The Question of Happiness

…And the paradox of a society that dies as it evolves.

In the 1980s and 90s, sci-fi writers predicted a cyberpunk future where old philosophies were forgotten and mankind forsook the natural earth for the digital frontier. As we enter 2024, technology has certainly advanced to a level we once deemed fictional, but mankind is left behind. The limiting factor of technological progress isn’t science, but the adaptability of the people. It takes years to integrate a technology into daily use and years more for people to become familiar enough with it to want to innovate. The most notable example of this is the internet and artificial intelligence, whose social impact has been a decades-long process that is only now reaching a climax. Because this technology is inherently social and informatic, there is no spectrum of outcomes or subsets of society that will remain unaffected: beyond the climax lies either the collapse of the technology, or complete social integration. Once again, human adaptability is the determining factor.

The Hands of God and Adam - Michelangelo. Artchive.

In terms of comprehension and familiarity, humans adapt remarkably well to the digital world. After all, computers are designed after the human brain. The bottleneck is not so much the cognitive challenge as it is the emotional and psychological challenges of daily exposure to such a vast amount of information. While the internet, and more recently, AI and machine learning, have boosted productivity in academia and the workforce, they have also dealt a blow to the human psyche. We are not emotionally equipped to process the amount of information the internet presents to us or the number of people it connects us to. We are social creatures, certainly, but there is a limit to the network one person can manage.

Can we adapt to this as we have adapted to technologies of the past? The answer is uncertain, because we are dealing with things that no other technology has ever touched: the abstraction of knowledge and of human relationships. Everything that is presented to us in the digital world is an abstraction. As digital information becomes more pervasive, society becomes more accustomed to treating things that aren’t real as if they were. This isn’t inherently bad, and in the tech world it is quite necessary, but the subliminal tone of the digital landscape is dissonant and is easily carried over into our daily lives. It’s becoming more difficult for people to understand themselves, the people around them, or the natural world because their perception of reality is less concrete. Without realizing it, we apply the same caveat to our interactions with the real world as we do to our interactions with the digital, and the dichotomy of experiences is emotionally and psychologically taxing.

Whether or not we can adapt to evolving technology, however, is not the subject of this article. What I would like to explore is the idea of directed social evolution. I’ve discussed in previous articles how technological progress is driven by the materialism of those in power, and the same idea applies here. Society is evolving toward opulence and material comfort because that is what is valued by the wealthy and powerful. (Here I use the term power as it is commonly understood. I’ve already shared my grievances with the term in "Illusion of Human Power" and the final section of "Wealth Without Work.") What results is a society that is so absurdly comfortable that they must imagine challenges to keep themselves occupied (case in point: middle-class America) or a working class who spends most of their time at jobs they hate because they believe everyone should have a car, a house, a retirement plan and insurance policies for everything. This social structure is so rigid in first-world countries that it is difficult to live any other way.

The goal of social evolution is human happiness, but we are advancing toward a universal lifestyle that has never made anyone happy and never will. This has been recognized by philosophers and religious scholars since ancient times, which is why so many of these individuals chose a life outside of the social mainstream. What society is advancing toward today is the same as it has always been—the very antithesis of “the good life.”

The Good Life, or Human Happiness

What is “the good life”? I am not so proud as to think that I, with my 23 years of a remarkably sheltered and uneventful life, can answer that question with anything like dogma. But it is a question I have considered often, especially in the past year. Consider this article an attempt to synthesize my tangled thoughts on the subject.

Philosophers have called it “the good life” or “the happy life.” They are one and the same. Happiness is the aim of every human soul, but we seek it in different ways and call it by different names.

