The Definition of Happiness

The bulk of my thinking on happiness comes from Aristotle. I won't say that my thinking is identical with his since I have the advantage of 2000 years of history to draw upon since his day. But I can say that his thinking stands the test of time especially his thinking on the subject of happiness.

Happiness is a life of rational activity. That's it. This is a very simple and easy definition, but the application of this definition is what makes it so complicated. What is rational activity? That is person relative and demands reason and judgment. Most people are not able to accomplish this which explains the frustration of their lives.

Everyone seeks happiness. It is the endpoint and goal of all our activities. The reason people are unhappy is because their activities are irrational. I will give an example. It has been known for many years that a great way to break someone's will is to give them labor with no purpose. The Marine Corps used this to great effect by making the recruits in their motivation platoons move piles of dirt all day. Nowadays, they just boot these people, but the motivation platoon worked because the human mind abhors such lack of purpose. The Greeks told the story of the myth of Sisyphus condemned to a roll a stone up a hill for eternity. To them, hell was senseless labor. People in real life situations of Sisyphean futility will opt for suicide rather than carry on.

The challenge for any person is to find meaning in all of it which leads to a tautology. The meaning of life is happiness, and happiness is the meaning of life. The reason happiness is like this is because it is the final end. For each of us, we must find our own happiness or end. To accomplish this is to be called "autotelic" which means self-directed. Here's a quotation from Wikipedia:

Autotelic is defined by one "having a purpose in and not apart from itself". It is a broad term that can be applied to missionaries, scientists, and innumerable other vocations.
Autotelic is used to describe people who are internally driven, and as such may exhibit a sense of purpose and curiosity. This determination is an exclusive difference from being externally driven, where things such as comfort, money, power, or fame are the motivating force.

Too often, people look to something outside of themselves for happiness. It could be a drug, a religion, an ideology, a group, or what have you. But these are false roads, and once they dead end, you are left bereft of purpose and meaning. This is why people will cling so tenaciously to these things even when they know they are false. But this is irrational which is definitely not what happiness is all about.

I think psychologists focus too much on the feeling that comes from autotelic activities or "flow." Aristotle placed happiness within a larger framework of rational activity. This is why he spends so much time talking about the Golden Mean and refuting misconceptions about what happiness is and is not. Happiness is not a feeling but a state of being. This implies objectivity. A person high on cocaine can be said to be experiencing flow but not be happy. His feelings will not reflect reality, and we can say that he is not happy but deluded.

Happiness comes from activity. You can't be idle and also be happy. You have to be doing something. This is why vacations and retirements make no sense. If they are used to pursue some other rational activity, they make sense, but this activity will look a lot like work except you aren't getting paid for it. This is how you get middle aged men rounding up cattle on a dude ranch for a week and paying for it. I have to wonder why they can't experience the same flow on the jobs they are paid to do.

The easiest and surest way to happiness is to fill your life with activities. Happy people do things. If you wonder where they get the energy from, it comes from the flow experience which is energizing. You can find flow in work, a sporting endeavor, a creative act, or studying a difficult subject. If it ever becomes boring, you have to change it up to increase the challenge.

My favorite example of an autotelic person is the character of Andy Dufresne from The Shawshank Redemption. The guy was in real shithole of a situation, but he turned it to his advantage. He fought against his attackers. He built a library. He built up the fortunes of the corrupt warden and undid him. And he escaped through a tunnel that took 19 years to chisel in the concrete. You would think a person in this situation would just give up, but he didn't. He found his flow. He did things. He acted. Those 19 years were probably a blur to him.

You will know you are happy when you hate having to sleep. You know you are happy when you wish that your life could go on forever in that state of being. Happiness is not dependant upon having a perfect life in a perfect world. It is finding perfection in the moment and losing yourself in it. This is rational activity. Arrange your life in such a way that you always live in this moment, and you will always be happy even when you die. The word Aristotle used was eudaimonia which means the "god within." This is what autotelic means. It is to have a god within you directing you and empowering you and making you who you are.

Posted in: