My son called from university to tell me he’d decided to drop college because it isn’t making him happy. He is 20 years old and whether something makes him happy or not seems to be his primary criterion for decision-making.
I wanted to explain that happiness isn’t a reliable compass for navigating life, that sometimes you do things because they are important or necessary, not because they make you feel good. But I couldn’t explain this because I wasn’t entirely sure I believed it. Why should he spend three years studying something that made him miserable? What was the point of any of it if not happiness? I told him to do whatever he thought was best and hung up feeling like I’d failed some parental test.
That evening I started reading about what previous generations thought about happiness, back when it wasn’t the organizing principle of every life decision. What I discovered is that for most of human history, happiness wasn’t considered a birthright or even a realistic goal. Buddha thought desire was the problem. Descartes thought happiness was achieved through wisdom. The Harvard study spent 85 years tracking men to conclude it is all about relationships. Only recently, historically speaking, did we decide that being happy was not just desirable but mandatory, something we should optimize our entire lives around.
What is happiness, really? A feeling? A state of being? Something you’re supposed to achieve? Humanity’s greatest thinkers have been arguing about this since at least 500 BC, and the only thing they seem to agree on is that pursuing happiness directly is the worst possible way to find it.
Buddha
The first person to really make a proper study of the happiness question was probably the Buddha, sometime around 500 BC. Siddhartha Gautama had been born a prince, surrounded by luxury and shielded from suffering, until one day he slipped past the palace walls and discovered that the world contained sickness, old age and death. This came as something of a shock. He renounced his comfortable life, tried extreme self-denial for a while, found that didn’t work either, and eventually sat under a bodhi tree until he figured things out. What he figured out became Buddhism.
Life is suffering.The problem, the Buddha taught, is craving and attachment. We grasp at things that are impermanent, pleasure, possessions, people, our own lives, and when they inevitably slip away, we suffer. The solution was to extinguish this craving through wisdom and meditation, eventually achieving nirvana, a state of complete liberation from the wheel of desire. This wasn’t happiness in the sense of perpetual good feelings; it was something more like perfect equanimity, a peace so profound it transcended the very concepts of pleasure and pain.
The Buddha was the first to point out something that would become a recurring theme in happiness philosophy. Chasing happiness often makes it run away faster.
Confucius
Around the same time, halfway across Asia, Confucius was working on a rather different approach. Where the Buddha sought liberation from the world, Confucius wanted to fix it. China during his lifetime was a mess of warring states and social chaos, and Confucius believed the answer lay in restoring proper relationships and traditional virtues. The opening words of his Analects are about happiness, specifically the joy of learning about humanity and trying to realize it in our lives. For Confucius, happiness wasn’t something you pursued privately. It was shared happiness, achieved through virtue and proper conduct in your family and community. He used the term junzi to describe someone who lived in harmony with others. The more people who became junzi, the happier society as a whole would be.
This was a fundamentally social vision of the good life, in stark contrast to the Buddha’s inward turn. Confucius believed that relationships weren’t obstacles to overcome on the path to enlightenment; they were the path itself. Your duties to your parents, your obligations to your community were opportunities for meaning. Strip them away and you wouldn’t find your true self. You’d find nothing at all.
The Greeks
The ancient Greeks were the next to make a proper nuisance of themselves about the whole happiness business. Before them, at least in the Mediterranean world, people seemed to operate under the assumption that happiness was essentially a gift from the gods. You either had it or you didn’t, like naturally curly hair or a talent for public speaking. If Zeus liked you, you prospered. If he didn’t, well, you might push a stone up a hill for eternity. Life was arbitrary and cruel and there wasn’t much point thinking about it too deeply.
Then along came Socrates, around 470 BC, and ruined everything by suggesting that happiness might actually be something you could pursue and achieve through your own efforts. This was a revolutionary and, frankly, rather annoying idea. Socrates believed that true happiness, not the fleeting kind you got from wine or a really good olive, but the deep, enduring sort, came from living well, which required wisdom. You couldn’t just get the things you wanted and expect to be happy. You had to use those things wisely. Money, for instance, could be wasted or spent on immoral pursuits. Only through critical thought and reflection could you transform the objects of your desire into genuine sources of wellbeing. It wasn’t the things that made you happy, Socrates argued. It was your wisdom in relation to them.
Socrates’ student Plato took things further. The Greeks had a word, eudaimonia, which we translate as ‘happiness’ but which actually meant something closer to ‘having a good soul’ or ‘living up to your potential.’ For Plato, achieving this state required cultivating four cardinal virtues: wisdom, temperance, courage and justice. If you could master these, you’d reach your true and perfect form, like a butterfly emerging from a chrysalis, except the chrysalis was ignorance and the butterfly was still basically you but better at making decisions.
