It’s no great secret that life is often full of disappointment. Yet for many, that doesn’t stop us from pursuing happiness big and small, near and distant. What is happiness, and what about it is so compelling? This should be asked constantly and sincerely, so let’s have this talk. Happiness: signification and significance.
Pushed hard enough and asked annoyingly enough, many – nay, all – will rationalize their goals in terms of some capital H Happiness. But there we see an implicit distinction between the grandiose Happiness of a lifetime, and the less imposing though still enticing happiness of a few moments’ worth. Sure, it’s all the same versatile word, but I think we can agree that people mean something fundamentally different when they talk about having a “happy” life, versus the “happiness” of enjoying a cup of coffee. Assuming this difference is real, let’s focus on the latter kind to start. Let’s call it “big” happiness.
So, big happiness: different in quality from the “small” happiness of a good meal, a good book, even a good moment shared with good friends. But what is it if not small happinesses extended over periods in time? Surely it’s something substantially different, for otherwise we would seek it in chocolate, warm showers and sex, not education, relationships and purpose. Surely it’s something more we’re after: to be happy in such a way that it characterizes your life, defines how you spent your time here. To live and live well, to be here and enjoy it. That must be what we mean and why it’s so desirable.
The Greek tragedian Sophocles once wrote: “Count no man happy till he dies, free of pain at last.” Surely this is an example of what we’re talking about, right? Something about that suggests that there is a kind of other happiness so intense and complete that it alone can account for the worth in life.
But now let’s focus on the implied (predictable) tragedy of Sophocles’ remark. If he’s right, then there’s no way of knowing we’re happy in the sense we’ve imagined, let alone measuring that happiness. You can work your whole life achieving it and still never enjoy it as anything more than an inevitably fleeting emotion, however good of an emotion it is. Even taken in its profoundest sense, happiness still amounts to a state of mind that is as contingent as any other.
Perhaps another tragedian can offer further insight: Fyodor Dostoevsky, who wrote that “man is a frivolous and incongruous creature, and perhaps, like a chess player, loves the process of the game, not the end of it. And who knows (there is no saying with certainty), perhaps the only goal on earth to which mankind is striving lies in this incessant process of attaining, in other words, in life itself, and not in the thing to be attained”. Taking it a step further than Sophocles, Dostoevsky indicates that no happiness like the one we pursue actually exists; it’s a fabrication, a made-up carrot at the end of the stick.
Now, as a 20-year old who has no idea what they want out of life, I don’t feel particularly inclined either way on this happiness issue. However, I do feel that after considering “big” happiness in this light, its smaller counterpart seems all the more meaningful. It may be that we’ll never find the satisfaction of a happy life while alive on a constantly fluctuating continuum of human experience (a tragic irony that would make Sophocles and Dostoevsky both giddy with existential angst). But for now, at least we can know and measure our happiness in the moment, and that’s something. So eat more chocolate, I guess. I don’t know, figure it out.
