CHAPTER 1

Happiness and the Meaning of Life

The good life was a central concern to the ancient Greeks, and the question of what kind of life was best led them to considerations of virtue, freedom, pleasure, and happiness. In medieval philosophy, these concerns shifted to considerations of sin and salvation. In modern philosophy—and for philosophers the “modern” period starts in the 1600s, with René Descartes often used as a dividing line—the question becomes not “How should one live?” but “How should one act?” and the question of the good life becomes secondary to questions of moral behavior and ethical choices. Still later, especially along with the rise of religious skepticism, agnosticism, and atheism, the question of the meaning of life became pressing.

While that’s the shape of the general trend, these questions are obviously connected, and philosophers (and others) have had all of these concerns in all of these different periods. We won’t go through them in any historical order. As you’ll see, though, once we start pulling on a particular thread, the fabric will bunch up, showing how intertwined these concerns and questions are.

The Epicurean’s Wealth

If you had ten times your wealth and ten times your income, what would you do that you can’t do now?

What’s a version of that activity that you could do right now?

Is it ten times less meaningful, important, or enjoyable than the activity you would do with more money? Why or why not?

The Philosophy

What do we want money for? Maybe you wrote that you want to travel to marvelous places, climb Mount Everest, or help the poor. But can you achieve similar goals and have similar experiences with the resources available to you right now?

An ancient Greek philosopher, Epicurus (341–270 B.C.E.), held that the good life and happiness were found by pursuing pleasure and avoiding pain. Sounds like common sense—but Epicurus would have told us that we’re doing it all wrong.

The key to a pleasurable existence, according to Epicurus, is to have a peaceful and simple life, with friends. When we think of hedonism—living life for nothing but pleasure—we tend to think of a much more complicated kind of life. Rare and hard-to-obtain pleasures may be great, but think of everything you have to sacrifice to get them! With great wealth there are opportunities to enjoy great luxury, or to enjoy being a great benefactor, but we soon develop expensive tastes. Once our happiness is bound up in becoming and remaining wealthy, fear and uncertainty begin to dominate our lives. Life becomes more and more about securing the resources that we’ve made our happiness depend on, and less about doing things that actually make us happy.

To be happy and peaceful, Epicurus advocated living simply, and not getting too involved in wealth, politics, or even physical desires like those for sex or food. As often happens, his doctrine has become twisted over time, and today “Epicurean” refers to a taste for very sophisticated and refined foods. For a true sense of Epicurus’s view of the good life, cook a simple thick soup of water, lentils, turnips, and some salt. Eat it with crusty bread and butter in the company of a friend, and then go for a walk together. Try it, and then ask yourself what else you’ve made harder than it needs to be.

Aristotle’s Altruism

Was there a time recently when you went out of your way to do something nice for someone else? What did you do?

Were you glad you did? Why or why not?

What about a time when you put your own interests ahead of others—was it worth it? What made it so—or if it wasn’t, why not?

The Philosophy

Common sense would tell you that doing something for yourself should make you happy. It seems like a no-brainer. But it’s more complicated than it might seem.

Happiness is a confusing, fleeting thing. The ancient Greek philosopher Aristotle (384–322 B.C.E.) was a pupil of Plato (429–347 B.C.E.), who eventually broke from the ideas of his mentor. He held that happiness was a matter of realizing human potential. When we do the right thing, we are following higher, distinctively human parts of ourselves, like reason, character, and virtue. When we act out of self-interest, we follow lower parts of ourselves that we have in common with other living things: pride, anger, desire, and simple hunger. According to Aristotle, someone who is purely self-interested can never be happy; only through virtuous action can we be happy.

That’s why when we do something out of self-interest, we often feel guilty or ashamed, and when we act altruistically and purely out of a concern for others, we feel good about ourselves. Happiness can only be reached indirectly; you end up happiest when you just try to do the right thing, and when you try to make yourself happy, you often enough end up feeling worse.

Aristotle was a harsh realist, though. Goods of fortune, like wealth and health, can’t make us happy, but their absence can prevent us from becoming happy, or even virtuous. How can you cultivate care and generosity when you have no resources? How can you learn temperance and how to moderate your desires, if you are always living paycheck to paycheck? Putting self-interest first might be worth it if you’re struggling just to get by. The problem is that once we start out this way, we develop selfish habits; we end up with goods of fortune, but little virtue.

