There’s Something Better Than Happiness

… Both Beauvoir and Schopenhauer turn away from the life of recumbent happiness and toward something more difficult. Schopenhauer would probably think that Beauvoir asked too much of people, women and men both. To him, most of us don’t have the capacity to embrace authentic self-creation. The best we can manage is studying geography and the lives of insects. I tend to side with Beauvoir: As a teacher, I’m inclined to see the best in my students and have hopes for their futures that go beyond coin collections and amateur astronomy.

The last witness in my case against happiness — at least, happiness as perfect contentment — is interested in the enlightenment of humankind as well as of individuals. Friedrich Nietzsche’s archetype of the “last man” is the type of person who arises in a culture that encourages the pursuit of drone-like happiness. The last man is cautious: He has his “little pleasures for the day” and “little pleasures for the night.” He lives for tiny satisfactions: He never goes all out, never spends for vast returns. “A little poison now and then” — drugs, alcohol and empty entertainment are the last man’s delights. He’s willfully blind to the life of thought and artistic creation, or of being-for-itself, which Beauvoir thinks is necessary for true fulfillment. But he is, after his own fashion, happy.

When Nietzsche’s protagonist in his book “Thus Spoke Zarathustra” tells a crowd of people about the last man, they rise as one and entreat him: “Give us this last man, O Zarathustra … Make us into these last men.” But it is too late. They already are last men and women and so, it appears, they will stay.

I don’t mean to malign every form of contented happiness. I only want to say that overall it may be better to seek meaning rather than pleasure. Of course, even the meaning-seekers need an occasional break, and why shouldn’t it be in a verdant glade or a sun-washed beach? For a while Nietzsche savored a blissfully relaxed life in Turin, Italy. (He felt that the waitress at his trattoria saved the lushest grapes for him.) 

Perhaps, though, we ought to make it a point not to stay in our happy place for too long and, surely, not to aspire to live in it for the rest of our lives.

Mark Edmondson

https://www.nytimes.com/2026/09/07/opinion/happiness-research-joy-mental-health.html?smid=nytcore-ios-share

Sane and happy

“Finally, I would like to assure my many Buddhist, Christian, Hindu, Jewish, and Muslim friends that I am sincerely happy that the religion which Chance has given you has contributed to your peace of mind (and often, as Western medical science now reluctantly admits, to your physical well-being). 

Perhaps it is better to be un-sane and happy, than sane and un-happy. But it is best of all to be sane and happy. Whether our descendants can achieve that goal will be the greatest challenge of the future. Indeed, it may well decide whether we have any future.”

—Arthur C. Clarke 

Colombo, Sri Lanka September 19, 1996

3001: The Final Odyssey Valediction/afterword
https://a.co/0aG1eeZZ

“the pursuit of happiness” had become the pursuit of riches

Hannah Arendt’s American Education

…Thomas Jefferson’s “pursuit of happiness” retained an older sense of “public happiness,” the pleasure of participating in town meetings, councils, and congresses. That meaning faded, however, and “the pursuit of happiness” had become the pursuit of riches and, eventually, consumerism as a way of life…

https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2026/08/17/hannah-arendt-life-of-the-mind-thomas-meyer-book-review-an-admirable-woman-arthur-cohen

Starved for meaning

Arthur Brooks says we are starving our right brains of love, meaning, mystery, purpose, and (thus) our whole selves of happiness… https://youtu.be/rSJQf72jlGA?is=rylTWtsfMI0oNQnx

Is “feeling loved” the key?

Sonja Lyubomirsky has been a leading researcher on the science of happiness for decades. And for just as long, people have asked her: What is the secret?

Dr. Lyubomirsky, a distinguished professor of psychology at the University of California Riverside, has always chafed at this question. The secret to happiness? How ridiculous and reductive.

When pressed, she told me she tends to say something along the lines of: “Connection and relationships. Positive thinking, which includes gratitude. And a sense of control in your life.”

