"The words “happy” and “happiness” work hard. You can buy a Happy Meal, or drink a cheap cocktail during happy hour. You can pop “happy pills” to improve your mood or post a “happy” emoji on social media. We value happiness highly. Singer Pharrell Williams’ song “Happy” was number one and the bestselling song of 2014 in the United States, as well as in twenty-three other countries. Happiness, according to Williams, was a transitory moment of elation, or feeling like a hot-air balloon. Yet we are confused about happiness. Almost everyone believes that they want to be happy, which usually means a lasting psychological state of contentment (despite what Williams sings). If you tell your children that you “just want them to be happy,” you mean permanently. Paradoxically, in our everyday conversations, happiness far more often refers to the trivial and temporary glee of a meal, cocktail, e-mail message. Or, as Lucy in the Peanuts comic strip put it after hugging Snoopy, an encounter with “a warm puppy.” A “happy birthday” is a few hours of enjoyment to celebrate the anniversary of your birth. What if happiness were a lifelong state of being? Philosophers are divided into two main camps about what that would actually mean. On one side, happiness is objective, and can be appreciated, even evaluated, by an onlooker or historian. It means having, for example, good health, longevity, a loving family, freedom from financial problems or anxiety. According to this definition, Queen Victoria, who lived to over eighty, gave birth to nine children who survived into adulthood and was admired around the world, had a clearly “happy” life. But Marie Antoinette was clearly “unhappy”: two of her four children died in infancy, she was reviled by her people and executed while still in her thirties. Most books about happiness refer to this objective “well-being” definition, as do the studies set up by governments to measure the happiness of their citizens on an international scale. Since 2013, on 20 March every year the United Nations has celebrated the International Day of Happiness, which seeks to promote measurable happiness by ending poverty, reducing inequality and protecting the planet. But on the other side are philosophers who reject this, and instead understand happiness subjectively. To them, happiness is not akin to “well-being” but to “contentment” or “felicity.” According to this view, no onlooker can know if someone is happy or not, and it is possible that the most outwardly boisterous person might be suffering from deep melancholy. This subjective happiness can be described, but not measured. We cannot assess whether Marie Antoinette or Queen Victoria was happier for a greater proportion of her time alive. Perhaps Marie Antoinette enjoyed long hours of intense gratification, and Victoria never did, having been widowed early and having lived for years in seclusion. Aristotle was the first philosopher to inquire into this second kind of subjective happiness. He developed a sophisticated, humane program for becoming a happy person, and it remains valid to this day. Aristotle provides everything you need to avoid the realization of the dying protagonist of Tolstoy’s The Death of Ivan Ilyich (1886), that he has wasted much of his life scaling the social ladder, and putting self-interest above compassion and community values, all the while married to a woman he dislikes. Facing his imminent death, he hates his closest family members, who won’t even talk to him about it. Aristotelian ethics encompass everything modern thinkers associate with subjective happiness: self-realization, finding “a meaning,” and the “flow” of creative involvement with life, or “positive emotion"...
Aristotle's Way: How Ancient Wisdom Can Change Your Life" by Edith Hall: https://a.co/inx7Ndk
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