On Happiness

I have once again been inspired by Dorothy; on this occasion, by her recent post on happiness. For various reasons I’ve been thinking a lot lately about what happiness might look like, what it might consist of, and I’m beginning to wonder whether it isn’t a highly personalized thing. That’s to say, I think we all can agree on what happiness feels like, but its recipe would be a matter of individual taste. I do think happiness is influenced by the society and the times that we live in. Just consider the French Romanticism that underlies George Sand’s declaration that ‘There is only one happiness in life, to love and be loved.’ Or the way that Ludwig Wittgenstein’s comment ‘I don’t know why we are here, but I’m pretty sure it isn’t in order to enjoy ourselves’ betrays his adherence to the German work ethic. Or the Dalai Lama’s teaching that ‘When we feel love and kindness towards others, it not only makes others feel loved and cared for, but it helps us also to develop inner happiness and peace.’ Now I agree with these words and admire the sentiment behind them, but I’m not sure sustainable happiness is possible on these terms in the grasping, self-oriented contemporary societies of the West. In our cultural history, people who give endlessly with no expectation of recompense are called saints.

I do think, also, that our relationship to happiness is dependent upon age. The younger you are, it seems to me, the much better you are at being straightforwardly happy. When I was young, happiness was a very easy state of being; it’s epitomized in my mind by the start of the summer holidays, the ancient sun lounger on the patio, and a stack of books. There’s no real reason why it should be so different nowadays, but it is. I can still read books in the sunshine, but only against the background white noise of financial and parental responsibility, the necessity of providing meals, the nag of chores and tasks and projects to be completed. Once you become a parent, happiness becomes so very complex, as it merges imperceptibly with the happiness of one’s children, until there is no simple, central sense of self to please. Happiness can look like a rather frivolous, displaced thing, like someone wearing a party hat to the office. Or like a lovely, sparkly tiara, which is terribly attractive, but you’re not entirely sure how much actual use you’ll get out of it. And that’s a shame, because happiness ought to be more valuable, more worthwhile, that that.

It strikes me that if it is harder to be happy as we get older, it’s because we become increasingly aware of the obstacles to that happiness, the lack of fit between our wants and the options available to us in the world. Adam Phillips, always the man I turn to for brilliant insight into the business of living, writes the following:

‘All the new thinking, like all the old thinking, agrees that there is something catastrophic about being a person. The catastrophe is located in various places: in our being born at all, in our being condemned to death; in our vulnerability as organisms, or in our cruel injustices as political animals; in the scarcity of our natural resources, or in our greedy depredation of them; in our Fall, or in our hubris. But all these catastrophes, one way or another, are linked to our appetites, as creatures who want, and who are driven by, what is at once necessary and missing from our lives. Our wants may be ‘constructed’ – given form by the language available in our culture – but that we want is not in doubt. It is whether our wanting has catastrophe built into it – whether our wanting is such that ruinous frustration or ruinous aggression is inevitable… that is now the question.’

So Phillips locates the hardship of living in the mismatch between appetite and resource, between our wants and desires and what’s on offer to satisfy them, between inner world and external reality. Most of the formulas for happiness focus on one or other side of the equation, proposing that our exclusive attention will save the day: find someone to love and give them all your love (turn to the external world and attempt to appease it), find work you love and devote yourself to it (turn to the inner world and try to feed it some satisfaction and recognition). Celebrate the self, or deny the self, find oneself acknowledged in the world, or lose oneself in the world; those seem to be the most straightforward options. I suppose my suspicion of happiness arises from the fact that we tend to think of happiness as showing us the correct route to follow in life; but happiness is a flibbertigibbet feeling, as attendant on things that are bad for us, as on the things that are good. I think we would like to feel that happiness comes out of virtue, out of a textbook life well lived, free from conflict and pain and humiliation. But happiness doesn’t come out of good self-management, not necessarily. I always think the phrase ‘a happy drunk’ is a telling one, for it reveals the essence of happiness to me: we can be happy on self-abuse as much as on self-development, and we don’t know what that happiness might turn into, any more than we know how long it will last. I think happiness is a random gift we’re given occasionally in this crazy, arbitrary life, a little existential leeway designed to keep us going, but it doesn’t come with the moral high ground, or with any kind of meaningful significance, any more than a fall of crisp, white snow, or the taste of chocolate cake.

I don’t mean to denigrate happiness by saying this; it is as beautiful and enlivening in and of itself as a cut diamond or a smile from a handsome stranger. But I suppose I’m somewhere between Mark Twain who said ‘Sanity and happiness are an impossible combination’ and Le Rochefoucauld who said ‘He who lives without folly is not as wise as he thinks.’ If I had to choose (and we have to hope that this would be unlikely), between the things that make me happy and the things that keep me sane, I’d take sanity every time, but it’s possible Twain is a little harsh here. Happiness might visit sanity in the same way that it might alight onto any other state of mind (surely the mad and the bad are sometimes happy, too). As a goal to pursue, sanity – for me a kind of ironic, provisional peace of mind – is the one that I would rather value as a sustainable state of being and an indexical marker of a satsifying, meaningful life, but that little bit of madness, the little bit of folly, is part of the private joy of being human and perhaps a necessary awayday from the business of being wise and good.