But if she really had to choose one thing, she said, the secret to happiness is “feeling loved.”

That’s the premise of her latest book, “How to Feel Loved,” out today, which she co-wrote with Harry Reis, a professor of psychology at the University of Rochester who studies close relationships...

https://www.nytimes.com/2026/02/10/well/lyubomirsky-reis-how-to-feel-loved.html?smid=nytcore-ios-share

“Why should I strive for happiness?”

Looking forward to John Kaag’s October 2 MTSU Lyceum visit, when I’m sure he’ll affirm the possibility of happiness in work. I’ve decided we’ll read this book in Existentialism just before he arrives (and we’ll read how William James saved his life in CoPhi then, too).

“For Nietzsche, I consoled myself, the point was not about avoiding or even conquering suffering: he recognized, like so many philosophers before him, that suffering was a fundamental fact of human existence. But the ascetic response to suffering was to understand it as a complaint about life. My challenge—the challenge Nietzsche raises—was to embrace life with all its suffering. When he wrote, at the very end of his career, “Have I been understood? Dionysus versus the Crucified,” he meant to show that suffering does not refute life as we experience it but must be welcomed, embraced, in exactly the same way we welcome and embrace happiness. In fact, Nietzsche often sounds as though happiness is at best a kind of secondary goal. In Thus Spoke Zarathustra, Nietzsche’s most famous character, having spent his life in the mountains, concludes: “Happiness? Why should I strive for happiness? I strive for my work.””

— Hiking with Nietzsche: On Becoming Who You Are by John J. Kaag
https://a.co/02BXPDFc

A Happy Death by Albert Camus

“You make the mistake of thinking you have to choose, that you have to do what you want, that there are conditions for happiness. What matters—all that matters, really—is the will to happiness, a kind of enormous, ever-present consciousness. The rest—women, art, success—is nothing but excuses. A canvas waiting for our embroideries.”

https://www.goodreads.com/work/quotes/1591380-la-mort-heureuse

“The best minds of my generation…”

…There is a war for the brightest students in America. And for decades, one side has vastly outspent the other. Every year, the consulting firms, the banks, the law firms and the venture capitalists pour fortunes into recruiting top graduates. As one early Facebook employee famously put it: “The best minds of my generation are thinking about how to make people click ads. That sucks.”

…

https://open.substack.com/pub/rutgerbregman/p/these-harvard-students-dont-want?r=35ogp&utm_medium=ios

In the presence of hope

“Trudeau has produced a steady stream of fierce social criticism for nearly sixty years and has no intention of changing his tune anytime soon. He remains an eternal optimist who vows to continue to make the most of whatever breathing room he is given. As the cartoonist emphasizes, “It’s a lot easier to get through the day in the presence of hope.””

— Trudeau & Doonesbury: A Biography: The Cartoonist Who Turned the News into Art by Joshua Kendall
https://a.co/0crdHVEP

Defiant optimism

… Humans are future-oriented creatures. Not being able to look ahead deprives us of what matters most. Data collected in an ongoing study on people’s well-being showed that young adults across the world score low not just on happiness but on eudaemonistic well-being, including meaning, purpose and fulfilling relationships.

As an adolescent, I took solace in the saying “Even if I knew that tomorrow the world would go to pieces, I would still plant my apple tree.” This aphorism, often attributed to Martin Luther, wasn’t about the joy of digging holes. It represented defiant optimism in the face of uncertainty. In the hardest moments of my youth, my goals gave me dignity and agency. When the present felt unbearable, my aspirations allowed me to transcend my surroundings. I think about sitting in the back seat of my rusty car, clutching an SAT book. I still bear the scars of my work ethic; I wish I’d known, like today’s youth, how to give myself more grace. But I also wish they understood how the dream itself illuminated the path a few feet ahead of me, until I stood on solid ground.

https://www.nytimes.com/2026/07/23/opinion/gen-z-ambition-millennials-career.html?smid=nytcore-ios-share