| If you type “how to be happy” into Google, you receive several million hits. That is a great deal of advice, and can be taken as a comment on our times: for all that life in the West is awash with wealth and choice — much more so than in previous periods of history — happiness has not automatically followed.
It could be argued that today felicity is in decline. In his latest book, The Selfish Capitalist: The origins of affluenza (Vermilion, 2008), the psychologist Oliver James calculates that in the English-speaking world you are now twice as likely to suffer from mental illness as you were 30 years ago.
There are many hypotheses about the causes of this endemic discontent. One is called the Easterlin paradox, after the economist who first described it. The relationship between money and happiness obeys a law of diminishing returns, it says. Once your wealth exceeds a minimum threshold — enough to sustain your life in comfort — cash buys no more contentment, although people carry on pursuing it regardless.
Another theory reaches back to the Enlightenment philosopher Rousseau. He argued that the material gains of the modern world exact a great toll on human individuals because progress is powered by the cultivation of a relentless sense of competition among citizens. Hence, another of the characteristics of our age is a desire to keep up with the Joneses.
That there abounds so much advice on trying to be happy is not the only arresting thing about it. The dubious quality of what is on offer is striking, too. Much of it sounds just trite: work less, say thank you, keep fit, make friends. If it were so obvious, then we would surely do these things, find contentment, and the happiness industry would wrap up — which clearly it has not.
Despite this, the debate about well-being that the current interest in happiness has provoked can broadly be welcomed. In the form of the more rigorous “science of happiness”, inspired by the academic discipline of positive psychology, it has put the matter of the good life on the map like nothing else in recent years — certainly more successfully than any faith-based initiative.
But — and it is a crucial “but” — a fundamental issue has yet to be nailed: just what is happiness? Confusion here is, I suspect, the reason for the excessive quantity of the advice and its often doubtful quality.
So consider the thoughts of one of the great philosophers of happiness, John Stuart Mill. He wrote an autobiography, which includes profound reflections on happiness. After a period of serious depression, he concluded: “Those only are happy (I thought) who have their minds fixed on some object other than their own happiness; on the happiness of others, on the improvement of mankind, even on some art or pursuit, followed not as a means, but as itself an ideal end. Aiming thus at something else, they find happiness by the way.”
Mill had realised two things. First, that happiness is a by-product of a life that is lived well. It cannot be gained by pursuing it directly. Seeking to do so is one error implicit in much of the happiness advice. Instead of focusing on your happiness, you should focus on how you are living your life.
For Mill, this meant doing things not because they might make you happy, but because they have meaning and purpose in their own right. Happiness may follow, though only by the way. Mill’s advice to us today might be to stop focusing on happiness altogether. Paradoxically, that could make us a great deal happier.
Second, Mill realised that happiness depends on not making yourself the centre of attention — another routine mistake in the current obsession. And his point is not the moralistic one, that we should be less selfish. It is more interesting than that. Mill is saying that for human beings, the good life requires a sense of transcendence — a desire for that which takes us beyond our personal concerns to something that we can give ourselves to.
Mill was a secular philosopher. That he none the less stressed the link between happiness and transcendence only emphases its centrality. In fact, Mill was reviving what the ancient Greek philosophers understood well. A sense of transcendence is implicit in their word for happiness, eudaimonia. It means “well-goddedness” or having “the good god within”.
Aristotle pointed explicitly highlighted the crucial part played by the transcendent in the pursuit of happiness. In his great book on happiness, The Nicomachean Ethics, he wrote: “We must not heed those who advise us to think as human beings since we are human and to think mortal things since we are mortal, but we must be like immortals insofar as possible, and do everything toward living in accordance with the best thing in us.”
The contemporary search for happiness could yet reveal something that believers might already suspect: it is the search for transcendence that is the determining issue for human well-being today.
Mark Vernon is the author of Wellbeing (Acumen), which is published this month. |
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