On the tyranny of happiness

It often seems like the most ubiquitous determination in the modern world is the determination to "do what makes you happy." Not always in so many words, but it's everywhere in principle. The test of whether one should convert to a given religion is whether it makes one happy or "feels right." Innumerable customization options are offered at fast food places and streaming services offer thousands of movies and tv shows on demand so that no one need ever settle for any less than perfect satisfaction of nearly any craving. No longer being "happy" is even a not-very-rare excuse for infidelity in marriage. It is so common that the default assumption on both sides of almost every argument is that the other side holds their position because they want to hold it and not because they think it is the correct position whether they like it or not.

The fascinating thing is that the more one pursues happiness, the harder it becomes for him to be happy. The itch gets harder to scratch. An alcoholic who seeks happiness in drink finds that he drinks more and more and enjoys it less and less. At least, that was my experience when I was an alcoholic. The one who seeks happiness from sex similarly engages in increasingly risky behaviors for waning return.

On the other hand, history is full of accounts of the great cheer of men and women who prioritized duty or fidelity or truth. These things do not, of course, guarantee happiness to anyone, but lived experience and recorded history both suggest that pursuing any good thing because it is good and not as a matter of following one's whim's is more likely to produce happiness as a byproduct than pursuing happiness itself is. I believe it was Francis Bacon who said "It is not happy people who become thankful. It is thankful people who become happy."

At a glance, it almost seems counterintuitive, but I think there's a simple enough explanation. To pursue anything is, almost by definition, to not yet have it. So to be always chasing happiness is to look ever forward to the next unattained thing that might make one happy and never to look at what one already has with the kind of eyes that can see with gratitude. Now plenty of things make sense as short term goals, including maybe the pursuit of happiness in some measure, but when it is made the main goal of one's life, it becomes an insatiable tyrant.

Primary goals that tend to make people happy in the long term tend to be

1. ends in themselves
2. repeating rather than ongoing

For example, to strive to do your duty is a thing unconditionally worth doing. You don't have to like it. You don't have to live and get to enjoy the knowledge of having done your duty. You don't even have to very perfectly succeed. Many goals like this can be seen as more about producing the kind of person who persists than the kind of person who attains. Your duties are also new every year. Every day. Sometimes every hour. You don't work your whole life toward a threshold at which you have "done your duty." You get up each day, and you do your duty that day. And on days when you fail, the days when you succeed are not diminished.

Happiness is fundamentally the opposite. There's not some identifiable point each day at which we can say "I have achieved today's happiness. Good for me." The real end of pursuing happiness is to enjoy persisting in that state after having achieved it. We don't want the infinitesimal moment at which we go from being unhappy to being happy. We want all the moments after that one, and we want there to be a lot of them, and we want them to be uninterrupted. Not only does almost no one ever reach that lofty goal by a direct approach, but the pursuit of happiness being an ongoing rather than a repeating goal makes it very difficult to enjoy even the memory of past happiness if we once attain happiness and then lose it. There are no milestones such as duty offers. Only the moment-to-moment state of being in or out of happiness.

Besides being a very ineffective way of becoming happy, making happiness your primary goal is demonstrably very dangerous both to you and to others. Specifically, the pursuit of happiness - when set up as Alpha and Omega - does not produce good behaviors (at least, not because they are good). It produces behaviors that we think will make us happy. Things like

1. lying to get ahead
2. insisting on having everything our own way
3. hurting or neglecting others in order to get what we want in the moment
4. refusing to be happy about anything if we cannot be happy about everything

History is full of records of men and women who have been murdered, exiled, or suffered other terrible fates because someone else's perceived road to happiness lay through the wreckage of their lives.

Though David had almost everything a man could want, he could not deny himself the one thing in the whole world which he wanted and could not have. Then, after his affair with Uriah's wife, he had Uriah himself murdered in order to cover it up. The Knights Templar in the early 14th century were slaughtered by the French King Philip IV largely as a means of escaping his enormous financial debt to them. And one does not have to look far in the true crime section of most streaming services to find stories of murderers who committed their crimes in the pursuit of their own personal happiness.

There are edge cases, of course, in which a man might make happiness his main goal and also become really happy without doing any harm to others, but there are also cases in which a man might survive a high speed traffic collision without wearing a seat belt. In any case, I encourage you to become really happy by not worrying too much about whether you are happy. Seek first the kingdom of God, and these things will be added to you (Matthew 6:25-34).