About happiness

Life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness are among the fundamental rights of the American Declaration of the Rights and Duties of Man.  They can be read together: a man or a woman has the right to live and to be free to seek out his or her own preferred form of happiness. Here we have to qualify with J.S. Mill “On Liberty” that freedom to pursue happiness is limited by its not causing harm to others.  A pessimist who sees life as a zero sum game might argue that one man’s happiness necessarily entails another man’s unhappiness.  The optimist in me, however, does not see life that way so I believe with the American founding fathers that a harmless pursuit of happiness is possible.

The whole point of having the freedom to pursue one’s own preferred form of happiness is that happiness can take many forms which may suit each individual differently.  What indeed is happiness ?  It is a word used to cover many quite different feelings and states of mind: joy, pleasure, delight, bliss, satisfaction, self-fulfilment, contentment, peace of mind, serenity, wisdom - to name but a few and they are all quite different things.  Generally, being happy is regarded as a positive and desirable state.

“Happiness” then is something of a catch-all word, not unlike “love”.  There are many forms of love: the parents’ love of their child, the child’s love of its parents; the first love of teenagers and the love of a couple married for twenty-five years; love of one’s friends - to name but a few, and they are all quite different things.  Happiness may or may not be possible without love; although also Aragon writes “Il n’y a pas d’amour heureux” (there is no happy love).  Since love implies engaging with someone else, the happiness that comes of love, active and passive, is of a greater human value.  Indeed can a solitary man or woman truly be happy ?

If I were asked: Did you have a happy childhood ?  Is yours a happy marriage ?  Have you had a happy life ?  I would answer: “On the whole, yes.”  That is, all in all, taking the rough with the smooth, weighing everything in the balance, I have more often been happy than unhappy.  Happiness is not, nor could ever be, a permanent state in a normally constituted sentient human being living in this world.  It is a high to which there are always corresponding lows.  Its very elusiveness is indeed why it has to be pursued.

The main problem in the pursuit of happiness is recognizing when we have attained it.  Real happiness is here and now, it is of the present moment.  It is not the nostalgia for a sweetly remembered past which was not actually as we fondly imagine it to have been.  Nor is it the imagined perfection of a desired future which is actually unattainable.  Real happiness is only now and now is as good as it is ever going to get.  It never was better and it never will be better.  Perceived happiness is a clear case of the best being the enemy of the good.  The past and future can get in the way of full awareness of the present and prevent us from recognizing when we are happy.

Perhaps I am suggesting we should revise downwards our expectations of life.  I know I lowered mine a long time ago.  This is not being negative or settling for second best: it is merely embracing reality.  Some things are never going to happen, so get real and enjoy what you have for which you ought really to be very grateful.

In fact there is an awful lot to enjoy in what we have and what we are.  For example, as we recover from illness we are happy to have returned to good health; and yet we ought to be happy to be in good health whenever we are not unwell.  We have become blasé about the sheer miracle of being alive.  

If you can find enjoyment and satisfaction in the basic functions of life, a good meal, a good night’s sleep or in everyday society, a friend’s smile, an unexpected gesture of solidarity, or in nature, the warmth of the sun on your skin on an autumn day, the beauty of a tree, then you are well on your way to being happy.  I’m not suggesting that conversely when you’ve had a bad meal, a bad night’s sleep, somebody’s been rude to you, it’s raining and you’re surrounded by ugliness that you should automatically be unhappy; although I admit myself to soon becoming a grumpy old man in such circumstances.  I’m talking about an ability to recognize what is positive in everyday life which can become a background feeling that makes the difference between being predominantly happy or unhappy.

On a miserable day, however, we are going to have to fall back on some deeper form of happiness to avoid being unnecessarily sad.  Here we are moving away from the more sensual forms of happiness, joy and pleasure to the more rationalized forms of self-fulfilment, satisfaction, peace of mind and such.  It is a question of taking a step back from immediate impressions which may be adverse and unhappy, so as to relativize them by placing them in a broader context.  A lot of this has to do with getting outside of our immediate self and recognizing how we fit into something bigger, society, nature or put less abstractly how we relate to those who are close to us; in short recognizing our worth to others.  This is the motivation identified by Adam Smith in his “Theory of moral sentiments”: we try to behave in a way that will cause others to think well of us.

Perhaps all that I am saying is that we all want to be loved and if we know we are loved then we can be happy.

However, that is not something that is owed to us once we have outlived the child’s entitlement to be loved by its parents.  It is something we are going to have to work for.  A deeper happiness, therefore, entails some effort on our part.

The fleeting happiness of the moment, that of the senses, is a gift if you can recognize it, but you probably cannot hold onto it: Aragon again on man “quand il veut serrer son bonheur, il le broie” (when he wants to hold tight his happiness he crushes it).  The deeper happiness, however, is not given, it has to be pursued and striven for through engagement with others.  As such it is always subject to setbacks: our children fall ill; those dear to us die; our friends betray our trust.  There are real reasons to be unhappy.  Only a fool is happy the whole time.  Yet also it is foolish to be unhappy for trivial reasons.

Happiness remains possible but only here and now.

Happiness is about being here.