Happiness isn’t eating plump figs in the south of France, hallucinating at Burning Man, or playing a good round of golf.
Happiness is the pursuit of purpose, done individually and with a community:
Happiness cannot be pursued; it must ensue, and it only does so as the unintended side-effect of one's personal dedication to a cause greater than oneself or as the by-product of one's surrender to a person other than oneself.
―Viktor Frankl, Man's Search for Meaning
Why have we invested so much into meaning-seeking and policy-making when none of it brings us closer to happiness? Why are we still so unhappy despite practicing positivity, mindfulness, and meditation? Perhaps we’ve gotten our priorities upside down: What we’re pursuing isn’t happiness anymore.
We’ve mistaken temporary highs for lasting happiness. Some things were never meant to be the end goal in themselves: Financial power, sexual compatibility, emotional catharsis, to name a few, are all important and they make us feel good—but none of these bring lasting happiness if they themselves become the object of pursuit. This kind of idolatry results in what psychologists describe as the hedonic treadmill and what coastal elites call the rat race.
We’ve lost sight of our target, confused the means with the end, and created a Frankenstein-styled happiness that is solely cosmetic and ends up destroying its creator, the self. We can put all the right pieces together—a beautiful lover, a vacation, a(nother) successful startup, a shiny car, a year of living abroad—and still feel unhappy. We can have everything yet still feel like there is something missing.
So, what is the end that we should seek? What does Victor Frankl, a holocaust survivor, mean by a greater cause? Why and how exactly does pursuing purpose make us happy?
To define the end, it’s worth taking a step back and thinking about why we have an end at all. I once heard someone say “thirst alone proves the existence of water”, meaning that having the desire for water means that there is a thing inside of us that feeds on water and relies on it for sustenance.
When we think about “happiness”, our outward pursuit of it suggests there’s something in us hungry for it. (After all, isn’t that why you’re reading this? )
That thing is your soul. And just like how the flesh requires nutrients, the soul requires nourishment. When we mix up the means with the end, we feed our souls with junk food and we replenish that hunger with empty calories: we worship false gods and indulge in activities of temporary delight that distract us from what we care about but don’t want to attend to at the moment.
When a person can't find a deep sense of meaning, they distract themselves with pleasure.
— V. Frankl
So, not only is there a hunger, but a right way to feed that hunger.
What, then, is the right way?
INDIVIDUAL pursuit: simcha, avodah, and eudaimonia
Think of the Apple Lightning port. If your iPhone charger breaks, you have to return to its original manufacturer to buy the compatible one. The right one. (Samsung won’t do). Similar to the iPhone, humans have a Creator. When our souls need feeding, we can only receive the right sustenance from the one who created us because only the Creator offers the kind of replenishment we need.
This explanation works both religiously and irreligiously. The Hebrew Bible calls happiness simcha, Aristotle called it eudaimonia.
Simcha is about living aligned to what God has purposed for you. As a carpenter makes a chair and expects it to stand sturdily, God creates us with a specific purpose and expects us to work abiding to that purpose. In fact, “work” and “worship” share the same word in Hebrew: Avodah. To work is to worship the Creator by joyfully engaging in one’s special purpose:
There is nothing better for a person than to rejoice in his work, because that is his lot.
— Solomon, Ecc. 3:22
Solomon also said that if one doesn’t practice avodah, one will find himself hungry, thirsty, naked, and impoverished with an iron yoke on his neck that will destroy him (Deut. 28:47-48). We might not think of throwing water balloons at Coachella as an iron yoke on the neck, but if hippie-boho music festivals make up our chief purpose for living, we’re not really living. In fact, the Bible doesn’t seem to care at all about what we want, it only commands us to be delightful in our work: Solomon isn’t telling us to find our “why” by building the next AI unicorn, he means that there is no better joy than serving God and sticking close to the purpose He has given us.
For those who consider themselves atheists and/or rationalists, even without a G-O-D in the equation, our true moral purpose must be objective. To Aristotle, “good” wasn’t whatever one wanted it to be. Something was “good” only if it fulfilled its purpose: A good clock tells time, a good horse obeys its master, a good mug doesn’t leak. And what does a good person do? Act morally and with reason.
The American founders understood this very well:
The consideration that human happiness and moral duty are inseparably connected, will always continue to prompt me to promote the progress of the former, by inculcating the practice of the latter.
— George Washington, Letter to the Protestant Episcopal Church (1789)
Happiness flows downstream of answering the call of moral purpose, much like how pine cones can only fall from evergreens. A maple forest, no matter how large, can not produce a single pine cone. Pleasure, no matter how much, can not bring true joy if it comes from all the wrong places.
