What value does happiness have for us?
Happiness is feted at the minute. Richard Layard’s Happiness: Lessons from a new science is a top seller and trendy in the newspaper book reviews (I haven’t read it mind). There is a new chair of positive psychology at Cambridge, whose remit is the study of happiness and the latest psychological furore is definitely the fuss surrounding Cognitive Behavioural Therapy and its importance for making everyone happier. Are we happy? It’s a question on everyone’s lips.
This seems like a legitimate question to ask, the greatest happiness for the greatest number, in spite of difficult questions concerning its measurement and the problems of quantity vs quality of happiness, is still an important principle in deciding how we treat one another and conduct our affairs. But what role should happiness be playing in our individual lives?
I ask this because I have an interesting relationship with happiness at the moment. I am trying to be as happy as I can in a situation which is objectively quite sad making. I am working a shit job and trying to find better but it isn’t going all that well. I am not sure what I want to do with my life and routinely change my plans, worrying about how best to get there and how I should spend my time. I miss my girlfriend and don’t see her nearly as much as I would like, I miss my family, and I feel isolated from time to time. In spite of all this, I find myself taking happiness in my freedom, my lack of responsibility, my time to read and the general sense that I am accumulating some mad and beautiful experiences and seeing the world in a way I wasn’t free to when I had the pressure of my degree. However, my happiness spells contentment. Do I want to be content? If I get content my ambition will drop and I face the possibility of getting stuck and not always having the driving force to move on. It could be argued that my awareness of this should be enough to galvanise me to action but it is easy to forget the fear that moves one.
More importantly, happiness decides how we live our lives. We do what makes us happy. Should we though? Surely there is a discrepancy between acting in a way that makes us happy and a way that makes the world in some way a better place. Maybe happiness is a red herring in the search for improving our existence. However, what other moral yardstick is there? I don’t know of any other way of deciding whether what I am doing is right. But then how can we account for anyone else’s happiness other than our own? After all, we don’t really know any other conscious exists and we certainly can’t be sure how to make others happy. What is more, some people argue that everything we do is selfish anyway, I find this argument compelling, even the most giving people do what they do because they take pleasure in it. Can you think of a selfless act? Unless you don’t believe in free will (in which case our actions can’t be said to have moral content anyway) then everything we do we do because we want to. So we all act to further our own happiness in the long or short term, what hope does greatest happiness for the greatest number have? Everyone’s search for happiness conflicts with everyone else’s, we know we can’t sustain the way we live in the west without polluting the planet and oppressing further millions of exploited workers. The only way I can see out of this is a change in what we decide makes us happy. As I have found in my own experience, this is surprisingly possible, even easy. If all we do is pursue our own happiness then we are only as good as the things we love and we have to align this with what we feel in some way to be good. If we value some notion of good then this needn’t be difficult. But, and here comes the crux, it still depends on us holding certain values in the first place, and where do they come from?
Happiness is feted at the minute. Richard Layard’s Happiness: Lessons from a new science is a top seller and trendy in the newspaper book reviews (I haven’t read it mind). There is a new chair of positive psychology at Cambridge, whose remit is the study of happiness and the latest psychological furore is definitely the fuss surrounding Cognitive Behavioural Therapy and its importance for making everyone happier. Are we happy? It’s a question on everyone’s lips.
This seems like a legitimate question to ask, the greatest happiness for the greatest number, in spite of difficult questions concerning its measurement and the problems of quantity vs quality of happiness, is still an important principle in deciding how we treat one another and conduct our affairs. But what role should happiness be playing in our individual lives?
I ask this because I have an interesting relationship with happiness at the moment. I am trying to be as happy as I can in a situation which is objectively quite sad making. I am working a shit job and trying to find better but it isn’t going all that well. I am not sure what I want to do with my life and routinely change my plans, worrying about how best to get there and how I should spend my time. I miss my girlfriend and don’t see her nearly as much as I would like, I miss my family, and I feel isolated from time to time. In spite of all this, I find myself taking happiness in my freedom, my lack of responsibility, my time to read and the general sense that I am accumulating some mad and beautiful experiences and seeing the world in a way I wasn’t free to when I had the pressure of my degree. However, my happiness spells contentment. Do I want to be content? If I get content my ambition will drop and I face the possibility of getting stuck and not always having the driving force to move on. It could be argued that my awareness of this should be enough to galvanise me to action but it is easy to forget the fear that moves one.
More importantly, happiness decides how we live our lives. We do what makes us happy. Should we though? Surely there is a discrepancy between acting in a way that makes us happy and a way that makes the world in some way a better place. Maybe happiness is a red herring in the search for improving our existence. However, what other moral yardstick is there? I don’t know of any other way of deciding whether what I am doing is right. But then how can we account for anyone else’s happiness other than our own? After all, we don’t really know any other conscious exists and we certainly can’t be sure how to make others happy. What is more, some people argue that everything we do is selfish anyway, I find this argument compelling, even the most giving people do what they do because they take pleasure in it. Can you think of a selfless act? Unless you don’t believe in free will (in which case our actions can’t be said to have moral content anyway) then everything we do we do because we want to. So we all act to further our own happiness in the long or short term, what hope does greatest happiness for the greatest number have? Everyone’s search for happiness conflicts with everyone else’s, we know we can’t sustain the way we live in the west without polluting the planet and oppressing further millions of exploited workers. The only way I can see out of this is a change in what we decide makes us happy. As I have found in my own experience, this is surprisingly possible, even easy. If all we do is pursue our own happiness then we are only as good as the things we love and we have to align this with what we feel in some way to be good. If we value some notion of good then this needn’t be difficult. But, and here comes the crux, it still depends on us holding certain values in the first place, and where do they come from?
posted by huwtube at 11:22 pm
1 Comments:
Setting aside the question of from where values arise for a moment, as I'm still thinking about it, I think that there are two principal stumbling blocks on the road to modifying the way in which we perceive happiness.
The first is a human one - or so we're led to believe - ambition. The desire to better oneself is often stated as the reason that we're the species that builds things bigger, faster, and stronger, and has consequently 'conquered' the world (although we'll see about that when the world formulates its reply). The argument arising from this I suppose is that it's our natural state to feel dissatisfied with what we have and to want more; only this will make us happy. Naturally, in a system with limited inputs, this means taking something off someone else. But if you believe the admittedly convincing stuff about the selfish gene and the absence of any genuinely altruistic act, then it's human nature to gratify oneself at the expense of others. If this is ingrained at a biological level, there isn't much hope for change.
The other option that seems persuasive - and difficult - is of course the society in which we live. A developed capitalist society such as that which exists in a significant proportion of the world (and certainly in that proportion which is significant) is based on the idea of consumption; permanent, unassailable happiness is, it seems to me, anathema to the system. If I'm happy with what I have why would I buy more stuff? Thus the whole basis of our society is to convince you that no, actually you're not happy at all, because you don't have this potato/that chair/a third home on the Algarve. Changing one's conception of happiness is thus a profoundly difficult struggle against the prevailing social mores of the society in which you live, particularly since as a social being you'll constantly be challenged, ridiculed or even ostracised by your peers and even your friends if you reject 'their' conception of what happiness is.
The options seem a bit bleak, all told...
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