“Life is good”
So said the Amazonian Piraha people, according to Daniel Everett, before it became a popular marketing slogan.
Happiness (the class) begins for real today with Daniel Haybron’s Very Short Introduction, which includes that epigramatic reference to the Pirahas and then tells us that Socrates – so often exalted as a paradigmatically happy man, right up until the hemlock kicked in, in his 70th year – “didn’t miss out on a thing.” Well, he missed out on his 71st. Life might have been better, certainly longer.
Was Socrates happier than the average college student? “You might think the typical college student lives in a state of bliss,” with minimal obligations and maximal opportunities to ruminate, socialize, and party, but apparently that would be wrong. How many of them are living the examined life? Ignorance is perhaps not bliss, after all? But what about enlightened Socratic ignorance? Either way, American students are apparently less happy than we thought.
Panama is most blissful, evidently. Or was. More recent results point elsewhere. Denmark? Iceland? (I think I recall Eric Weiner’s Geography of Bliss giving them high marks.)
One way to chart our happiness index is to ask what’s on your bucket list. Another: what’s not on your deathbed list of things you just have to do one more time. Maybe not “another peck at the mobile phone, or one more trip to the mall.” Maybe you won’t wish you’d bought more crap.
“What sort of life ultimately benefits a person,” wondered Aristotle. What, not shopping or iPhoning? How many of us can even imagine how bizarre those activities would seem to an old Greek philosopher?
A young Intro student yesterday told me it was his impression that philosophy was mostly about pondering and pontificating on our feelings. But Haybron quickly withdraws feeling theories from the field, in favor of “life satisfaction.” But don’t confuse that with “subjective well-being,” a catch-all of psychologism he says we mustn't confuse with our real quarry.
Has there really never been a better time to be alive? I wouldn’t have said the first decade of this millennium was the best ever, but it depends on the yardstick. Steven Pinker’s Better Angels makes the case for our good luck.
Many indigenous peoples say the only thing they envy about the western industrial lifestyle is healthcare (and we know how fraught that is). William James told his friend Schiller to “keep your health, your splendid health – it’s worth all the truths in the firmament.” Hard not to agree, especially after a bout with serious illness. If you’ve not experienced that, by the time you reach “a certain age,” you’re even luckier than most.
Haybron says “we need a theory – a definition – of happiness.” Do we? What do you mean, we? We philosophers? We authors? We moderns? We shoppers and social media fanatics? Why can’t we be happily undefined and atheoretical? Presumably because the absence of a good theoretical framework leaves us in the wrong “state of mind.”
Happiness is a state of mind, for sure, but it’s even more a state of experience and expectation. No?
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