage by the world.

Their answer was to put greater value on the things closer to our control: our judgments, choices and actions. This does not mean becoming some emotionless stone who feels nothing when life goes wrong. It means recognising that if you build your whole life around always feeling happy, you build it around something that events you cannot command can disturb.

Kant gives happiness an even smaller role. He thought morality could not simply be based on whatever makes us happy because happiness is too uncertain and too personal. Suppose telling a lie would save you embarrassment and make your life easier. The lie might increase your happiness, but that alone does not make the lie right. We seem to believe that being good and feeling good are two different things, even if we hope they often meet.

This creates quite a serious problem for happiness as the goal. Imagine you could become happier by being slightly more selfish, slightly less honest, and slightly less bothered by other people. If happiness were the only measure of a successful life, it becomes difficult to explain why you should refuse. Yet most of us feel that something important would be lost.

Would you choose fake happiness?

The philosopher Robert Nozick came up with a rather strange thought experiment. Imagine there were a machine that could connect directly to your brain and give you any experience you wanted. Inside it, you could become rich, write a brilliant novel, travel the world, have children, become famous, or simply spend the rest of your life feeling completely happy. You would not know any of it was fake.

If happiness really is the goal, then entering the machine should be an easy choice. You could guarantee yourself a happier life than the one you are likely to have outside it, and you could avoid almost every form of suffering at the same time. Yet I would hesitate, and I imagine many people would too.

I would want to actually write the book rather than merely have the feeling that I wrote it. I would want the memories in my head to belong to things which took place. Apparently we do not just want happiness. We also want reality, even though reality has the rather annoying habit of hurting us.

If we would choose a less happy real life over a perfectly happy fake one, then happiness cannot be the only thing we value.

Nietzsche would probably hate the question

We know he would; Nietzsche would be suspicious of our obsession with happiness for another reason. He did not see comfort as the highest form of human life. Difficulty, creation, struggle, and overcoming yourself mattered more. A person who arranges their entire life to avoid discomfort may succeed in being comfortable while also making their world very small.

I think there is some truth in that, although Nietzsche can become dangerous if misunderstood. Struggle can build people, but that does not mean all suffering secretly does us good. There is a difference between choosing something difficult because it demands more from you and being crushed by pain that served no purpose. Nietzsche is useful because he reminds us that comfort and growth are not always friends, while Epicurus is useful because he stops us from turning misery into a virtue.

A lot of the things I am proudest of were not particularly enjoyable while I was doing them. That seems to be true for many people. Learning something difficult can make you feel stupid for weeks before it makes you feel capable. Exercise hurts. Writing can involve staring at the same paragraph until you begin to hate the person who decided to write it, even when that person is you. Yet the difficulty is sometimes part of what makes the final satisfaction possible.

The problem with getting what we want

Buddhist philosophy (you should have seen this coming): one of its central ideas is that craving helps produce suffering. We want something, get it, become used to having it, and then begin wanting the next thing. If our happiness depends on satisfying every desire, we have chosen a game in which the finish line has an irritating habit of moving.

You do not need to become a Buddhist monk to notice this. Think of something you badly wanted five years ago which you now barely notice. It could be a phone, a pair of shoes, a grade, a job, a certain amount of money, or somebody’s approval. At one point you may have imagined that getting it would change the emotional climate of your life. Then you got used to it, and your mind quietly began writing another shopping list.

This is also why I am not convinced by the idea that you can simply “think happy” and remain happy. You can certainly change your mood. Put on music you love, go outside, remind yourself of what is going well, and you may genuinely feel better. The mind affects the feeling. But there is a difference between changing a mood and building a life.

If you constantly ask yourself, “Am I happy yet?”, happiness can almost become harder to reach. You start comparing this moment with the moment you wanted, today with yesterday, yourself with other people. Happiness becomes an exam that you keep sitting, and sadness starts looking like a failed grade.

Sadness is not always failure

I do not think sadness proves that somebody has failed at life. Some sadness only exists because something mattered in the first place. Grief is the clearest example. If you deeply love another person, you have also accepted the possibility that losing them will cause enormous pain. A life designed to remove that pain would also have to remove the love that made it possible.

The same thing happens in smaller ways. Caring about your work creates the chance of disappointment. Ambition creates failure. Responsibility creates worry. If the highest goal is to remain happy, then eventually you may have to protect yourself from the same things that make happiness meaningful.

Viktor Frankl argued that meaning can matter more to human beings than pleasure. A person may endure great difficulty when they have something to live for, while pleasure alone cannot always explain why a life feels worth continuing. I would not turn that into another simple rule because people are far too eager to romanticise suffering, especially suffering which belongs to somebody else. Still, Frankl gives us an important idea: a day can feel terrible and still be worthwhile.

A parent sitting next to a sick child at three in the morning is probably not happy. A student struggling through something difficult may feel nothing but frustration. Somebody caring for an elderly parent can feel tired, trapped, grateful, and loving at the same time. Human emotions are rude like that. They rarely organise themselves so that every worthwhile thing feels good while we are doing it.

The family of happiness

This brings me back to what I keep thinking of as the family of happiness. Maybe happiness is not one final state we are meant to reach. Maybe joy, peace, pride, excitement, love, contentment, and satisfaction are more like signals. They tell us things about the life we are living, but no single member of the family should be allowed to run the whole house.

Perhaps our mistake is wanting life to have one goal at all. One goal makes life much easier to measure. If happiness is the goal, then more happiness means you are winning, and less happiness means something has gone wrong. But human beings seem to care about several things that cannot always be placed on the same scale. Truth matters. Love matters. Freedom matters. Character matters. Meaning matters. Happiness clearly matters too.

Sometimes these things work together, and sometimes they argue with each other. You might tell the truth and lose comfort. You might pursue something meaningful and spend months unhappy while doing it. There is no neat formula which solves every collision, and I think any philosophy which claims there is one has probably made humans simpler than they really are.

So, is happiness the goal? I think it is a goal, but I am not convinced it is the goal. It matters far too much to dismiss, yet it is too unstable to become the judge of an entire life. Happiness can be affected by your health, money, sleep, relationships, luck, hormones, the weather, and sometimes something as stupid as whether you remembered to get the milk.

I would rather build a life that gives the family of happiness, somewhere it would want to visit. That might mean people you care about, work that means something to you, enough peace to hear yourself think, enough difficulty to keep growing, and enough honesty to admit when you are unhappy without treating that unhappiness as proof that everything has gone wrong.

Instead of asking whether I am happy, I can ask whether there are good reasons behind the life I am living. Am I becoming somebody I respect? Do I have people worth caring about? Is there anything I would willingly struggle for? If happiness comes with those things, then I will gladly take it. If sadness sometimes comes with them too, perhaps that does not automatically mean I chose badly.

Happiness may therefore be less like the destination and more like part of the journey towards whatever matters to us. Some days it will be there and some days it will not, and trying to force it to stay may be one of the quickest ways to make it leave. The goal, if there has to be one, might simply be to build a life in which happiness has good reasons to appear, sadness has good reasons to be endured, and neither one is allowed to decide the entire value of the person feeling it.