Here Comes Honey Boo Boo and John Stuart Mill

What’s one of your guilty pleasures—a “bad” television program, secret romance novel habit, or something similar?

If you feel guilty about it, why do you keep doing it?

On the other hand, if it’s something you enjoy, and it’s not immoral, why do you feel guilty about it to begin with?

Everyone has guilty pleasures. What if we made them central to our lives instead of hiding them away? It’s hard to imagine. What would change? Would our world be a better place, or a worse one?

The Philosophy

John Stuart Mill (1806–1873), a British utilitarian and political philosopher, thought that the right action was always the one that provided the greatest good for the greatest number. But how do you figure out what is good for someone—or for anyone?

Mill said, first, that the only proof that something is worth valuing is that people, in fact, value it. By giving up on the idea that we should adopt some single conception of “the good life,” he was able to talk about how we ought to help as many people to be happy as we can, but without telling them how to be happy! But what about gluttons, scoundrels, and cretins? Can their “happiness” really be considered equal to the happiness of a decent person of refined taste who cares for others?

To fix the problem, Mill added a criterion to what counts as part of happiness. Not everyone is able to appreciate a quiet evening spent with a good book, but those who can tend to prefer it to watching trashy TV. That means that watching trashy TV is actually a lesser happiness, even though there may be many who can’t really appreciate a good book, and who think that trashy TV makes them happy.

As Mill put it in Utilitarianism: “It is better to be a human being dissatisfied than a pig satisfied; better to be Socrates dissatisfied than a fool satisfied. And if the fool, or the pig, are of a different opinion, it is because they only know their own side of the question. The other party to the comparison knows both sides.”

The Stoic’s Freedom

We usually regard freedom and self-determination to be central to a good life. When have you sacrificed something else in your life—perhaps in your work life, love life, or just your way of life—to ensure that you are able to make your own choices and not be dependent on others?

Was this sacrifice worth it? Why?

If not, why not? If so, how much further would you go?

The Philosophy

On the previous page, you were asked to look at what your personal freedom meant to you, and what comforts or happiness you’d give up to keep it. Most people would probably make sacrifices to be independent, to a certain extent. But there are certain things that just aren’t worth it, right?

Not according to Stoicism, a philosophy very popular in ancient Rome. It taught that the key to a good life was to identify what was up to us, and what was not, and to care only about those things that were up to us. Epictetus (55–135), a Stoic philosopher and freed slave, outlined the meaning and implications of this simple idea in his Enchiridion (Handbook), which was a kind of ancient self-help book.

To remain free and in control of our own happiness, we must care only about things that are up to us. “So, you want to compete in the Olympic games?” Epictetus asks. ‘If you say you wish to train hard, push yourself constantly, twist your ankle, eat sand, and, in the end, lose—then you may compete and be free and in control! But if you want to win, you are a fool, for this is not up to you, and this desire puts others in control of whether you are able to reach your goals and be happy.’

Your body also isn’t up to you; others can make choices about it. There’s a story that when Epictetus was still a slave, his master, enraged about some perceived wrong, broke Epictetus’s leg. Epictetus did not resist: He knew what happened to his body was not up to him and that caring about it would only deliver control of his life into the hands of others. By deciding not to care for his physical welfare, Epictetus remained entirely free and in control even as he was in chains.

Do you have what it takes to be free? Is it worth it?

The Nietzschean Marathon

Is happiness really what you’re aiming for in life? Most of us would say yes, and yet every day we make decisions that actually make our lives harder in the day-to-day reality of living, for example, training for a marathon, or taking the hardest classes in school.

Make a short list of the things you’ve chosen to do in life and to care about that have increased the suffering, struggle, and trials in your life.

For what reason or reasons did you make these choices?

The Philosophy

Did you say “Because I will be happier in the end, having gone through these struggles”? If that’s the case, why don’t you decide to eat an entire airplane? Now that’s really difficult, so it should make you really happy, right?

Go back and look at those questions again. I’ll wait here.

Okay, you’re back. Have you got another answer, or several of them? The point here is that while today we have fallen into the habit of acting like everything we do is in the service of happiness, we actually care about plenty of other things as well.

In his book Thus Spake Zarathustra, German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche (1844–1900) gives us a vision of the tragic dissipation of humanity: The Last Man. The Last Man seeks only happiness, and is free from the toil and turmoil of questioning and striving and seeking. But it is not too late, Nietzsche tells us through his character Zarathustra: We still have enough chaos within us to give birth to a dancing star!

