Are you happy? Am I happy? What is happiness anyway? Can we figure this out? Well, let’s see whether we can first look into what happiness actually is. Given that this is such a complicated question, let’s try to ask for some help.
Viktor Frankl on Meaning and Choice
First, I’d like to look at Viktor Frankl, famous for his book Man’s Search for Meaning. He wrote it as a Holocaust survivor. He knows what suffering is, and he writes about meaning and happiness.
He says in his book
“Everything can be taken from a man but one thing: the last of the human freedoms—to choose one’s attitude in any given set of circumstances, to choose one’s own way. We always have a choice in how we react.”
Maybe I should have put up this T-shirt phrase: “It’s not about what happens, it’s how you react.” This is the more elaborate version.
Furthermore:
“When we are no longer able to change a situation, we are challenged to change ourselves. We are expected to grow in life. We are expected to develop. Us as a child should be different than us as an older person with experience.“
When we think about all those questions that we have—questions about happiness or unhappiness—these are deep questions that are deeply philosophical. Frankl points out:
“A man’s concern, even his despair over the worthwhileness of life, is an existential distress, but by no means a mental disease.”
Now, I am not a therapist. Frankl is a psychoanalyst. We oftentimes run the risk of thinking about people who are unhappy as having some kind of mental illness. This is not about mental illness. This is about philosophy. This is about existentialism. This is about one of the basic questions of existence that are deeply human—probably animal, probably even more. Everything that is alive probably asks themselves, in whatever way they can, “Why am I here?”
This is not an illness. This is who we are as people.
The Search for Meaning
So much for meaning as a central obsession of people. What is the meaning of life? What is the meaning of me? The meaning of life—I can’t tell you what it is, but it is important to ask that question. It is important to live a life that in some way creates meaning and gives meaning not just to oneself but to others.
Understanding Unhappiness
If we ask the question “What is happiness?” maybe it’s easier to ask “What is unhappiness?”
Paul Watzlawick wrote a book in German with a title that translates to the American subtitle The Pursuit of Unhappiness or How to Be Unhappy. The book’s title is The Situation is Hopeless but Not Serious.
Watzlawick has this famous scene that might come straight out of a Seinfeld episode:
A man wants to hang a painting. He has the nail but not the hammer. Therefore, it occurs to him to go over to the neighbor and ask him to lend him his hammer. But at this point, doubt sets in. What if he doesn’t want to lend me the hammer? Yesterday he barely spoke to me. Perhaps maybe he was in a hurry. Or perhaps he holds something against me. But why? I didn’t do anything to him. If he would ask me to lend him something, I would at once. How can he refuse to lend me his hammer? People like him make other people’s lives miserable. Worse, he thinks that I need him because he has a hammer. This has got to stop! And suddenly the guy runs to the neighbor’s door, rings, and before letting him say anything, he screams, “You can keep your hammer, you bastard!”
This character in the book has what in German is called Kopfkino—a movie running in that person’s head, imagining the worst possible situation. We imagine people to act a certain way, to believe a certain way. We assume them to have a certain positionality.
If we are very obsessive thinkers, we make up things. We think, “I have to meet with this person, but…” and then all kinds of things start coming up, rather than allowing ourselves to look at a situation fresh. We are letting ourselves be biased against the situation, against the person, filled with all kinds of fears, stereotypes, anxieties, or maybe also hopes that are unrealistic.
Maybe happiness is, for instance, not to do this.
The Art of Loving
But happiness also is connected, I would argue, to love. Another famous psychoanalyst, Erich Fromm, wrote many things, but this is maybe his most famous: The Art of Loving. As you can see from this collage I created here, it’s a book that has been translated into all kinds of languages.
It’s not about intercourse. It’s about how we love and what love is. It’s about how we relate to ourselves, to other people around us and close to us, and to society as a whole and to God or the universe. It’s about how we position ourselves, how we learn how to act towards others without pure selfishness, but in a way that creates meaning for us and others and that also figures out where we are in the universe.
Fromm also wrote Escape from Freedom, a core book about why people may choose to live in an authoritarian society—why they may volunteer the one thing that they should insist upon: their freedom. But if we give that freedom up, we also give up responsibility.
