Happiness is Not the Purpose of Life

And yet, it isn't too hard to defuse what Larry Iversen (making friendly fun of me) once referred to as the "happiness-grenade."

At this point, people often expect me to make a moral argument. You shouldn't want happiness above all other things. There are other things that should, in some ethical or mystical way, be more important to you. But that isn't my argument at all: I claim that you do want more than just happiness. You value other things, right now.

Do people have a tendency to dump on you?
Does your group have more cavities than theirs?
Do all the hippies seem to get the jump on you?
Do you sleep alone when others sleep in pairs?
Well there's no need to complain,
We'll eliminate your pain.
We can neutralize your brain.
You'll feel just fine now.
Buy a big bright green pleasure machine!
-Paul Simon

In 1954, over a decade before Paul Simon penned the satirical "Big Bright Green Pleasure Machine," the scientists James Olds and Peter Milner invented the real thing: a button that sent a small electrical impulse directly into the pleasure centers of a rat's brain. As you might guess, the rat became a full-time button-pusher. "Even if an animal was deprived of food for 24 hours, when confronted with a choice between food and this particular type of brain stimulation, it would always select the latter."¹

The experiment was repeated with a wide variety of animals, large and small. Direct electrical stimulation provides an irresistible appeal for bulls and for monkeys, for cats and for human beings alike. Did you realize that the ultimate drug has been available for half a century? A typical human research subject "stimulated himself to a point that he was experiencing an almost overwhelming euphoria and elation, and had to be disconnected, despite his vigorous protests."

So, here is my ultimate social program. For a small fraction of the U.S. annual deficit, we could hook every man, woman, and child on Earth up to a brain electrical stimulator. We could all just sit down and relax, wherever we are, and plug in. Rich or poor, male or female, capitalist or Communist, religious or atheist, we would all be one big, literally happy, family of man.

What do you think of my idea? Sure, we'd all die eventually. But we're all going to die eventually anyway: the goal is not long life, but happiness, right?

Most people don't find that idea particularly appealing when I suggest it. They find it terrifying, creepy, and pathetic, to name a few. Our culture has so far avoided hard-wired happiness like the plague: "Not even victims of intractable neuropathic pain or depression are permitted to have their pleasure centers wired." Why on Earth not? Why aren't all the selfish people trying to get their hands on a brain-stimulator at all costs? More to the point, why aren't the selfless, compassionate people trying their best to help other people get their hands on one? Why does anyone bother with anything else?

Because...well, when you come right down to it, all that machine can provide is happiness. Practically everyone I speak to about this decides that being happy, or even making everyone in the world happy, is not in itself a good idea. At least, not doing it like that. Apparently, we all have some other priorities that trump happiness. What do you think they are?

Although the rat experiment is my favorite way to debunk happiness as a goal, I've accumulated quite a few others over the years.

• Disturbingly simulated happiness is a recurring theme in the Twilight Zone and other science fiction staples. Here is a typical scenario: we find a man hooked into a virtual reality simulation of a perfect world. His wife—who died years ago in real life—is still alive, as beautiful as she was at 17 years old, and perfectly in love with him. His children, who are really criminals and drug addicts, appear to him as perfect little angels, perpetually cheerful and eternally grateful for having such a wonderful father. The happier the protagonist is, and the greater the contrast we see between his imaginary world and the real one, the more depressing we find the story. We don't just want him to be happy: we want it to all be true. Please, wake up!

• On a less individual and more greater-society level: if the goal of our political system is to maximize human happiness, don't we all have an obligation to spawn as many children as possible? I mean, the more people there are, the more total happiness there probably will be, right? No, that can't be right. Maybe the goal is to maximize the average happiness of the human species. So then, let's start by killing all the sad people. No, that can't be right either, can it? Wait a minute...

• Back to the personal: look at how we spend our free time! We read sad books and watch depressing movies. (Or stressful, or terrifying, or...) I'll bet if you hooked an emotion-detector to a typical teenaged boy playing a typical video game, it would read "happy" or "triumphant" about 5% of the time, and "frustrated" or "angry" at least 80%. If you created a video game where the user was perpetually winning, how well do you think it would sell?

Once you get the idea, you can probably start generating your own arguments. No one actually pursues happiness as his only, or even primary, goal. There are other things that we want more than happiness.

That idea has serious political consequences. Almost every political argument I hear—left, right, or center—makes the implicit assumption that the final end of all our labors will be to make us all downright giddy all the time. If that isn't the goal, the arguments are left completely empty.

But I'm more interested in the personal consequences.