Every so often, a new study comes out on parenting and happiness, and most often these studies find that having kids makes us feel less self-satisfaction and less happiness on a day-to-day basis. When confronted with this empirical data, parents usually insist, “It’ll be worth it!” and “I’ll be happier in the end!” Why not just recognize that happiness isn’t the only reason we do things, and certainly isn’t the only reason things are worth doing? How empty and worthless the world would be if our own private enjoyment were the only reason to get up in the morning!

Sisyphus’s Toil

What goals do you have in life? Think about family, career, hobbies, and personal passions.

What will they amount to when you’re done? What difference will they have made?

What difference will they have made to the world after you have passed away and a couple more generations have lived and died?

The Philosophy

Are you depressed yet? Well, it’ll get worse before it gets better.

French-Algerian absurdist philosopher Albert Camus (1913–1960) adapted an ancient Greek story—the myth of Sisyphus—to force us to confront the meaninglessness of life. Imagine Sisyphus, punished eternally to push a rock up a hill, only to watch it roll down the other side every time. A more meaningless eternity cannot be imagined. Camus asks us how this is different from our lives. We all struggle and toil to achieve our goals, and whatever we put together is taken apart in time. What we do for ourselves is taken apart by death, but even what we do for others—to care for the sick, help the needy, or advance science and human understanding—is erased from the earth by time and death. As the Book of Ecclesiastes puts it, “All is vanity and a striving after wind.”

Camus asks us, though, “Can we imagine Sisyphus happy?” Camus thinks we can. We can imagine Sisyphus’s pleasure in the wind as he descends the hill, the enjoyment of work and of the body as he puts his shoulder to the rock once more. And so too he tells us that just because life amounts to nothing does not mean it isn’t worth living.

Richard Taylor (1919–2003), an American philosopher, asks us further: What if Sisyphus desired nothing more than to push this rock endlessly? Then he might find not just moments of happiness in his toil; he might find the whole process, devoid of an outcome as it may be, to be meaningful. What is it to find something meaningful other than to desire to do it? Is this closer to what our lives are like: meaningless in that they amount to little or nothing, but meaningful to us through the process of living itself?

The Device Paradigm

Even if we find our lives to be meaningful, that certainly doesn’t apply to every part of them. What are some of the most meaningless things you’re going to have to do today?

What purposes do those activities play in your life? Are there more meaningful things you could be doing to serve those purposes instead? For example, could you go for a run through the woods or on the beach instead of putting in time on the treadmill at the gym? Could you make a family meal instead of picking up something on the way home and eating a rushed meal in front of the television?

The Philosophy

Meaninglessness isn’t just an abstract concern tied to death and purpose; we struggle with meaninglessness and tedium on a daily basis. Some things need to get done, but if we do everything just to finish it and sacrifice taking actions and completing tasks in a rich and fulfilling way, then we’re left with a life where we’ve sacrificed the meaningful stuff so that we can do more and more empty and inane things more quickly!

Contemporary American philosopher Albert Borgmann (1937–) thinks part of this trend has to do with our technological worldview. The need for warmth, for example, once structured our lives and our families. The hearth was a focal point in the home; its fire gave each family member a role to play: gathering and chopping wood; building the fire in the morning; cooking on the woodstove. The centralized heat source in the house brought and kept the family together throughout the day’s activities. Today, on the other hand, with devices like central heat and gas or electric stoves, warmth is provided through a simple switch, and the family is no longer structured by these roles. Each family member no longer need contribute to the shared process—nor do they communally share its benefits. The family is not brought together into a central room; instead each retreats to his or her own separate space. Along with the disappearance of the hearth, the family disintegrates.

Now, technology is clearly a good thing in many ways, but the things we tend to find meaningful depart from the technological drive toward efficiency. We go for a walk after dinner, and we say “This is nice. Why don’t we do this more often?” And yet, we don’t. Actions taken in slower, usually more complicated ways are often the things we find meaningful, yet for the sake of convenience, we choose efficiency. Resist it! Cook a nice meal instead of going through a drive-through! Grow a garden, even though you could just buy vegetables in the supermarket! Make some music (even if it’s awful) instead of just listening to it!

Marx’s Alienation

In your work life, how much can you choose what you do, or how you do it? Could work life be structured to give you more freedom?

What difference does the work you do make in the lives of others? What control do you have over the meaning and impact of your work? If you work for a corporation, how much do you control the meaning and impact of your company?

