… 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