Aristotle, never one to be outdone by his teacher, added his own refinements. He agreed that happiness came from fulfilling our nature, but argued that what makes humans specifically human is our capacity for reason. This rational faculty, he believed, needed to be perfected. We didn’t have to suppress our animal urges entirely (thank God), but we should tame them into serving our higher goals. For those not naturally blessed with virtuous character, Aristotle recommended finding the ‘golden mean’, the balance point between excess and deficiency. If you could locate yourself exactly midway between cowardice and recklessness, for example, you’d probably end up courageous. Through enough practice at this sort of calibration, making good choices would become second nature, and happiness would follow.
This was all very sensible and rational and Greek. It was also, I suspect, almost impossible to actually do.
Epicurus, born in 341 BC, offered a more accessible alternative. He’s often misremembered as a hedonist and someone who recommended wine, orgies and general debauchery. In fact, his philosophy was almost ascetically restrained. Yes, he believed happiness was pleasure and unhappiness was pain. But the highest pleasure, Epicurus argued, wasn’t sensual indulgence. It was ataraxia, a state of tranquillity and freedom from anxiety. And the way to achieve this wasn’t by gratifying every desire but by carefully limiting them. Epicurus divided desires into three categories: natural and necessary (food, shelter, friendship), natural but unnecessary (fancy food, luxurious shelter), and neither natural nor necessary (fame, power, wealth). The first category you should satisfy, the second you could enjoy occasionally but shouldn’t depend upon, and the third you should eliminate entirely.
Jesus
Around the time the Greeks were debating eudaimonia, a Jewish preacher in first-century Palestine was offering a radically different vision of happiness. Jesus of Nazareth didn’t write philosophy; he told stories and gave sermons, and the most famous of these is the Sermon on the Mount, delivered on a hillside overlooking the Sea of Galilee.
‘Blessed are the poor in spirit,’ Jesus said, ‘for theirs is the kingdom of heaven. Blessed are those who mourn, for they shall be comforted. Blessed are the meek, for they shall inherit the earth.’ He went on to bless the merciful, the pure in heart, the peacemakers, and most puzzlingly, those who are persecuted for righteousness’ sake. This was not Aristotle’s golden mean. This was a complete inversion of conventional values.
The word translated as ‘blessed’ is the Greek makarios, which could also mean ‘happy’ or ‘fortunate.’ But it was a particular kind of happiness. Not the happiness of getting what you want, but a deep, serene joy that existed independently of circumstances. He wasn’t telling you how to feel good. He was describing a state of grace available to those who had given up trying to feel good and had instead surrendered themselves to something larger. Happiness, in the Christian understanding, was a by-product of righteousness, not a goal in itself. Or as Jesus put it elsewhere: ‘Seek first the kingdom of God, and all these things shall be added unto you.’
The Romans
The Romans inherited Greek philosophy and, being Romans, made it considerably grimmer. Marcus Aurelius, emperor from AD 161 to 180, had to contend with wars, rebellions, and a plague that killed five million people. His solution was Stoicism, a philosophy that put one’s own mind entirely in charge of proceedings. ‘Our life is what our thoughts make it,’ he wrote, in what might be the world’s first self-help book. Circumstances weren’t innately good or bad. They were made so only by how we thought about them. You could choose to react with composure and calmness to whatever came your way, even if what came your way was an invading army or a pandemic.
There’s something admirable about this. There’s also something slightly unhinged. Marcus Aurelius spent his evenings writing meditations to himself about how none of his problems were real problems, which is either profound spiritual practice or the equivalent of staring into a bathroom mirror and whispering ‘I’m fine, I’m fine, I’m fine.’
Spiritual longings
Meanwhile, religious thinkers were developing their own theories. Thomas Aquinas, a thirteenth-century Dominican friar, managed to unite Greek philosophy with Christian theology by arguing that there were two distinct types of happiness. Felicitas was the imperfect kind, available to us in this life through virtues like wisdom and courage. Beatitudo was the ultimate version, achievable only in death, when you’d finally get to know God directly. This was either reassuring or deeply depressing depending on your perspective. Either way, it meant that perfect happiness was always deferred. A kind of spiritual layaway plan where you made payments throughout your life and collected the goods after you died.
Al-Ghazali, the twelfth-century Islamic philosopher, took a different approach. He believed we were fundamentally spiritual beings who experienced pain because we’d been born disconnected from Ultimate Reality. Our mistake was trying to heal this spiritual wound through physical means by pursuing pleasure, accumulating things and chasing status. This only made matters worse. The self, al-Ghazali argued, was actually perfect. It had just become obscured by passions and desires. Happiness lay in clearing away these obstructions, like scraping algae off a pond to reveal the clear water underneath. The happiest people were those who could rid themselves of wanting anything at all.