Here's another experiment you can run. Ask people, of all the experiences they have had in the past 10-20 years, which ones were the most valuable: which experiences helped shape them, which experiences they would never want to give up, which experiences they are the most grateful for. You may hear some really nice stories, but you will also hear a lot of trauma. The time my boyfriend left me...the time I didn't make the team...the six-month period when I only got four hours of sleep every night...times that people were pushed out of their comfort zone, and experiences that seemed agonizing at the time, often make the top of the list. And yet, how do we live our lives and make our choices? We avoid those kinds of experiences at every opportunity, opting instead for whatever seems comfortable, safe, and un-challenging.

If we can choose experiences in advance based on criteria such as "being the best person I can be" instead of "feeling good," I think our lives will go much better. Ironically, I think we will even tend to end up, in the long run, happier.

¹All my information about the neural pleasure experiments, and all the direct quotes in this paper other than the Simon & Garfunkel song, come from www.damninteresting.com/technology-and-the-pursuit-of-happiness.

Thanks!

So happiness becomes a complicated mixture of gratitude that I have a job & family, pride in my work and in following my principles, and the ability to appreciate even the things that aren't tripping the trigger of the pleasure center of the brain—doing the dishes, compromising with the spouse on the budget, filling out paperwork at the job.

If I'm reading you correctly, the "uncomfortable bits" are a sort of unfortunate necessity. But are they really? If you could have a job where your talents are a perfect match for the requirements, so you are good at everything, with no stretching or pain required, would you want it?

Necessity, yes. Unfortunate, no. Learning and growing, while not always "fun in the moment" lead to bigger/wider/better talents/skills or uses of your talents/skills. So part of "happiness" as I'm driving towards it is the ability to appreciate tests as they happen.

Very nice. One thing that seems to correlate well with happiness is the ability to demonstrate competence. This can happen in adversity, perhaps even more easily.

I'm not quite sure I followed what you're saying: adversity leads to competence which in turn leads to happiness, so therefore, adversity leads to happiness?

Oh, and I guess my terminology got influenced by the original topic. You could also substitute "challenge" for "adversity." As far as I know, the event doesn't need to have a huge potential downside. It just needs to provide a change to display competence, as opposed to favoritism, luck, etc.

I would rather my life be about making realistic contributions to humanity then my own happiness. I'm thinking about interface design for augmented reality, eventually branching into (hopefully) devices used by doctors during surgery/brain scans. I'm not the best at actually writing code, but designing/producing applications seems to be my thing. Also a food co-op which is 1. vegan, 2. preservers less commonly grown varieties of edible plants/fungi/bacteria whatever, 3. free. I actually want the co-op to be the type of idea that works well enough to outlive me, and I've been gardening for a couple years and giving most of the food away to keep my 'green thumb'. These are the eventual goals of my life, just about everything that I'm doing now, is cutting my teeth (or ways to generate the money necessary) for these things.

I like the essay a lot and I would agree with it 100% if you substituted "pleasure" for "happiness"; however, I think an argument can be made that most if not all of us are pursuing happiness, with the definition of the term being completely idiosyncratic. I'm certainly not living a life designed to maximize my pleasure, but in choosing to burden myself with overcommitments and incessant travel—sometimes to places that I would never go for a vacation (India comes to mind) and not nearly enough time for music and reading and playing with my kids and grandkids, in the long run the satisfaction I get from the impact of what I'm doing on other people and the recognition and appreciation I get from so many of them brings me a huge amount of happiness. (I'd probably be even happier if my first drafts of things didn't contain so many sentences as long as that one.)

With that in mind, it is important for us to always try bring happiness to ourselves and others—even in difficult circumstances—and even if it's not the meaning of life.

As much as I am attracted to Buddhism, one of the stumbling blocks for me has always been the emphasis on "suffering," and the end thereof, which forms the heart of the system going all the way back to the origin. This may give me a new handle on that one. Thanks!

Something you said in your original post is what got me on this track to begin with. You wrote "Please, wake up!"—the Buddha means "Awakened one".

Still, I find myself far more drawn to Buddhists when they promise to help me see things as they really are than when they promise to help me end suffering.

I like Richard's happiness/pleasure distinction. Aristotle viewed happiness as harmony with the cosmos; and it is our struggles with ourselves that make it possible to transform those parts of us that are not in harmony with the cosmos. I think this is where the Buddha was coming from too: we suffer because we are not in harmony with the cosmos. Overcoming suffering is bringing ourselves into harmony with the cosmos. Attachment to the phenomena of the material world (including emotional and other soul phenomena) takes us out of harmony with the cosmos; and we learn to renounce attachment through practicing the eight exercises (Right Thought, Right Word, Right Deed, and so on).

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