Arno Gruen, another psychoanalyst, writes about how we are afraid of autonomy, how we give up ourselves sometimes willingly, and how this leads to pathology.
Enlightenment and Freedom
This is another theme here that reminds us maybe of Immanuel Kant and the question of enlightenment. What is enlightenment? According to Kant,
Enlightenment is man’s emergence from his self-imposed immaturity. Immaturity is the inability to use one’s understanding without guidance from another. This immaturity is self-imposed when its cause lies not in lack of understanding but in lack of resolve and courage to use it without guidance from another. Sapere aude—dare to know! Have courage to use your own understanding. That is the motto of the enlightenment.
And later on, he connects this to freedom:
Nothing is required for this enlightenment, however, except freedom, and the freedom in question is the least harmful of all, namely the freedom to use reason publicly in all matters.
“Publicly” means politically. It means we are supposed to be active in society.
How does this connect to happiness? Because it connects to self-expression, authenticity, and meaning. It gives us meaning.
Nature and Transcendentalism
What else gives us meaning? We see again how this connects—it can be an understanding of nature. Again, that which is larger than us. See, now you understand maybe why this channel has the occasional nature video.
Ralph Waldo Emerson, the world’s maybe first influencer, public speaker—well, not the first, but in more recent times—made his money this way. He also sponsored Henry David Thoreau, who we may know as the inventor of civil disobedience.
In “Nature,” Emerson develops his philosophy of transcendentalism. So this is about, in a sense, religion.
“The happiest man is he who learns from nature the lesson of worship.”
And one of the more famous quotes:
“Man is a god in ruins. When men are innocent, life shall be longer and shall pass into the immortal as gently as we awake from dreams.”
And even more famously: “In the woods we return to reason and faith. There I feel that nothing can befall me in life—no disgrace, no calamity.” Again, a theme that then Viktor Frankl plays on.
“Standing on the bare ground, my head bathed by the blithe air and uplifted into infinite space, all my mean egotism vanishes. I become a transparent eyeball. I am nothing. I see all. The currents of the universal being circulate through me. I am part or particle of God.”
“I am nothing” may echo the idea of nirvana—the importance of not desiring too much because desire can be the path to unhappiness. Transparent eyeball, part of everything, seeing but being transparent, not even being seen—part of universal being. The idea that God is that which transcends us, which is larger than us, greater than us.
Religion and Compassion
And once we are at the topic of religion, the Dalai Lama wrote a book, The Good Heart, in which he looks at the commonalities between Christianity and Buddhism and reflects that the essence of any religion is a good heart.
“Sometimes I call love and compassion a universal religion. This is my religion.”
This is a theme that runs through everything the Dalai Lama has done.
The Active Life
Now this connects us, though, again to action. You can’t just have a good heart. You have to operationalize it. You have to act on it. Hannah Arendt speaks in The Human Condition about vita activa—the active life. Not just contemplating but acting on it. How do we relate to others?
And she also has something to say about happiness:
“The ultimate end of human acts is eudaimonia—happiness in the sense of living well, which all men desire. All acts are but different means chosen to arrive at it.”
Arendt also can tell us about tolerance. We know that she was in a relationship with Martin Heidegger. Heidegger, of course, used to be her professor but is also the lead thinker of National Socialism. Hannah Arendt later wrote a book on Eichmann in Jerusalem about one of the perpetrators of National Socialist crimes and specifically the Holocaust.
A very complicated relationship, a very complicated person, but a person who sees activity as a path to happiness.
Measuring Happiness
Now, that means maybe there are measurable things about happiness. The World Happiness Report gives us this map. You can Google it for yourself. It shows us several countries in the 7-plus or upper 6-plus realm that are the happiest.
In North America, that would be Canada, followed closely by the United States. In Europe: Finland, Sweden, Norway, and so on. Then New Zealand and Australia with similar numbers.
When it comes to Asia, it’s a little bit more complicated. They have Taiwan with 6.6—the happiest. Least happy there: Afghanistan. Least happy in Europe: Ukraine (well, there was already a war going on). Haiti in North America: 3.6, the unhappiest. Venezuela: 4.9—brutal dictatorship. Africa: Zimbabwe, 3.1. The most happy in Africa: Mauritius (well, that’s not even on continental Africa—that’s an island).
