Pursuit of Happinesses

Last month, I was asked to give a talk titled “How to achieve happiness.” I said yes, of course, but privately I scoffed at the title.

Achieving happiness seemed a ridiculous thing to dangle in front of an audience of 100 people on a Wednesday night in a pub in Central London. I might as well offer them enlightenment, or eternal salvation.

It seems ludicrous, and probably harmful, to promise happiness. Happiness is elusive. At best, it’s fleeting. And to try to be happy is useless, or worse. Even Sigmund Freud dismissed happiness as the goal of therapy, saying instead that the aim should be to restore “ordinary unhappiness.” Perhaps that is the best we can hope for.

The philosopher John Stuart Mill went further, saying that seeking happiness actually makes it harder to achieve. “Ask yourself whether you are happy, and you cease to be so”, he said.

So it seemed I had two bad options: cop to the fact that I had no intention of fulfilling the promise of the title, or commit to the fraud, and convince myself, and maybe a few people in the audience, that in 45 minutes, I could actually tell them something useful about this great and elusive mystery of life.

In the days leading up to the talk I asked my friends what they thought, and they all seemed to agree with the philosophers and religious teachers that happiness is too much to hope for. From Buddha to Plato to Aristotle to Jeremy Bentham and Mill to Freud, everyone warns that feeling good is unsustainable. Real happiness, they say, is not so much a feeling, but a life well-lived. According to all these serious thinkers, it’s not just that real happiness doesn’t mean feeling pleasure, but that pleasure is actually poison to happiness.

The things that bring us pleasure need to be enjoyed in small amounts, or sometimes avoided altogether, they say. They are harmful, addictive, and the pleasure they bring never lasts. The key, so say the experts, is not to have too much of them, to moderate. Overindulgence in pleasure eventually leads to great pain, and so real happiness can only be achieved through a kind of tranquilized contentment, an absence of pain rather than the presence of any especially good feeling. And really, that’s fine, because feelings of pleasure and joy, let alone euphoria or ecstasy, are not what happiness really is.

It was three days before my talk when I started to suspect there was something really perverse in the fact that all these philosophers of happiness tell you to be suspicious of anything that makes you feel very happy. Why are they all afraid of pleasure? And are they right to be?

It struck me that perhaps the things that the philosophers are worried about aren’t really all that pleasurable.

Numbing ourselves for too long, however, makes it impossible to feel the sadness, and open ourselves up to the joy that sometimes waits beyond it.

Junk food. Scrolling Instagram at 11:30 at night. Sex with people you don’t really like. It’s true that these things should be avoided, but not because we need to be careful about overindulging in pleasure. We shouldn’t do these things because they’re not actually that pleasurable at all. The things that are actually enjoyable - hanging out with good friends, dancing, watching a good movie, sex with someone you’re attracted to - aren’t bad for you. There’s no reason to stay away from them, and although it is possible to overdo it, it would be pretty weird to warn someone to be “careful not to make too much art!” instead of offering a supportive “have a great day making art!”

For millenia, philosophers have been warning against overeating and indiscriminate promiscuity because, they say, the pleasures that they offer are dangerously potent. But that’s not it at all! We should avoid these things not because the pleasure they provide is so intensely strong, but because the happiness they offer, even in the short term, isn’t potent enough.

The Black Feminist writers Audre Lorde and adrienne maree brown reject the prudishness of this attitude to happiness. Desire and the pursuit of what feels good, they say, are what teach us what’s worth pursuing, and what we need to fight back against if we’re going to get what makes us happy. According to them, the cautious attitude towards happiness makes us compilict in our own oppression by teaching us to neglect our needs and wants, including our need for political change. In her essay “The Uses of the Erotic,” Audre Lorde writes: “as we begin to recognize our deepest feelings, we begin to give up, of necessity, being satisfied with suffering and self-negation, and with the numbness which so often seems like their only alternative in our society.”

From the perspective of this radical hedonism, we can see that activities like binging Netflix and drinking three pints of Guinness are not intensely pleasurable, no, they are just easy to find. You can get a greasy hamburger on any corner, and find mild distraction any time you open Instagram, but these cheap imitations of pleasure are unsatisfying, which is why they’re also useful to the corporations that sell them. They follow the first rule of showbusiness: always leave ‘em wanting more.

A loving, sensuous relationship, on the other hand, needs to be carefully cultivated. It can be the source of intense pleasure, but it takes work to achieve. That’s why things that only offer an imitation of pleasure are dangerous: they can distract us from the more powerful, but harder to develop, sources of elation.

Still, binge-watching and binge-eating have their place. They give us ways to numb the pain. If you’re in turmoil and distress, it can really help to have something that lets you tune out for a while. Numbing ourselves for too long, however, makes it impossible to feel the sadness, and open ourselves up to the joy that sometimes waits beyond it.

It is still true, of course, that it’s possible to have too much of a good thing. Moderation is important, and so is deferred gratification, but the key isn’t to temper your joy, it’s to go after it! The priority and the emphasis is crucial: mistaking temperance for the main point, rather than a caveat, has done a lot to hinder our ability to confidently and curiously seek pleasure.

So, the key to happiness isn’t moderation, it’s refusing to be distracted by the bleh and meh. Maturing and learning to live well isn’t about learning to exercise restraint, at least not primarily; it’s about learning what really makes you happy and how to go about getting it. To preach moderation in the pursuit of pleasure before preaching the pursuit of pleasure itself is just perverse. By cautioning us against the pursuit of happiness, puritanical philosophers are teaching us to act against our own interests. They’re discouraging us from developing one of the most important capacities: our ability to tell the difference between what makes us happy, and what only offers a numbing imitation of happiness.

I would never have proposed a title like “How to achieve happiness,” but what I thought had been a trap turned out, in fact, to offer a way to escape millenia of despair. Rather than making a promise it couldn’t keep, it pushed me to reject the perverse denial of happiness by those who claim we need to go about getting it in roundabout, complicated ways.

Of course, I couldn’t guarantee the crowd happiness, but in liberating myself, and maybe my audience, to pursue it, I could at least give us back hope.