The stoics believed that happiness lay in adherence to the laws of virtue and logic, and indifference toward changeable things like pleasure and pain. Stoics like Marcus Aurelius stressed the importance of the greater good and man’s duty to the whole, of which he was a working part. Stoicism is a practical wisdom and its applications to the professional world are tremendous, but I wonder about its application to personal life. I am not convinced that its tenets are sufficient to make us aloof to pain or pleasure, or if such an aloofness is even admirable. In the workplace, it is vital that we remain detached from such things, which is why stoicism is such a great system of ethics for the professional world. But in the private world, we are forced to confront pain and pleasure head on. And if someone is able to remain completely composed in the face of such things, I can’t help wondering if they are truly confronting them.

While we are talking about ancient Greek philosophies, Epicureanism is often depicted as the opposite of stoicism and holds pleasure, or the absence of pain, as the greatest good. But rather than an overtly sensual or materialistic pleasure, Epicurus purported that humans derive greatest pleasure from intellectual activity and from simple, honest living. While both the stoics and the epicureans believed that happiness was best attained in a virtuous and active life, they differed in their placement of happiness in the equation. The epicureans held individual happiness as the chief aim, while the stoics held it as a benefit, with collective good as the chief aim. Where an Epicurean would seek to arrange his circumstances to ensure his greatest happiness, a Stoic would arrange his circumstances to ensure his greatest usefulness. As it happens, virtue often maximizes both happiness and usefulness, and thus stoics and epicureans came to similar conclusions about “the good life.” A virtuous life is a happy life.

But even if our moral code is clear, we are still faced with difficult choices. Suppose two paths are open to you, neither of which is evil. You know that in one path you would be more useful and would have greater opportunity of serving your fellow man, but in the other path you would be happier. Which should you choose? The stoic might argue that being useful and performing your duty would ultimately make you happier. The epicurean might argue that if you aren’t happy you couldn’t be useful in the first place.

While neither philosophy is without sense, the Epicurean philosophy seems less practical, if only because happiness is difficult for any individual to understand. For all the effort we put into being happy, we are remarkably bad at it. For one thing, we are goal-oriented: we enjoy working toward something that we believe will fulfill us. While we are working toward something, even if we enjoy the work, we are partially dissatisfied because we have not yet attained the goal. But once we do attain it, we find that we miss working toward it, so we set another goal to take its place. Thus, we are never entirely satisfied, because the mind is happiest when it is working toward something but the spirit is happiest when it has attained something. Mind and spirit are bound together, so we achieve their mutual well-being through a constant goal-setting in which both can attain a degree of satisfaction.

This manifests itself in every aspect of life, personal or professional, and society builds itself up around it until life becomes a checklist. Go to school, get a job, move up in your job, get married, have children, have grandchildren, etc. We are always moving forward, because if we stand still for too long we find that we are unhappy. This is true at any stage of life, but especially toward the end of life. Depression in elderly people is prevalent and, I suspect, is a primary contributor to rapid declines in health. More people die of unhappiness than of anything else. But society is more concerned with depression in young people because they have more to give. Instead of admitting that outright, people will mouth platitudes like: “You have your whole life ahead of you,” or “There is so much for you to see and do.”

Depression in elderly people is prevalent…But society is more concerned with depression in young people because they have more to give.

In observing our elders, we find that the goal-oriented, checklist idea of happiness doesn’t really hold up. By keeping ourselves occupied, we attain not happiness itself, but the absence of unhappiness. Routine is a drug that relieves our perception of life’s heaviness but doesn’t cure the underlying disease. Without that drug, we are left to feel the full weight of life, and we find that we cannot live long under it.

What are we to do then? Curl up in a ball and die? Of course not. That doesn’t solve anything. We are alive, whether we want to be or not, and we ought to make the most of it. And by making the most of it, I don’t mean whatever society says you ought to do, but trying to understand and attain happiness in your own way.

“The wind is rising! We must try to live!” - Paul Valéry

Happiness as a Personal Revelation

I could go on for pages about what other people have said about happiness and how it ought to be attained. But each of us has the same resources as they did and can draw our own conclusions, if we dare to try. It’s the “trying” part that we shy away from. Few people are willing to face life as it is, to feel the full weight of it without the influence of any social drug. And yet this is something we must do, if we are to understand anything and, above all, happiness.

