When was the last time you were genuinely happy?
You may be a fortunate soul who has no trouble answering this question. You may have led a charmed existence free from trouble, or you may be a natural Zen master, who suffers like everyone else but lets those pains roll off leaving without a mark.
Or it may require some thought. You may have happy memories in the past, but they’ve grown misty with time. It may take an effort of will to recall them.
Or this may be a difficult question. Your life may be scarred by regret. You might strain to recall even an instant of joy.
Either way, I’d suggest that if your life is lacking, you schedule more happiness into it.
It sounds absurd, because you can’t conjure emotions into existence by willpower. But what you can do is create the conditions for happiness. If you put yourself in the right circumstances, the emotion often follows.
We all know this works in the opposite direction. If I’m tired or hungry or stressed, a minor inconvenience can put me in a bad mood. Our emotions are more dictated by circumstance than we might realize. You can use this to make yourself happier as well.
It doesn’t have to be a peak experience. It can be a simple thing that brings you joy: a party with music, a neighborhood cookout, a gathering with friends or family, a walk in nature, an afternoon in a coffee shop with a good book.
Only you can decide what holds meaning for you. But whatever it is, you should make a deliberate effort to have more of it in your life. Happiness will only come if you leave a space for it to show up.
Happiness is what we should be fighting for
In my view, happiness is the only thing a moral system can sensibly be based on. If you accuse me of being a utilitarian, I’ll gladly plead guilty to the charge.
The alternative to utilitarianism is a morality that’s based on either virtues or rules. You can hold up martial courage, or adherence to tradition, or obedience to duty, or honoring your elders, or religious faith, or any of a thousand other qualities as the supreme guiding principle of life.
However, those moral systems all fall short because they have no explanation for why we should prefer one rule, or one virtue, over a different one. Why tradition, rather than innovation? Why sobriety, rather than hedonism? Why the family rather than the state, or vice versa? Why one church rather than another? If there’s no answer to the “why”, all these choices are ultimately arbitrary.
By contrast, when happiness – or well-being, or flourishing, or whatever you choose to call it – is the key to your morality, you have a guide for how to choose among priorities. You go by what produces the best outcome for human beings, rather than maximizing some impersonal measure of goodness, like getting the high score in a video game.
That doesn’t mean morality is always easy. People can argue (and do, at length) over what the rules should be, when we should hold firm and when we should make exceptions. It will always be difficult to judge between mutually exclusive claims. But if we agree on what the goal is, and if we agree that arguments have to be based on evidence that everyone can see for themselves, it is possible to reach consensus. The expanding circle of moral progress across history testifies to this.
However, a utilitarian philosophy comes with an important asterisk. That’s that we have, in a sense, a duty to be happy. If happiness is the desired state for everyone, doesn’t that mean we should try to nurture it in our own lives?
A duty to be happy
In a society built on capitalism, it can be hard to make time for happiness. Our jobs tend to demand everything we’re able to give and then some. Even among those of us who don’t have bosses to report to, there’s the insidious “hustle culture” mentality that we should devote every waking moment to “productive” (read: money-making) pursuits.
There’s also a political angle to unhappiness. In my experience, where conservatives are prone to disastrous overconfidence, atheists and progressives are habitually gloomy and downbeat. That’s because we look at the world and imagine how it could be, and reality comes up short by comparison.
We dream of a world without violence, exploitation, or suffering. Yet those evils persist, and often it seems like they’re multiplying. We hope for change, but those hopes have so often been dashed – whether because the powers that be strangled reform in its cradle, or because people were kept divided and powerless by their worse impulses of bigotry, ignorance and greed.
When fascism and climate change are knocking at the door, it can seem like the only moral response is to redouble your activism. But if the struggle demands all we have, then leisure and happiness can seem like luxuries you can’t afford. At best, they seem like inexcusable selfishness; at worst, a betrayal of your comrades. Some leftists act as if we have a positive duty to be discontented, the better to motivate us toward rejecting the present order and creating a better one. When the world is so bad, how can you be happy, unless you don’t care?
However, I see a problem with this outlook. If we have it so bad, what about previous generations, who lived in even worse poverty with even fewer rights?
When should past generations have been happy?
What if you were born a medieval peasant, legally bound to a feudal lord, in a rigidly stratified society ruled by kings and churches? The common people in those times had none of the rights we take for granted, and starvation was rarely more than a bad harvest away. Or what if you were born into a Jewish family in that same era, when the entire Christian world was viciously antisemitic?
What if you were born a woman, in any of the patriarchal societies of the past and some that still exist today, that grant women far fewer rights and freedoms than men? Or what if you were a Black person in America in almost any era of the past – or for that matter, America today? (If you’re not American, you can substitute whatever minority is in disfavor in your country.)
