A couple of friends asked me for my thoughts on this Vox article “America is obsessed with happiness — and it’s making us miserable” so I thought I’d blog about it.
It’s tricky to discern exactly what the author is arguing for (she makes several points), but I take the main point as claiming “The pursuit of happiness is self-defeating“.
This is often called ‘paradox of happiness‘ – if you seek it, you won’t get it – and it comes up quite a lot in discussions about happiness. However, it’s hard to make the claim both interesting and true. Here’s why.
It’s clearly self-defeating to try and make yourself happy at every moment, but it’s not clear anyone has seriously suggested it. This seems like a straw man.
However, it seems obvious we need to think about our happiness sometimes. If I’m deciding which job to take from a range of options or, say, whether to set myself on fire, I’m considering options on the basis of their expected happiness. But here I’m confident I could make a good choice. I’ll put down the matches.
The author also claims “happiness should be serendipitous, the byproduct of a life well lived“. This sounds wise. Let’s say I take it on board and instead aim ‘off-center’ (whatever this means) at happiness, rather than trying to become happier directly. But my ultimate goal is still happiness. If I do become happier, this advice is false. If the advice is true, and effort to become happier fails, then it’s not advice you can follow anyway.
Two things particularly annoy me about these sort of anti-happiness arguments:
1. They don’t suggest an alternative goal to happiness. They’re complaining about the means to reach a goal, not the goal itself. I often feel it’s something people say to show they’re smarter than other people; they haven’t been fooled like the rest of us.
2. My main irritation is that they take no account of *how happiness is pursued*. Sure, if you’re seeking happiness really individualistically by trying to beat other people and achieve money, success and status, it’s no surprise you won’t find it.
But that’s no the only option. Instead, you could aim to spend your time doing things you like, with people you like, whilst trying to create a world you’d like to live in. And you could teach yourself how to think differently: gratefully, mindfully, Stoically. In fact, there’s evidence this second opton works.
Is the pursuit of happiness self-defeating? Sure, if you pursue happiness in stupid ways. But that’s not an argument against either happiness or its pursuit.