A friend pointed out that I write a lot about “spirituality.” I replied that I don’t intend to, but the things I think about the most are the things that naturally spring up in my writing. This time, I really did intend to bring up religion, since religious texts have more to say about happiness and fulfillment than any others. And yet, while countless monks, priests and saints of all religions have given useful advice for living a good life, I will dismiss them on the same grounds that I dismiss the philosophers: that we have the same resources as they and can come to our own conclusions. What I will point to, rather, is the attitude that brought them to their conclusions.

Today, we dull our senses with routine, ethics and religion, because we lack the faith of the prophets who asked, “How long, oh Lord?” or the audacity of Jacob, who wrestled with the Angel of the Lord.

I’ve been a Christian all my life and, in that time, I’ve heard many blasphemies against the faith uttered by those who have never opened a Bible in their lives, and some by those who open it every day. What I hear most often is the cultural idea of religion: that the Scripture is a rulebook for how to live a good life. And that is partially true: the Bible is full of sound advice and if someone adhered strictly to its guidelines, even without faith, he/she would experience as good a life as any human could wish to have. The same can be said of many religious and secular texts, however; as I’ve mentioned before, all philosophers have come to similar conclusions about “the good life.”

But the question that eats away at all of us isn’t how to live a good life. It’s: “So what?” And nowhere have I seen that question addressed with such depth and unflinching honesty as it is in the Bible. Anyone who reads the Bible in full will make a startling discovery: that it has little to say about religious ecstasy or a utopian existence, and much to say about pain, loss and despair. It is filled with the cries of people who felt the full weight of a cursed world, without any of the opiates of modern society. Today, we dull our senses with routine, with ethics, and yes, with religion, because we lack the faith of the prophets who asked, “How long, oh Lord?” or the audacity of Jacob, who wrestled with the Angel of the Lord. We think that God does not hear us, but I wonder how many of us have truly asked Him anything and have refused to give up until we got an answer. We lack the persistence of Job or of the prophets, because we lack the despair, and this is precisely the problem with modern society and evolving technology. We are too comfortable, too distracted and self-satisfied to question the hollowness of the structure. We stop short at the essential questions of life because we cannot bear the despair, and thus we fall farther and farther from God.

This is exactly the kind of thing that Dostoevsky, a deeply religious man, alludes to in his novels, and thus his work is misunderstood in many of the same ways that the Bible is misunderstood. I’ve heard many people call his novels “depressing” because he portrays the world as it is, in gray and black, instead of painting over it with the bright but vain colors of pleasure and beauty. And yet he makes continual obeisance to Christ, who said: “I came to give you life, and to give it to you more abundantly.” But we don’t know what that means, and we are afraid to ask. We want Dostoevsky to give us a straight answer, we want Buddha or Augustine or Marcus Aurelius to give us a straight answer, because if we ask God it might hurt. My readers would probably like me to give them a straight answer too, but of course I won’t. People spend too much time answering, when the whole business of mankind lies in asking.

“If any of you lacks wisdom, let him ask of God, who gives to all liberally and without reproach, and it will be given to him. But let him ask in faith, with no doubting, for he who doubts is like a wave of the sea driven and tossed by the wind.” – James 1:5-7

The happy life is something we must seek out for ourselves. It is a wrestling between the individual and the Divine. The philosophies of others will do us no good. The problem with an evolving society is that it evolves at the cost of the individual: as technology advances and society becomes more elaborate, the social identity supersedes the individual, and we find ourselves living empty lives, because there is no such thing as a social identity. Thus man wakes to sterility, and society, as it evolves, evolves to its doom.

“It's time for you to look inward and start asking yourself the big questions. Who are you? And what do you want?”

- Uncle Iroh, Avatar: The Last Airbender