Being Happy Shouldn’t be The Purpose of Your Life

Everywhere you look someone is trying to teach you how to increase your happiness. Every product advertised is said to make you happier. Being happy is the most important thing in life—the only thing that makes life worth living. Right?

I’m not convinced that happiness is the right metric to judge ones life by. Primarily because it’s mostly out of our control. Happiness, like good fortune, is fickle and fleeting. It seems to come and go randomly. One day it’s here, the next it’s gone and you can’t will yourself to stay continuously happy. If you could then why don’t you? Why are you not eternally blissful simply because you commanded yourself to be so?

Even if you could will yourself to be forever happy, and could be free of all your problems, I’m not so sure you would. It’s a gift that most people think they would take—until they got bored. Dostoyevsky said it best in Notes From Underground through his narrator “Shower upon him every earthly blessing, drown him in a sea of happiness, so that nothing but bubbles of bliss can be seen on the surface; give him economic prosperity, such that he should have nothing else to do but sleep, eat cakes and busy himself with the continuation of his species, and even then out of sheer ingratitude, sheer spite, man would play you some nasty trick. He would even risk his cakes and would deliberately desire the most fatal rubbish, the most uneconomical absurdity, simply to introduce into all this positive good sense his fatal fantastic element. It is just his fantastic dreams, his vulgar folly that he will desire to retain, simply in order to prove to himself–as though that were so necessary–that men still are men and not the keys of a piano”.

People need problems, and problems mean unhappiness. Part of being human is the deep need to carry something heavy—to do something difficult. Man can’t feel whole without struggle. To take this away from him would be to fracture his soul. The feeling of accomplishment that comes with overcoming difficulties at the very least rivals the pleasure of happiness, if not surpasses it.

If happiness is paramount in your life, you may decide life is not worth living when things get bad. Happiness comes and goes, and therefore cannot sustain you through the many tragedies that befall everyone at some point in life. If happiness is all that matters, what happens when a loved one is diagnosed with terminal cancer? Why go on living? Is everyone with chronic depression living a useless life?

Being happy isn’t what sustained the Jews in Auschwitz. Happiness didn’t inspire most great art. It was something much less shallow that got them through hell. It was something that reaches to the depths of man that inspires beautiful art.

There must be something other than happiness that makes the game worth the candle (a phrase I stole from Alan Watts who probably stole it from Michel de Montaigne).

One example of happiness being subordinate to other values is motherhood. Having children is difficult and can even be said to be an antagonist to being happy. As the saying goes “you’re only as happy as your unhappiest child”. With children comes financial burden, the anxiety of your child being hurt, and the knowledge of their mortality. So why bother?

If not happiness, then what should we aim for? What star should we set our sights on?

“Don’t seek for everything to happen as you wish it would, but rather wish that everything happens as it actually will—then your life will flow well.”

Epictetus

I’ve spent the last few weeks wrestling with this question. Fundamentally the question is “how should you live your life?’ or even “how should a life be framed?”. Happiness is too shallow and insufficient to answer either of these questions.

To put it in a sentence, the answer is—live virtuously and heroically in the adventure that is your life.

Living virtuously is not dependent upon external circumstances and so can be done regardless of fate. Being heroic allows one to overcome the obstacles that are sure to come, and to gain satisfaction from overcoming them (as well as fulfilling the need to be helpful to others). Lastly, viewing your life as an adventure will buttress you against hopelessness and despair when things go wrong. In fact, when things go wrong, life becomes exciting through the lens of adventure. If Odysseus got home safe and sound as planned, there would be no reason to read The Odyssey.

Live more virtuously. Practice heroism. View your life as an adventure.

Paradoxically, happiness will rear its ugly little head more often when you aren’t chasing it. And so what if it doesn’t? Your life is sufficient without it.