What would we say to people born in those repressive, unenlightened times? Was it their duty to be miserable their entire lives, hoping that the far future would be better? Or did those generations have a right to find happiness where they could get it?
To my mind, any morality which claims that happiness is an unaffordable luxury isn’t worth advocating for. It’s a morality that, literally, offers us nothing. No one should be expected to sacrifice their entire life for the sake of others – not a capitalist ruling class, and not their descendants in the distant and uncertain future.
As much as struggle is necessary, you can’t build your entire life around it. We need to make room for joy.
We have to work, and we should fight for a better world. But life can’t be all duty and work and obligation. We also need time and space for ourselves. We need music and art, we need love and beauty, we need rest and celebration. Our lives should partake of all the colors in the palette.
Thank you, that was a pleasure to read and consider.
For several years i have thought about the possibility of a “pursuit of happiness” party as an alternative. But the 2-party system in the USA seems too entrenched in the binary thinking of the country, where everything is boiled down to black or white choices, good or bad, left or right, etc.
Such a shame to be so limited when the natural world reveals life as a wide spectrum of colors and choices.
A common occasion for joy here in the Pacific Northwest is the feeling you get when you hike from the bottom of a mountain to the summit. Some of that may be chemicals, similar to ‘runner’s high’ but so what? When you get to the summit, particularly those with 360 degree views, the feeling of joy is marvelous. Nothing like it in my (72 years) experience.
This hews very closely to my own moral philosophy, and perhaps to some ancient ones (Epicureanism, perhaps?) …
One notes also that the same arguments for having part of each day, plus weekends, plus occasional vacations off from work generalize to any obligations, including self-imposed obligations (or however you would classify imposed-by-one’s-own-moral-compass obligations). Aside from the shalt-nots, of course — we shouldn’t take vacations from “not murdering everyone who annoys us in the slightest” for instance — but the musts, the ones that entail some kind of active labor, need breaks. Two major things worthy of note here:
One, not taking breaks actually harms productivity and can easily lead to burnout. To the extent a task benefits from creativity, also, it needs “think time” that can look and even feel unproductive.
And two, any other way of looking at it puts the cart before the horse. What’s the point in saving the world if there’s nothing in it worth saving? Such as … all the little joys and things that morally upstanding people would have to forgo to save the world, under any other moral philosophy.
Last Sunday. Having completed the chores I had set myself, I was driving back from getting a new propane tank for the grill. The top was down, the sun was shining, the roads were clear, and the radio started playing the last movement of Beethoven’s 5th. That movement where Beethoven keeps playing with the listener’s expectations, bringing the work to a satisfactory conclusion, then keeps going. It’s like he keeps saying, “This time it’s really going to be the finish.”,… “Psych!”, “Okay, this time for real.”,… Gotcha again!”, “I know, that’s enough, it will end time this time, no fooling.”,… “Fooled you!” What brilliant playfulness! So the music was turned up, and I was whistling along, and I was truly happy.
We should all be able to find times in our lives to allow this to occur. If there is no meaning to life other than what we assign to it, we should be assigning personal happiness, personal joy, a high status. So long as our personal happiness is not creating pain or hardship in others.
Yet, when I read your essay, an unbidden thought came into my head. A thought I know you were not trying to evoke, but it arrived nevertheless. It was a reminder of the centuries of oppression by richer folk onto poor people with the justification that the poor still appear happy. The most egregious example I can think of at the moment is in the Marx Brother’s movie A Day at the Races where there is a wonderful song/dance sequence by Ivie Anderson singing and the Whitey’s Lindy Hoppers dancing to the jazz standard, “All God’s Chillun Got Rhythm”. While the performance is great, the setting, and implication, is that even though this black community is extremely poor, it’s okay because they are still happy. (They all win some money betting on a horse race at the end of the movie, so I guess it’s okay?)
This idea, that the poor are happy so we don’t need to help them; and it’s converse that if the poor are unhappy it’s their own fault (because we see happy poor people) so we don’t need to help them has cropped up throughout human history. I can offhand think of the example in nineteenth century Ireland. I’m certain if I give it more thought, I could recall examples from Spain, Italy, France, and Russia. And I could probably find examples in any region where there exists a large disparity in wealth.
Money doesn’t bring happiness. But money can create additional opportunities for happiness to occur. Clearly there are rich people who are more concerned with collecting money rather than using it to create opportunities for happiness, and they may not even be happy themselves. And there are people who are poor who find happiness. But wealth and happiness are not orthogonal. There is a relationship.
