“Those only are happy (I thought) who have their minds fixed on some object other than their own happiness; on the happiness of others, on the improvement of mankind, even on some art or pursuit, followed not as a means, but as itself an ideal end. Aiming thus at something else, they find happiness by the way.”
—JOHN STUART MILL, Autobiography, 1873
Having lost touch with the kind of grand story that once quenched our ancestors’ thirst for meaning, we’ve psychologized and reduced human existence to a simple model of avoiding pain and seeking pleasure. Happiness has filled the space previously occupied by transcendental values as the one purpose of life worth striving for. Accordingly, happiness has become one of the most celebrated life goals in modern Western culture. It’s also big business: while just fifty books were published on the topic in 2000, eight years later that number grew to nearly four thousand.22 Today, fancy corporations hire chief happiness officers to help ensure employee well-being, and products from soft drinks to perfumes are marketed by a promise of bottled happiness.
Even governments are increasingly paying attention. The World Happiness Report, which ranks some 156 countries by how happy their citizens perceive themselves to be, was first released in 2012 and has become a highly anticipated annual event ever since. Since the 1970s the tiny Himalayan kingdom of Bhutan has maintained that the goal of their government is to advance Gross National Happiness not the Gross Domestic Product. Everywhere you look, magazine articles, books, songs, advertising and marketing campaigns, and academic research are dedicated to the subject. It’s safe to say that today’s egalitarian feel-good-now conception of happiness has become an obsession, the pursuit of which is touted as not only an individual right, but as an individual responsibility.
Derived from the medieval English term hap, meaning “luck” or “chance,” happiness was originally more about good fortune and things turning out well than an inner state of well-being.23 From Italian to Swedish, the vast majority of the European words for “happy” originally meant “lucky,” including in Finnish, where the word for happiness, onnellisuus, stems from the same word as onnekkuus, which means “being lucky.” The Germans gifted Glück to the world, which to this day means both “happiness” and “chance.” In the context of these original definitions, happiness was understood as something more like happenstance in that you couldn’t control it; it rested in the hands of the gods or with fate or, as the monk in Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales says, with Fortune: “And thus does Fortune’s wheel turn treacherously / And out of happiness bring men to sorrow.”24 Fortune, with a capital F, was the work of God’s hand, an inexplicable force wholly independent of man’s actions and emotional state. This focus on external circumstances reflected a culture where people were much less interested in their inner feelings than ours is today.25
During the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries the notion of happiness started to slowly evolve from being about external prosperity to an internal feeling or state of being.26 When Thomas Jefferson drafted the famous passage in the Declaration of Independence about “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness,” what he meant by happiness likely still had echoes of prosperity. Since then happiness has more or less come to refer to a positive inner feeling or a tendency to experience one’s life in positive terms.
Accompanying this new definition was another key breakthrough: we came up with the idea that people ought to be happy, that happiness was something worth pursuing in life.27 At first, happiness was considered the goal of society, as codified for example by the United States Declaration of Independence. But especially since the 1960s, Western societies have increasingly perceived happiness as being an individual goal and responsibility. Accordingly, being happy has become a cultural norm and a self-evident aim of life.28 We want to be happy because our culture tells us that we should be happy. We’ve acquired a morality where a person’s goodness is measured by how good that person feels. Happiness has become the holy cow of our age, an ideal we all ought to strive for.
But here’s the thing: happiness is just a feeling.29 It’s an abundance of positive emotions or a general sense of satisfaction with one’s life conditions and experiences. And while it’s nice to have more pleasant life experiences than unpleasant ones, happiness on its own won’t provide a lasting sense of meaning nor is it a way to avoid existential malaise.