Reasoning
The Enlightenment brought a new kind of thinker. Men who believed reason and science could solve anything, including the mystery of human flourishing. René Descartes, the sixteenth-century French philosopher famous for ‘I think, therefore I am,’ equated happiness with wisdom and saw philosophy as ‘medicine for the brain.’ A happy person, he believed, would enjoy psychological contentment as a result of having a well-ordered mind.
Jeremy Bentham, in the nineteenth century, took a more mathematical approach. Observing that humans are fundamentally motivated by the pursuit of pleasure and the avoidance of pain, he concluded that happiness was simply a predominance of pleasure over pain, an equation you could calculate using what he called ‘hedonic calculus.’ The right action, morally speaking, was whatever produced the greatest happiness for the greatest number of people. Bentham didn’t distinguish between ‘high’ intellectual pleasures and ‘low’ bodily ones; a good meal was as valid a source of happiness as a good symphony. His student John Stuart Mill disagreed, famously declaring that it was better to be an unhappy Socrates than a satisfied pig.
Forever alone
Not everyone was so optimistic. Arthur Schopenhauer, also nineteenth century, believed that lasting happiness was impossible and that the best we could hope for was to minimize our pain. He recommended solitude as a means of achieving this, on the grounds that other people were fundamentally untrustworthy and relationships required compromises that weren’t worth making. ‘The company of others makes it impossible for us to be our true selves,’ he wrote, and there aren’t enough advantages to human relationships to compensate for this loss. Talented people especially, Schopenhauer believed, should avoid their fellow humans altogether.
Immanuel Kant took perhaps the bleakest view of all. He argued that pursuing happiness wouldn’t lead to finding it, and that seeking our own wellbeing actually prevents correct moral behaviour. ‘Every admixture of incentives taken from one’s own happiness is a hindrance to providing the moral law with influence on the human heart,’ he wrote, in a sentence so German it practically comes with a side of sauerkraut. For Kant, the goal wasn’t to be happy but to make yourself worthy of happiness.
Suffering has a meaning
And then there was Friedrich Nietzsche with his magnificent moustache. The discipline of great suffering, Nietzsche believed, was what created all enhancements of humanity so far. To pursue comfort and pleasure was to betray your potential for greatness. The people he most despised were what he called ‘the last men’. Passive, comfort-seeking creatures who asked ‘What is longing? What is a star?’ and wanted only to be warm and safe and entertained. These last men sound uncomfortably like everyone I know, myself included.
If you’ve ever felt that maybe suffering has meaning, that struggle makes you stronger, that there’s something suspicious about people who just want to be happy, well, you’ve been influenced by Nietzsche whether you know it or not.
Pleasure and pain
The twentieth century brought psychology, and with it the hope that science might finally crack the code. Sigmund Freud, the Viennese grandfather of the talking cure, believed that human behaviour was governed by two ‘sovereign masters’: the pursuit of pleasure and the avoidance of pain. He called this the pleasure principle, and he located it in the id, the primitive, unconscious part of the mind that wants what it wants and wants it now. But Freud was not optimistic about human happiness. The id’s demands, he observed, are in perpetual conflict with reality, which rarely provides immediate gratification, and with the superego, which imposes moral constraints.
Freud died in 1939, having fled Nazi-occupied Austria and having asked his doctor to administer a fatal dose of morphine. He had cancer of the jaw, reportedly caused by his lifelong cigar habit. A pleasure he refused to give up even when it was literally killing him.
The will to meaning
Viktor Frankl, another Viennese psychiatrist, took a very different view. In 1942, Frankl and his family were deported to the Nazi concentration camps. His wife, his parents, and his brother all perished. Frankl himself survived Theresienstadt, Auschwitz, and two other camps, and after the war he wrote a small book called Man’s Search for Meaning that would go on to sell ten million copies.
Freud, Frankl observed, had argued that humans are driven by a ‘will to pleasure.’ Alfred Adler, another Viennese psychologist, had proposed a ‘will to power.’ But Frankl believed the primary human drive was neither of these. It was the will to meaning. People could endure almost any suffering, he had witnessed, if they could find a reason for it, a purpose that made it bearable. Those who lost their sense of meaning perished; those who maintained it survived. ‘He who has a why to live,’ Frankl wrote, quoting Nietzsche, ‘can bear almost any how.’
The key insight was that happiness, like success, ‘cannot be pursued; it must ensue, and it only does so as the unintended side-effect of one’s personal dedication to a cause greater than oneself.’ The more you chase happiness directly, the more it eludes you. But dedicate yourself to something meaningful like work, love or service to others, and happiness follows as a by-product.