Maybe the solution is to teach that even people who find happiness in their present circumstances can still use help to improve their lives. And oppose the idea that people who do find happiness in their present lives shouldn’t be offered opportunities.
I know that’s not what you were trying to communicate in the OP. There is nothing in the OP I take exception to. But I have also seen the fact that poor people can be happy be also used to justify not helping them. Which makes me a little sensitive to statements that the goal is to maximize happiness, because it can lead to the ‘just-world’ hypothesis. Even if I agree with the goal.
Agree with OP and with flex, and note that minimizing suffering seems to be an equally important, and separate, goal from promoting opportunity-for-happiness.
Maximizing individual agency (including not only legal freedoms, but assuring enough access to basic necessities of life, such as food and shelter and clean water, and basic necessities of opportunity, such as means to travel and access to social venues and maker-spaces and such) seems to be the way to go. People know best their own likes and dislikes, what they want more of and what they want to avoid. And it’s clear there’s no one-size-fits-all answer to those.
That militates against authoritarian systems and top down centralized ones (which also suffer from resiliency issues when war or natural disaster come knocking). It points toward a civil-libertarian, but not a “private property uber alles” sort of Rand-style libertarian, system, which would give all too many people only the freedom to sign away their freedoms in exchange for not starving.
Perhaps something in the vicinity of anarcho-syndicalism.
At the very least, it needs to recognize the need for a safety net to establish a minimum standard of living that’s above the poverty level. That, in turn, especially combined with planetary limits, implies some limitations on freedoms, particularly upon the morbidly rich. Should people have, say, the freedom to personally own a superyacht? I’d argue no: one gains little concrete freedom to either travel or experience from that compared to, say, having the freedom to rent, borrow, or in some other way time-share a sailboat of some type. Freedoms need to halt where going further impinges on someone else negatively: no freedom to abuse your kids; no freedom to have too many of those, given planetary limits; no freedom to have a huge carbon footprint; nor to hoard to a degree that requires others be deprived of the basics. It goes without saying that the inheritance tax should be 100%; and maybe public schooling should be mandatory. If the rich kids go to the same schools as everyone else, those schools will be invested in; and the kids can all be inculcated with similar values, as distinct from elite private schools inculcating rich kids with the belief that they’re specially deserving and owed the world, spoiling them.
That’s the minimum leveling that should be done; again, it should probably be but a waystation toward something far more egalitarian. But at least it would grant near-equality of opportunity …
Well, at some point you need to figure out how to deal with the tiny minority of people who will be dangerous, unrepentant jerkasses no matter what. The ones who can’t or won’t be fixed without turning them into an entirely different person, effectively murdering them – even if they were willing, it’s questionable whether one could truly consent to that. The ones who ruin other people’s lives, or worse, leave corpses in their wake – by doing whatever it is they desire to do in the stupidest possible way, or out of vicious spite, or out of joyful malice.
Once those people are identified for absolutely certain, almost certainly after already having done some damage more than once (and also almost certainly after we have done away with privacy as we currently know it, because “absolutely certain” is rarely possible otherwise), then in most cases probably the best thing to do would be to isolate them from the general public. But then the question becomes, how much effort and resources do we put into their comfort and safety? This is not trivial. An open-air prison village, for example, even if it’s relatively luxurious, is going to experience through-the-roof crime levels, just by the nature of the people living there. For that matter, the place is going to decay into slums sooner or later, and likely sooner… unless the entire place is self-repairing, or you’re willing to send daily construction and/or repair crews into that dangerous environment. Escape attempts will happen. So obviously they can’t be left alone to their own devices, but keeping them under control would be morally and psychologically hazardous to the keepers, and in some cases physically hazardous as well, just like with present-day prisons.
I suspect that the majority of them would not be happy to be living among people with personalities like themselves, anyway, even if you managed to keep them from significantly harming each other.
There are other possible solutions, depending on how the future turns out, obviously. Lock them in a VR paradise. Bliss them out on drugs or brain mods. Give them non-sapient bots to abuse. Set them free but with an inescapable AI minder to slap them down hard when they cause problems. Mercy-kill them. If all else fails, default to something like EU-style prisons as the best option in a lot of bad ones, or even just put them on ice in hopes that some future generation will be able to come up with something better. Each of these has thorny issues which need to be worked out or justified. I don’t think that I’d ever accept any ethos which would lead to “just brutalize them” or “let them kill each other”, regardless of how much of a failure at humaning they were.
Of course this is one of those things which isn’t likely to be a high priority until the biggest issues have been solved (like world peace) but it does at least deserve some consideration, if only because it might help figure the optimal solutions towards promoting happiness and/or minimizing suffering in general.