Happiness is dead. Happiness remains dead. And we have killed it. How shall we comfort ourselves, the murderers of all murderers?
Aristotle was the original philosopher who pointed out:
Happiness is the meaning and purpose of life, the whole aim, and end of human existence. – Aristotle
If you ask most people today what is the “ultimate purpose” of the actions they take and they will say, to be happy.
Unfortunately, things have changed. We have dropped the cost of happiness in the last few years by a huge amount.
Let me take an extreme example. Below is a description of what cocaine does to your brain from WebMD:
Cocaine primarily affects a neurotransmitter called dopamine, which plays an important role in the brain’s reward and reinforcement systems. The drug prevents dopamine molecules from being taken back up into the cell. This allows dopamine to build up in the synapse and have a much stronger effect on surrounding cells than it normally would. This is how cocaine causes the intense happiness and energy that it is often associated with.
WebMD - Cocaine’s Effect on the Brain: Everything You Need to Know
Combine this with Aristotle’s “whole aim of human existence” and you get:
“Try to get your hands on the max amount of cocaine you can for the lowest price possible. This is your life’s purpose.”
You are about to protest. So, let me preempt that:
You: Yeah but that’s not real happiness. You ingested a drug. That messed up normal brain functioning. That resulted in more “dopamine” or whatever. It’s not real.
Me: Sure. So, I took some action. That action leads to more dopamine. Which part of this is unnatural? The action part or the dopamine part? I am sure you can see that dopamine was always in the brain. It’s the action that got it to behave in a strange way and have a stronger effect.
You: Yes the action part.
Me: Okay, so if I do an action that gets my brain to release more dopamine than usual then that action is “unnatural”?
You: Yes. I would say so.
Me: So, you post a photo on Instagram and then get a notification that somebody liked it. That’s the action. Is that “unnatural”? Because that also produces a hit of dopamine.
Or say, you eat a nice cake slice. It was awesome and delicious. You get a juicy release of dopamine. Is that unnatural?
You: Okay, so your point is where does one draw a line of “natural” and “unnatural” actions right?
So, there is no line. The line is “subjective” and “arbitrary”. So, let’s not bother with it.
What we can say is: The amount of effort required to release dopamine in the brain is very low in the case of cocaine. And, if we measure “success” as “happiness” then the drug addict is the smartest person there is. He gets straight to the end without all the nonsense work the rest of us do.
Businesses around us are trying to deliver the largest hit of dopamine at the lowest cost. And, they are very good at doing so. The cost of dopamine has dropped to much lower levels than it was at Aristotle’s time.
The Other Issue With Happiness
Besides all this, Buddha would point out another problem with “happiness”. The problem that economists call the “law of diminishing marginal utility”.
This is what economists have to say to describe it:
Law of diminishing marginal utility, meaning that the first unit of consumption of a good or service yields more utility than the second and subsequent units, with a continuing reduction for greater amounts.
You know what this means. The first slice of pizza is awesome. The second is less so and the tenth is repulsive.
It is the same pizza. If you get 5 units of happiness from the first does not mean that you can eat 10 and get 50 units of happiness. You get about 10 units all at max.
The sultans of old would have the luxury of having singers and dancers perform in their courts. We turn on the TV and have 20 different singers and dancers performing for us at any given point. Are we 20 times happier than the sultans of old?
Buddha would ask you to notice that even if you try you cannot “control” your happiness and scale it up and down at will. You cannot do this even if you had all the resources in the world. You would still hit the law of diminishing marginal utility.
The Last Nail In The Coffin Of Happiness
I have one last shot to take at happiness. This one is thanks to Jordan Paterson and his book “12 Rules For Life”.
He points out: Say you want your children to be happy. Say that it is your highest goal. How would you treat your children then? Would you ask them to go out in the world where they could get hurt in so many different ways? Or would you give them an infinite supply of chocolate and have them sit in their room all day playing video games?
If you accept the ultimate goal is happiness, then do the second. But, you don’t. Because you know somewhere that things don’t work this way.
Happiness As “The Goal” Is Dead. So, let us bury it and move on.
I say all this so that we can put that idea aside and say that we have outgrown it. Say that we can see its flaws. And stop saying that we are doing things for happiness.
What do we replace happiness with? I have a hunch that the answer is Flow. I have a hunch that the goal is to try and spend the max amount of time in the “flow state”. But, I may be wrong. But this is what I am trying to explore now.
Order is not enough. You can’t just be stable, and secure, and unchanging, because there are still vital and important new things to be learned. Nonetheless, chaos can be too much. You can’t long tolerate being swamped and overwhelmed beyond your capacity to cope while you are learning what you still need to know. Thus, you need to place one foot in what you have mastered and understood and the other in what you are currently exploring and mastering. Then you have positioned yourself where the terror of existence is under control and you are secure, but where you are also alert and engaged. That is where there is something new to master and some way that you can be improved. That is where meaning is to be found.
Jordan Peterson, 12 Rules for Life: An Antidote to Chaos
The above could be the answer. But I am not sure. So, let’s see how it goes.