The Philosophy

You’re almost certainly familiar with Karl Marx’s (1818–1883) opposition to capitalism, but the German philosopher’s reasoning is less well-known. It can offer insights to all of us living under capitalism, whether or not we wish to see the system end.

Marx believed that what made humans distinct from other animals was our ability to change the world based on our own desires and creative vision. This ability to not just consume, but to also change and create the world, is what he called our species-being. In his early, more humanistic and less economic work, he outlined several ways in which those of us who must work to survive are alienated from our basic nature—from our species-being. We are alienated in that we produce objects not of our design or choice; we produce them using tools and techniques that are not our own; we use materials that are not ours; and the value of our labor, crystallized in the products we manufacture, belongs to someone else. We do not have ownership over the product of our labor, and during our working hours we do not have ownership over ourselves.

We sell the most human part of our lives—our creative, productive abilities—which becomes “labor”; a necessity and a burden. We then feel free only outside of working hours, where we concentrate on our lesser, animal needs for consumption and rest. In this way, the worker is alienated from her own humanity; she is least herself when building and creating, and feels most at home when she is least human.

The argument was much more striking before the labor movement, motivated in part by Marx’s arguments, brought about the eight-hour workday and the weekend, and abolished child labor. But even today, many workers feel this alienation keenly. If you don’t you’re one of the lucky few.

Marcuse and the Rat Race

Assuming you’re working full-time, about 35 percent of your waking life during your working years will be spent at work. Are you happy to have your work achievements take up over a third of your life for these years? Why or why not?

Consider how many other people are similarly devoting this portion of their lives to work, and what it all adds up to. Is our standard of living worth a third of our lives? Is this what a third of humanity’s hours should amount to?

The Philosophy

Just as it’s said that no one wishes on her deathbed that she had spent more time at the office, so too we might imagine that if we could look back from the end of human history, we wouldn’t wish we had spent more time working. Instead, we tend to think that knowledge, understanding, discovery, togetherness, connection, creativity, art, and beauty make up the meaning of our species, if anything does.

And yet, as German-Jewish philosopher Herbert Marcuse (1898–1979) pointed out, once we achieved the forty-hour work week, we did not struggle further for the thirty- or twenty-hour work week. Once we shifted from working in order to free everyone from sickness and hunger to working in order to make things quicker-faster-better, we failed to slow down enough to live. What sacrifices have we made as a people to have faster mobile phones, tougher plastics, and hundreds of television channels? What would our lives be like if we had just spent less time working? What other forms of richness would we have instead?

I find this question especially important in the light of our current dialogue about “job creation.” We have no shortage of wealth, food, and shelter—we only have trouble making up things for people to do to earn the resources that we already have. Why not make thirty hours the standard for full-time, benefits-earning employment? It’s complicated, of course, and we’ll talk more about it in Chapter 5: Economic Justice, but we should at least talk about having more people do less, to include everyone in the prosperity of our society, while simultaneously allowing everyone more time to do the things that they find meaningful.

Embodied Values

Reflect back on the things you’ve talked about throughout this chapter on happiness and the meaning of life. The things you desire, that make you happy, or that you find meaningful—how did you come to hold those values?

Think about how you live your life. Do you embody values, both for happiness and for a meaningful life, that you would hold up to others as an example of a life well lived? If so, how so; if not, what’s something you could change?

The Philosophy

We don’t enter the world with a predetermined set of values; we learn them through our life experiences. Most of all, we learn them through our experiences with others. Did you identify any particular people who have served as models or instructors in a life well lived?

French existentialist Jean-Paul Sartre (1905–1980) held that one of the most significant elements of belief in atheism was that, if there is no God, then we are on our own to determine what our lives are to be about—and that this means that in deciding for ourselves, we also decide for all humanity, because there is no authority on and determiner of what life is about except for various people making their own choices. The same sort of thing can be said from a religious perspective: Even those who decide to listen to one religious authority or another, or follow one text or another, make that decision in a world that is underdetermining, in which we all muddle through using one another as examples.

When you decide how to live, you implicitly claim that your kind of life is a kind of life worth living. You claim that your goals are important enough to expend the hours we walk upon the earth pursuing. We do not receive our values; we choose them, even when we happen to choose to believe the things we are brought up believing.

Would you be happy to have the values embodied in your life be the values of humanity? In Sartre’s view, there is no source of values other than people’s choosing, and so we have not only the freedom to do whatever we wish, but the responsibility to choose on behalf of all others as well.