In many parts of the world, happiness isn’t put on a pedestal. I once had a long discussion about the topic with a Chinese professor of psychology who explained to me that for his parents’ generation, being personally happy wasn’t a thing. Quite the opposite: being personally unhappy was seen as a badge of honor. It showed the sacrifices one had made for one’s family or for the nation. And these sacrifices were perceived as carrying much more value than the fleeting feeling of happiness. Echoing this, a research study from 2004 asked both US and Chinese undergraduate students to write short essays in response to the prompt, “What is happiness?”30 Many American students emphasized the importance of happiness as a supreme goal in life while, conversely, such strong statements of the value of happiness and its pursuit were totally absent from the Chinese students’ writings. So the first thing to note about happiness is that it’s not a self-evident goal, and its importance varies from culture to culture.
Second, having happiness as a life goal can easily be counterproductive and may diminish the happiness that you already have. For his book The Geography of Bliss, Eric Weiner interviewed a woman named Cynthia who, wanting to settle down, took out a map and decided to calculate where she would be happiest.31 She wanted to live somewhere with a rich cultural scene, decent food options, and in proximity to nature, preferably mountains. She ended up choosing Asheville, North Carolina, a small but cultural city surrounded by mountains and nature. But when Weiner asked Cynthia if she considered Asheville her home, she hesitated. Asheville was close to meeting all her various criteria but still not optimal. She was still searching. Though she had lived in Asheville for three years, she thought of it as “home for now.” Weiner observes how that’s “the problem with hedonic floaters like Cynthia and with many of us Americans and our perpetual pursuit of happiness. We may be fairly happy now, but there’s always tomorrow and the prospect of a happier place, a happier life. So all options are left on the table. We never fully commit.” He continues, writing, “That is, I think, a dangerous thing. We can’t love a place, or a person, if we always have one foot out the door.”32
In their eagerness to derive the maximum happiness out of every life circumstance, the people Weiner interviewed were unable to commit to anything, having lost their ability to enjoy life as it is. And this is by no means the only example of how the pursuit of happiness can be counterproductive. Not only does psychological research demonstrate that people who are most committed to maximizing their own happiness are the ones who are least able to enjoy life,33 but also that an exclusive focus on one’s personal happiness can also damage one’s social relationships, which often are the true source of happiness.34 Finally, the predominant cultural norm that everyone must be happy in fact only makes it harder for us to tolerate life’s inevitable, unhappy moments.35 Feeling unhappy thus becomes a double burden: not only do you feel unhappy, but you also feel guilty for having failed to live up to the cultural norm according to which you ought to be happy all the time.
What if happiness isn’t the kind of central life goal we think it is? We value many things—love, friendship, accomplishments, and the ability to express ourselves—not because they bring positive feelings, but because they enrich our lives as such, and we find them worthy by their own accord.36 The goodness of friendship, for example, can’t be reduced to the amount of positive emotions extracted from that friendship. The value of true friendship is especially visible during life’s difficult moments when your friend, for example, is seriously ill or going through a crisis and needs support. We value our friends in the bad times, too, knowing that our support is mutually life-enriching even when it isn’t all fun and games. Humans are complex; we care about so much more in life than the mere presence or absence of positive feelings.37 Happiness is a nice experience to have, but making it into a sole life goal is an insult to the richness of what humans actually value in life.
That said, it’s difficult to let go of happiness as a goal because our culture is full of messages that remind us that we ought to be happy. Turn on the television—especially during commercials—and there’s an entire industry of smiling, healthy, beautiful people selling happiness as a packaged good. Don’t be fooled by these false prophets. Don’t sacrifice the good things in life in the vain hope of becoming happier. Happiness is just a feeling. That’s it. A side product of attaining something valuable rather than the true value itself. Accordingly, the pursuit of personal happiness is a poor answer to the question of what could make our lives truly valuable and meaningful.
HAPPINESS AND HEAVY METAL: IT’S COMPLICATED
“I do want to point out that Finland has perhaps the most heavy metal bands in the world per capita, and also ranks high on good governance. I don’t know if there’s any correlation there.”
