Is happiness bullshit? University Lecturer & Project Philosopher of Headspace Hunters, Joe Quilter shares his insights into what actually is true happiness and one’s quest to find it…
Life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness” is a quote from the United States Declaration of Independence. In the declaration, pursuing happiness was considered an “inalienable right” and has become a common concept in the U.S. and across much of the Western world. Many claim “they just want to be happy” or to “live a happy life”. If there is one thing that is certain about emotions, they do not last. Of course, our amygdala (the part of the brain that houses the limbic system) will record emotions and their links to experiences, stored in our memories.
These memories can often be “triggered”, brought back to the fore by a smell, sound, sight or circumstance that takes us back to how such-and-such experience stored in our memory felt at the time. For example, we might have had one of the happiest days of our lives at the beach once, say 10 years ago with someone we love. In general, the feel of the sand, the smell of the salt water takes us back to that moment. So in this sense, the sense that we can recall emotion and dwell in it, even when the experience it is connected to is not happening at the time. This is a sense in which emotions stay with us.
However we also know emotions are fleeting. Perhaps this is why strong emotional experiences stick with us so deeply. If we felt as happy as we did that day at the beach all the time, that particular day would not stand out anymore, or be worth recalling. Of course, the same is true of other emotions, fear, betrayal, hurt, feelings of trust and love, of sorrow or elation. When the emotion overwhelms us it sears onto our memories and is recalled when triggered. We might cultivate a strong emotional memory, because we don’t want to forget it, or we haven’t done the work to heal from it.
In the day to day, however, we feel all sorts of things that typically don’t last, they are not overwhelming. We get a touch of road rage here, some laughter there, a moment of empathy or sadness, then a sense of satisfaction with life, all in the course of one day. But these relatively light-touch emotional experiences come and go, without too much memorability. So what does the pursuit of happiness desire? Big, overwhelmingly happy experiences so that by the end of our lives we can look back at an archive of consistent happy memories, or general light touch happy experiences across our day to day? Imagine if we said both.
A majority of our deeply happy memories coupled with generally happy experiences every day. Wouldn’t they blend together? Wouldn’t we end up unable to recognise happiness anymore because there is nothing to contrast it? It is clique to say “you need bad days to have the good ones” or “no joy without sorrow”. It’s all a bit pop-Taoism to weigh in with the finger wagging about needing to be miserable sometimes in order to be happy sometimes.
The truth is that emotions come and go, and those big overwhelming experiences are simply experiences we never expected and had no underlying preparation for. Once we see them for what they are, the power and the emotional component that memory has over us begins to shrink. Emotions are like leaves blowing in the wind, there is a sense of poetry in them, whether it’s war poetry or love poetry, the poetic essence of emotion is there in all of them. But there is also a sense of chaos, a randomness.
We don’t really know why we feel the way we do about what we undergo. An identical experience can feel radically different to people. Surely happiness is included in this general picture? Sometimes we feel really happy, sometimes a bit happy, but the wind keeps blowing and the leaves tumble and new emotions come and go in the short and long term of our lives… but we don’t really know why.
Given this, it is important that emotions don’t rule our behaviour, because if we never choose how to act and let our emotions direct us we’d have no agency in our own lives, we’d simply be subject to external circumstances conjuring internal reactions manifesting our behaviours. There’d be no real sense of self or even free will. All we’d have left is petitioning the gods to determine us good luck as we bounce around like a ball in the pinball machine of life. The truth is that we can choose our behaviours, despite how we feel. Forcing ourselves to act in certain ways often brings about emotions later on that validates that agency we in fact do possess over our own lives. For example, someone might offend us and we feel angry, even vengeful, but we choose to let it go. Rather than yell or throw a chair, and then, we might decide to go for a run or talk to a friend. By choosing not to let the rage dictate our behaviour we feel a sense of wellbeing from making a behavioural choice, rather than simply reacting in the moment.
Happiness lends itself to elation, exhilaration, joy and fun – these are similar feelings that exist in a cluster of happiness-like feelings. When I was younger, I felt exhilarated a lot, and consequently did heaps of dumb stuff. The adrenaline said “this is fun”, so I kept going and shortly thereafter was drunk as a skunk having a rather terrible time not to mention the following day. Over-eagerness, recklessness, foolhardiness and a range of other states are “my excitement has gotten the better of me” like behaviours, all linked to initially happy sensations. When the emotion chooses for us, we often regret it later.
So what then is true happiness? How can we experience our lives so that we are happy with them? In a unit I taught at university a while ago, we discussed Nelson Mandela, and his claim that even in a South African prison during apartheid he felt “free”. It always made me think of others who have made similar claims.
One of my favourite philosophers Emmanuel Levinas wrote a book Existence and Existants while in a concentration camp during World War II. A book I read to be deeply ethical in nature. Imagine, writing a book on ethics — on the fundamentals of why we should be good to one another, while in a concentration camp. Victor Frankel similarly, in Man’s Search For Meaning recalled his experience while in a concentration camp, and from his experience developed his theory of “tragic optimism”. Optimism, while in a concentration camp. Amazing. How can someone feel free while in prison, or optimistic, even in the slightest, while held in a concentration camp.
If I’m honest, my sense is that those big overwhelming emotions and those smaller but meaningful day to day ones will always be leaves tumbling around in the wind, including happiness. Pursuing leaves as they are gust into the distance seems stupid. But what did Mandela, Levinas and Frankel know that it seems so many do not? Is there a space within us that knows a deeper truth, that might again, lend itself to happiness?
I suspect that space in our deepest innermost beings is one of gratitude, for absolutely anything available, the smallest, least noticeable things but of which are always actually there. And of peace. A peace that comes about from an ability to choose how we respond to our circumstances, to not be controlled by how we feel at any given time or in times past. Combined, this gratitude and peace equate to what I would describe as contentment. A resource we can draw from whenever we choose to.
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