Happiness
"Happiness is like an orgasm: if you think about it too much, it goes away."
- Tim Minchin
Overview
Happiness names at least two different things, and arguments about it usually fail to say which. One is a feeling: pleasure, contentment, the mood of a good afternoon. The other is a condition: a life that is going well, which the Greeks called eudaimonia and which may contain a good deal of unhappiness in the first sense. Hedonism says the first is all that matters; most people, when asked, say they want the second even at some cost to the first.
Notes
- Ideally, and mostly in practice, happiness is the default state. Something usually has to happen for you to be unhappy; if nothing happens, you are probably fine. This is the opposite of the self-help model, in which happiness is a distant goal to be achieved by effort, and I think the self-help model is one of the things that makes people unhappy.
- The Happy Pill and the Experience Machine challenge the intuition that happiness is what we all want, and most people refuse the pill. I take that as evidence that we want our happiness to be about something, which is a point against hedonism and not against happiness.
- The religious claim that there is no lasting happiness without God is testable and false: the least religious countries are reliably among the happiest. What religion does provide is community and routine, which are the actual ingredients, and which can be had elsewhere. See The human need for religion and Meditation and Mindfulness.
- Diminishing marginal utility applies. Beyond a modest income, more money buys very little more happiness, which is part of the case in Wealth and Luck for limiting how far it can compound.
- Minchin's point is the practical one. Happiness is a by-product of attention directed elsewhere; the person watching their own happiness gauge is the person least likely to see it move.