—PRESIDENT BARACK OBAMA, 2016 Nordic Summit
In both 2018 and 2019, the World Happiness Report ranked Finland as the world’s happiest country.38 Whenever overall life satisfaction is measured across the world, Finland, and the other Nordic countries of Sweden, Norway, Denmark, and Iceland, all rank in the top ten, boasting also blue ribbon marks for their relative stability, safety, and freedom. With temperatures that regularly dip below freezing and some towns cloaked in a perpetual state of darkness throughout the long winter, what do the Finns have to be so happy about? Turns out: a lot of heavy metal music.
Heavy metal gets a bad rap but not in Finland. If pop music denotes summers of love, heavy metal is its dark cousin. A country known for its dark and cold winter, Finland has more heavy metal bands per capita than anywhere else on Earth—about sixty-three per one hundred thousand people.39 In Finland, heavy metal is king, dominating mainstream radio stations and local karaoke bars alike. As one of Finland’s bestselling artists of all time, the band Children of Bodom is the king of kings, with sold-out shows everywhere from Helsinki to Rio de Janeiro. Interestingly, being home to a massive number of happy metalheads presents its own set of contradictions that directly relate to data on Finnish happiness and depression.
Based on the Gallup World Poll surveys, the 2019 World Happiness Report asked people in 156 countries to “value their lives today on a 0 to 10 scale, with the worst possible life as a 0 and the best possible life as a 10.”40 This is the question to which Finns provide on average the highest scores in the world. Finland’s position is actually no surprise at all, because compared to other countries, Finland excels in advancing and promoting the kind of societal factors that we know from research are important for people’s sense of life satisfaction: freedom from daily struggle to get bread on the table; extensive social services; freedom from oppression; and trust in government.41
However, there’s more to happiness than life satisfaction. Some see that it is more about positive emotions. But when you examine how much positive emotion people experience, the table flips, and suddenly countries like Paraguay, Guatemala, and Costa Rica are the happiest places on Earth.42 Finland falls far from the top, which isn’t surprising given the Finns’ famous reputation as modest, humble people who don’t easily display their emotions. There’s an old joke that a Finnish introvert looks at his shoes when he talks to you and a Finnish extrovert looks at your shoes.
Things get even more complicated when we look at the prevalence of depression in different countries. In some comparisons of the per capita prevalence of unipolar depressive disorders, countries like the US and Finland are found close to the top.43 Although there are significant shortcomings in international comparisons of depression and other research shows that Finland’s depression rates are closer to the European average,44 what is clear is that Finland is far from the top of the world in preventing depression. Paradoxically then, the same country can be ranked high on both life satisfaction and depression.
What this all boils down to is that there is no one thing called happiness. People’s emotional lives are complex. Life satisfaction is different from positive emotions, which is different from the absence of negative emotions and depression. If happiness is the prevalence of positive emotions (let alone the displaying of them), Finland is not the happiest country. If happiness is the absence of depression, Finland is not the happiest country. But if happiness is about a general satisfaction with one’s life conditions, then Finland, along with other Nordic countries, might very well be the happiest place on Earth.
Furthermore, it would be careless to dismiss the importance of heavy metal music on the Finns’ state of well-being. For a country that prides itself on the humble nature of its inhabitants, heavy metal music flies in the face of this characteristic reserve and offers cathartic release. It also offers a channel to express negative feelings, to scream them out rather than trying to suppress them. Actually, that might be more important than we often realize. For one’s emotional well-being, it is good to be able to experience a variety of different emotions. Suppressing so-called negative emotions—like the cathartic anger present in many heavy metal songs—is rarely a good idea and often paradoxically leads to lower well-being.45 A culture repressing and not tolerating expressions of negative emotions is unhealthy and can have a detrimental effect on people’s well-being. Accordingly, having a way of expressing the full range of one’s emotions is important. And heavy metal might be a great way to scream them out. The question is: If a metalhead screams in a snow-covered forest, will anyone hear him? Whether heard or not, he’s probably in better touch with himself and his emotions than his uptight cousin constantly sporting an enforced smile.
