Robert Rowland Smith On Being Happy

For centuries, the pursuit of happiness has been paralleled by the pursuit of the definition of happiness. From Aristotle through Jean-Jacques Rousseau, John Stuart Mill and right up to Gretchen Ruben’s recent Happiness Project in America, brains have been switched on to track and trap it. They ask what is happiness exactly? A vague set of positive feelings? A scientifically observable balance of chemicals in the brain? A form of liberty? Or just the absence of unhappiness?

This casting about for an answer leads to the obvious point that it’s hard to pursue happiness if you don’t know what you’re looking for. If these great brains can’t agree on what happiness is, what chance do the rest of us have in securing it? But the point is too obvious, in fact. For the problem is not with happiness per se, but with the idea of pursuing it. For where ‘pursuit’ is involved, potential failure looms. As long as we ‘pursue’ happiness, it can always elude us, like gold at the end of the rainbow.

So how, if not by chasing it, do we get happy? There’s a clue in the word ‘happy’ itself, which relates to the word ‘happen’, and is about letting things come into being rather than prescribing them in advance. Happiness should be the accidental byproduct of doing what we love, not a target. In this sense, happiness can only be known in retrospect. As in the cliché of schooldays being the happiest of your life, you know when you’ve been happy, and it was when you weren’t particularly trying.

This means happiness comes from trying not to try. Really, it would be better if none of those thinkers had ever turned happiness into a concept, because in doing so they fashioned an idol, and where idols are present, sacrifice follows. More suffer in the name of happiness than derive satisfaction from it. Today, people are acutely aware of being unhappy, and that only compounds the unhappiness. Better if happiness had never solidified into such an aspiration.

The worst thing we can do therefore is to keep talking about being happy. It only makes us miserable. Far better to focus on what we believe in, devote ourselves to a meaningful task and be pleasantly surprised at the moment when a friend turns to us asking if we’re happy, and we simply answer yes.

Robert Rowland Smith’s Breakfast with Socrates: the Philosophy of Everyday Life is published by Profile Books.

Comments

[Kelvin]

The pursuit of happiness. what a statement. Could it be that we are looking for something that we have not lost? The result of finding something that we have not lost is absurd. How many people search for the pair of glasses that are already planted on their foreheads and feel like idiots when someone points this out to them. Maybe that's all it takes. Someone to place a mirror in front of us to see what we thought we had lost.

[Dtfpress]

Thanks for this wonderful post which rings true.

The Work with Byron Katie turns people toward acceptance of what is and this acceptance brings peace. I'm new to The Work which is based on four questions and I have found that turning my mind away from how I think life and people should be then back to accepting reality - happiness is a natural product.

[Hazel]

What you're saying also speaks to the Buddhist idea of being in the moment

[teresa faria]

I totaly agree with your words. It reminds me the budist philosophy that says something like this: creating expectations on anything only brings us suffering because we create a mental image that will never be real, because its just mental, life always gives you something different. So its better just to be happy with the moment life gives you than being always expecting something different!
Teresa Faria

[Happy Frog and I]

I enjoyed your article and it reminded me of one of my favourite quotes; 'My life has no purpose, no direction, no aim, no meaning, and yet I’m happy. I can’t figure it out. What am I doing right?' Charles M Schulz

[Angeliki B]

That’s a very interesting entry and I couldn’t agree more with what you’re saying. However, for some of us just “trying not to try” doesn’t work that well. Sometimes, we need to have a goal to become happy and deliberately plan activities that make us feel nice. Having many of these activities planned can ultimately lead to happiness.

[sampsa]

Happiness is being content with and by pursuing the things one finds gratifications in. Focus on things that matter to you and skip the rest. Enough is enough.

[Squaxor]

Dear Robert, with your short article you have clarified something I have struggled with for years. I knew the pursuit of happiness was a false dichotomy, but your clarification made it evident.