This was, I realized, essentially what Jesus and the Buddha had been saying all along, albeit dressed up in twentieth-century psychological language. Stop chasing pleasure. Find something larger than yourself to serve, and the rest will take care of itself.
Martin Seligman, the founder of positive psychology, developed the PERMA model: Positive Emotion, Engagement, Relationships, Meaning and Accomplishments. If you could cultivate all five, happiness would follow. Unlike the ancient philosophers, Seligman didn’t believe we needed to examine the past to explain unhappiness. What mattered was how we thought about the future. We could be happy if only we could believe good things were coming.
The Dalai Lama, spiritual leader of Tibetan Buddhism, wrote a bestselling handbook called The Art of Happiness in which he declared: ‘I believe that the very purpose of life is to be happy. From the very core of our being, we desire contentment.’ This was Buddhism for the self-help age, stripped of its more demanding metaphysics and repackaged as something reassuring. Cultivate compassion, practice meditation, focus on the happiness of others, and your own wellbeing will follow.
The Harvard Study of Adult Development
Then science got properly involved. In 1938, Harvard University began tracking 724 young men to see what factors predicted health and happiness over a lifetime. They measured everything: cholesterol levels, drinking habits, career success, brain function and IQ. The study has now continued for over 85 years, making it the longest longitudinal study of adult development ever conducted.
The findings were surprisingly simple. It wasn’t wealth that predicted happiness, or fame, or achievement. It wasn’t even health, though health mattered. The single strongest predictor of who would be happy and healthy at age eighty was the quality of their relationships at age fifty. People with warm connections to family, friends and community lived longer, stayed sharper and reported greater satisfaction with their lives. People who were isolated declined earlier and died sooner. ‘Loneliness kills,’ said Robert Waldinger, the study’s current director. ‘It’s as powerful as smoking or alcoholism.’
Schopenhauer, I thought, would be horrified. But then again, Schopenhauer died alone.
The World Happiness Report
The World Happiness Report, published annually since 2012 by the United Nations, has attempted to rank countries by their citizens’ self-reported life satisfaction. Finland has topped the list for eight consecutive years, despite its dark winters and reputation for social awkwardness. The happiest countries tend to have high levels of social trust, strong safety nets, low corruption and good work-life balance. The unhappiest countries tend to be war-torn, corrupt or desperately poor.
But here’s the strange thing: wealth, beyond a certain threshold, doesn’t seem to make people happier. This is called the Easterlin Paradox, after the economist Richard Easterlin, who first noticed that although rich countries were happier than poor ones, rich countries didn’t seem to get happier as they got richer. Once your basic needs are met additional money provides diminishing returns on happiness. You get used to your new car, your bigger house, your fancier holidays. The hedonic treadmill keeps spinning, and you stay in the same place.
A not so happy ending
I’ve now spent three weeks reading about happiness. I have learned that it might be the extinguishing of desire, or the cultivation of virtue, or the feeling of power increasing, or something you can only achieve after death, or something that must ensue rather than be pursued. I have learned that the Buddha thought craving was the problem, and that Confucius thought proper relationships were the solution, and that Jesus thought the poor in spirit were blessed, and that Nietzsche thought the whole business was contemptible. I have learned that Schopenhauer recommended solitude, and that Freud thought we were all basically neurotic, and that Frankl believed meaning could be found even in Auschwitz, and that a bunch of Harvard researchers tracked people for eighty years and concluded that the answer was relationships all along.
None of this has made me any happier. If anything, I feel slightly worse, burdened now with two and a half millennia of failed attempts to solve a problem that might not have a solution. Or maybe the problem isn’t that I haven’t found the right answer. Maybe the problem is that I keep asking the question.
Frankl wrote that happiness ‘cannot be pursued; it must ensue.’ The Buddha said that chasing happiness only makes it run faster. And the Harvard study found that the happiest people weren’t the ones who focused on being happy. The happiest people were the ones who focused on their relationships, their work and their responsibilities to others.
What strikes me now, after all this reading, is how many of these thinkers arrived at the same conclusion from radically different directions. We cannot see happiness by looking directly at it. We can only catch it in peripheral glances, in the soft focus of attention placed elsewhere on our work, on others, on the small rituals that structure our lives. On standing in front of an open fridge while someone who loves you asks a question you don’t know how to answer.
I’m still not sure what the question means, but I’ve made peace with the not-knowing.
The Harvard study tracked those men for eighty-five years and concluded that relationships were all that mattered. Schopenhauer said other people make it impossible to be ourselves.
Schopenhauer died alone.
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