IT’S NOT ABOUT THE MONEY
People often make the mistake of equating happiness with financial success. This kind of thinking only services the advertising agencies and corporations that sell the very products you’re convinced are the key to personal happiness. Research shows that it’s only at the lower end of the income scale that money makes a significant impact in feelings of happiness. People who can’t pay their rent or groceries or care for their most basic needs report significantly less well-being than those who can. In these cases, extra income can make a big difference. Once your basic needs are attended to, however, wealth has an increasingly small direct effect on happiness.46 Several studies have shown that after a certain point on the income ladder, it helps only marginally or not at all, with one recent study even finding that after a certain point, in fact, people’s positive emotions and life satisfaction start to decrease.47
In North America, this occurs at ninety-five thousand dollars for life satisfaction and at sixty thousand dollars for positive emotions. In Western Europe, the turning point is at one hundred thousand dollars/fifty thousand dollars while in Eastern Europe, it’s as low as forty-five thousand dollars for life satisfaction and thirty-five thousand dollars for positive emotions. Furthermore, although many industrialized nations have made significant financial gains, this hasn’t translated to any more happiness, with American social psychologist Jonathan Haidt summarizing the results, writing, “As the level of wealth has doubled or tripled in the last fifty years in many industrialized nations, the levels of happiness and satisfaction with life that people report have not changed, and depression has actually become more common.”48 Once people adapt to a new baseline of wealth, their initial happiness dissipates; the new creature comforts become the norm and, over time, are taken for granted at least until the next latest and greatest tech device or luxury item is released on the market, and everyone swivels their attention toward its pursuit.
On a surface level, most of us can probably reject consumerism and materialism as a life goal. When asked, we usually report something grander as a motivating source. But beneath the surface, it’s often another story. Although we might be reluctant to admit it, many of us are addicted to the hedonic treadmill where the promise of happiness is always a bit out of reach. As Chuck Palahniuk writes in Fight Club, “You have a class of young strong men and women, and they want to give their lives to something. Advertising has these people chasing cars and clothes they don’t need. Generations have been working in jobs they hate, just so they can buy what they don’t really need.”49
The advertising industry is a two billion-dollar 50 propaganda machine that has but one goal: to make your current life feel inadequate. To make you feel that what you have now isn’t enough. Consumerism stops the moment you become satisfied with your life, when you’re able to say, “I don’t need anything. I already have everything that I want.” This is the kind of state that many religious doctrines from Christianity to Buddhism try to guide us toward. But in this secular age, the belief is that it is better to spend billions of dollars on messages that prevent anyone from reaching that state.
Today more than ever before, we’re presented with so many different choices of competing products it’s tempting to get caught up in the happiness trap. We prize the ideas of freedom and choice even when we know that too much of a good thing can lead to harm or to addictive behavior. It’s an irony of modern life that the more choices there are, the less likely we feel confident in our choice. If you can avoid making a choice, you are more likely to do so. Psychologist Barry Schwartz refers to this idiosyncrasy as the “paradox of choice”: we value choice and crave it despite the fact that too many options and choices can undermine our sense of happiness.51 Our ancestors didn’t contend with this dilemma to the extent that we do now. Starving was much more common than having too many enticing food options to choose from. The best way to manage the bombardment of daily choices is to become what Schwartz, following Nobel Prize–winning economist Herbert Simon, calls a satisfier, that is, evaluate your choices, pick one that’s satisfactory or “good enough,” and move on with your life.52 Stop trying to maximize every detail of every purchase or decision—that just leads to more stress, regret, and dissatisfaction.53 You’ve got better things to do with your time, energy, and resources. But to fight the powerful influence that the constant bombardment of advertising has on your life ideals, you need an even more powerful inner compass. You need to have some self-chosen values and life goals that are so strong and salient that you can retain your integrity even in an advertisement-filled society. For that, having a good grasp of what makes your life meaningful can be of significant help; behind all the surface glitter, and the presence or absence of the latest expensive gimmicks, your life probably already contains much of what can make it meaningful.