GROUP pursuit: civic duty and community
The only company that loneliness has is misery.
I think that the rise in mental maladies in our postmodern age is a backlash against the push for radical autonomy. Messages such as “be yourself shamelessly!”, “you are perfect as you are!”, and “be independent and save yourself!” have reduced the civic responsibility we each feel we need to carry.
Independence has its role in the human life, but which one of us raised ourselves? Did it not involve parents, grandparents, siblings, cousins, pastors, rabbis, teachers, babysitters, and the members of our society who put food on our tables, electricity in our houses, and clean water in our pipes? It really does take a village to raise a child.
We need colleagues to support us at work, friends for companionship, and safety nets to fall back on. We’re wired to bond with one another and keep an eye out for our neighbors; some might just call it evolutionary altruism, but that doesn’t take away from the fact that we need community. We are social because we need to feel like we have played a valuable role in something larger than ourselves.
No one can live happily who has regard to himself alone and transforms everything into a question of his own utility.
— Seneca
When it comes to a baby in a crib or an elderly parent at a retirement home, we understand this intuitively—it’s blatantly obvious that the young and the old need social support! Yet, we overlook the importance of community in the entire span of life between these two stages. Being healthy and able-bodied doesn’t make one more civically independent, that is, removed from the social network.
A massive longitudinal study at Harvard found that the single best predictor of lifelong happiness was the presence of close relationships: satisfaction with relationships at age fifty was more predictive of senior health than cholesterol level. Sociologist Emile Durkheim found that we can measure suicide rate by social intimacy. Jonathan Haidt says, “If you want to predict how happy someone is, or how long she will live (and if you are not allowed to ask about her genes or personality), you should find out about her social relationships. Having strong social relationships strengthens the immune system, extends life (more than does quitting smoking), speeds recovery from surgery, and reduces the risks of depression and anxiety disorders.”
We become miserable when we are too isolated. We need a bond that is broader than romantic love, friendship, and mentorship. We need social capital in order to function (i.e., shared norms, trust, and charity).
But, how do the individual and the group work together?
The individual and group pursuits of moral good are united by the Golden Rule: You shall love your neighbor as yourself.
Imagine a really long piano (one where 100 people can play on at the same time).
Imagine that the piano came with a few pages of sheet music that tell you which notes can be played together if you want to make pleasant sounding chords. If all 100 people follow the instruction, we make music that all 100 people can enjoy at the same time.
Now, imagine that one person decides to abandon the instruction and play their own tune. They decide to bash their fists onto the keys, just for the kick of it. One person gets to indulge in temporary fun, ninety nine people are forced to listen to abhorrent noise, and all one hundred people lose the music that made them a community. In the end, nobody is really happy.
Autonomy is the unfettered capacity to do whatever you want. Autonomy says, do as you please. Freedom is the power or right to act, speak, or think as one wants in the pursuit of moral good—happiness—while allowing others to do the same.
“Follow your heart” and “do as you wish” the central messages of a society that prioritizes autonomy over freedom. Autonomy says I make the rules, freedom says I can use the rules to do what I want to do. Autonomy is too bold to endure rules, but too timid to endure responsibilities. That’s why, more often than not, one person’s autonomy results in another’s suffering.
Without individual purpose given to us through a connection to something bigger than ourselves, we are led astray by ads and influences that tell us we’ll be happy when we buy xyz (why are discounted drinks called ‘happy hour’?).
The libertine destroys himself and his relationships because his atomistic desires have the tendency to grow selfish, self-justifying even the worst of oppressions (autonomy must be purchased with someone else’s capacity).
Even the enlightened/non-religious naturalists agree that we need a shared moral purpose:
I want my lawyer, my tailor, my servants, even my wife to believe in God, because it means that I shall be cheated and robbed and cuckolded less often…If God did not exist, it would be necessary to invent him.
— Voltaire
Freedom must include responsibility if that freedom is intended to last. Freedom that is abused enough times by hedonistic autonomists will diminish into nothing.
True happiness is a fruit of the pursuit of virtue. The heart may be an instrument that feels happiness, but happiness doesn’t ultimately come from the heart—after all, the stomach doesn’t make itself dinner when it’s hungry.
To be happy, we each need to be made equal in value yet not above the source of our intrinsic value. In other words, we need to be free to pursue purpose and happiness without trespassing the moral infrastructure that allows our happiness to occur in the first place.