So it seems there’s a political component here. Another rendition of this map, maybe a little less confusing but with the same findings, looks also very closely related to the democracy index.
It may be easier to be happy when you don’t have to be afraid all the time of your government—when you don’t have to be afraid to say the wrong thing, to be imprisoned for nothing, to be disappeared, or to have that happen to your family. I guess that is a large part of happiness.
Components of Life Satisfaction
Let’s zoom into maybe what the US and Europe might look like. Psychology Today has this definition, you could say, of life satisfaction:
- Physical and mental health
- Relationships—family, at work, and in the community
- Income and employment—sufficient health and wealth (not huge, but sufficient)
- Citizen virtues of pro-sociality and trust
- Social support (it’s good to know that you have it if you need it)
- Personal freedom to make life choices (again, freedom)
- Lack of corruption (because it means lack of unpredictability)
- Effective governments (so you can count on the government to solve problems)
All these are measurable points—nothing too individual, nothing too subjective. So you can—and it’s important—and it’s a social science approach. Of course, social sciences are big on measuring things. But there’s a downside to that because you have to come up with things you can actually measure.
Europe’s Eurostat here shows life satisfaction also as a map and has these definitions:
- Life satisfaction or evaluation: A person’s cognitive overall assessment of their life
- Affect: The presence of positive feelings such as joy and the absence of negative feelings such as sadness or anger (maybe a little bit less easy to measure)
- Here the influence maybe of Hannah Arendt, of antiquity: Eudaimonia—the feeling that one’s life has meaning (again, meaning)
But maybe I cheated here because both of these speak of life satisfaction. Is that the same as happiness?
I mean, you can have someone fulfill all these criteria here and still be unhappy. We probably all know people like that. They have everything and are absolutely miserable because maybe they haven’t solved this existential question for themselves. Maybe they lack primal trust because of what happened when they were children. Maybe they’ve been disappointed by life so many times that it is difficult for them to find meaning.
Oh well.
Eudaimonia: The Good Spirit
But let’s go back to this idea of eudaimonia. So I have this Greek theater here to illustrate how old the concept is.
“Eu” means good. “Daimon” or “demon” in this sense means spirit or soul—being of good spirit.
Plato uses the image of a daimonion in Socrates’s Apology as that little voice that tells you something. But being of good spirit—that sounds like, to a certain degree, it’s up to you.
Happiness as Choice
Can you be happy not because of something—because you have money, sports car, whatever—but in spite of everything? Like going back to Viktor Frankl: Can you be happy in the worst of circumstances?
I mean, life is precious. Life is unique. You can always not be alive. It is a gift that can be very painful.
So we are having this conflict here between data—everything objective, measured, reality, but the question of who chooses these data points—versus the self, which is very subjective.
I may feel happy and everybody around me will say, “Well, how could you possibly be happy?” Or maybe it is coming down to choice. Can we choose to be happy? Can we choose to be unhappy?
Maybe it’s something we have to work on. And maybe that is also a good answer.
So What Now?
We know that bad things happen all the time.
I personally believe it’s important to collect happy moments. In Meet Joe Black, Death meets this old woman who’s dying and recollects that she has collected many pretty pictures in her life. And that’s it.
Collect happy moments. Remind yourself that you have done so. Hold on to those even in unhappiness and choose to be happy. Don’t wait till everything is perfect.
If we wait till everything is perfect, till everything fills these measurable criteria, life may be over.
It’s not what we have. It’s how we derive meaning from it. How we act on it towards ourselves and others.
Is that too easy? Maybe. I’ll insist on it.
It’s something we have to work on. We are happy if we allow ourselves to be happy. Doesn’t mean things can’t be better. It isn’t something ultimate, but it’s something that we can work towards.
If we connect this to externalities like consumption, possession, life stages, successes—this is all meaningless at the end. We all die, our kids will die, our kids’ kids will die, countries die, nations die, cultures die, planets die, solar systems, galaxies, universes—everything eventually dies.
It’s about now. It is about the immediate, maybe the near future. But it’s about our life here and now.
That’s all I can say.
And now with that, I hope this was helpful. I hope to have provided you with some sense of meaning.
[This was originally posted to YouTube as a video. This post is a slightly abbreviated transcript, preserving the oral style of the video.]
Erratic Attempts 