Stop Blindly Chasing Happiness!
4 Philosophical Theories of Happiness
Have you ever worked hard for something you thought would bring you happiness only to get it and feel empty and disappointed?
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This can happen when you don’t have a clear view of what you’re after when you’re looking for happiness. Without a clearly articulated philosophy of happiness, you can keep chasing an obscure, moving target. You can work hard your whole life to be happy but never achieve any lasting happiness.
By investigating the philosophy of happiness, you can learn about different ways of understanding what happiness is and how to achieve it. You can evaluate these different theories of happiness. And you can make an informed decision about what happiness means to you.
If you want your hard work in life to pay off, you owe it to yourself to get clear on your own view of what happiness is and how to achieve it. In order to do that effectively, it helps to explore how different philosophers think about happiness.
Below are four different philosophical approaches to happiness to spark your inquiry into understanding what happiness and how to achieve it on your terms. I briefly summarize each one and offer my own broad assessment of what it gets right and wrong. I invite you to critically engage with these alternatives as you develop your philosophy of happiness to apply in your own life.
1. Happiness as Feeling Good: Ethical Hedonism
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We all like to feel good. A lot. So a natural first approach of the nature of happiness is to hold that happiness just is feeling good. Philosophers who hold that happiness is pleasure are called hedonists and include Jeremy Bentham and John Stuart Mill.
Hedonism is certainly an initially plausible view, but it faces problems as a philosophy of happiness you apply to your own life. For one, there are things that feel good that are bad for you, like doing heroin, and there are things that feel bad that are good for you, like exercising. Hedonism needs to do some work to give the right place to these pains that seem to make us happy and pleasures that lead to misery.
This approach faces issues about how to understand the way pleasures relate to each other and to pain. It is tempting to think of pleasures as happiness atoms that really differ only in intensity. It is also tempting to think of pains as negative pleasures and of neither pleasant nor painful experiences as zero. And it would be awesome if we could determine the happiness of life by summing up the pleasures and pains of different moments in life.
Tempting as this might seem, this model of pleasure does not stand up to critical scrutiny. What does the pleasure of reading your favorite book have in common with sexual pleasures? What value do you get when you add the pleasure of achieving a big life goal with the pain of losing your best friend? Is the sum total positive (is it a better than a neutral experience? Or is it negative (worse than a neutral experience)?
Neither answer seems to get it right. It’s not better or worse than neutral. it’s in some ways better and in others worse. In short, our pleasure and our happiness are too complex to try to fit into a single dimension with positive and negative values.
Another worry comes from psychological research that suggests a “hedonic treadmill” in human psychology. The basic idea is that people have a tendency to improving circumstances so that more (or higher quality) resources are required to get the same level of pleasure as before. These treadmill effects suggest that it gets harder and harder to feel as good as you’ve felt in the past. If you’re a hedonist, this means that being happier becomes harder and harder as you go through life.
A final worry with this approach to happiness is that it makes happiness something in the head, a state of mind. This opens up the possibility of false happiness that is based on lies. Like the happiness of a deluded fool who thinks everybody loves him but who people only pretend to like and secretly despise. This might be a life that feels good, but it is not the kind of life you’d wish on a friend or a child. To that extent, it is not a truly happy life.
Ultimately, it seems too flat-footed to think that happiness is all about pleasure and pain. And because of hedonic treadmill effects, adopting this philosophy of happiness can set you up for failure in trying to achieve happiness. Pleasure is important to a happy life, but happiness is not simply pleasure.
2. Happiness as Getting What You Want: Desire-Satisfaction Theory
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If pleasure’s not enough to get happiness, then something more substantial can perhaps get the job done, something tied to but richer than pleasure. A natural next thought is that happiness is getting what you want.
This is still a simple and intuitive view of what happiness is and how to achieve it but one that is a bit more substantial. After all, getting what you want often feels good and it is not just a state of mind but a state of the world, a state of the world doing what the mind wants. To that extent, it avoids the worry that hedonism faced about there being false happiness. Philosophers that advocate desire-satisfaction theories include David Hume and Wayne Sumner.
One natural worry this approach faces is that not all desires seem to actually contribute to happiness. Some, like the desire to count blades of grass, are trivial. Others, like the desire for violent revenge, are harmful and depraved. Yet others, like getting a promotion at your job, can leave you deeply unfulfilled, even when you satisfy it. Satisfying desires like these does not lead to happiness. It leads to unhappiness or worse, misery. Getting what you want does not always make you happy.
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To be plausible, desire-satisfaction theories need some way to distinguish the desires that lead to happiness and the ones that don’t. A lot of sophisticated versions of this theory try to come up with such a criterion that allows you to rationally clean up your desires to try to get rid of the misguided ones while keeping the plausible ones as part of your happiness. Some claim that it’s only your informed desires not based on false information, some that it's your authentic desires that stem from your own autonomous standards and values.
These more sophisticated versions of desire satisfaction theory, however, still cannot rule out deeply self-destructive or irrational desires that remain after being cleaned up from implausibly counting as part of your happiness. And there is an even deeper worry with these more sophisticated versions of desire-satisfaction theory: that they are not really versions of desire-satisfaction theory.
To the extent that these theories are able to rule out irrational, harmful, depraved, etc. desires, they seem to locate happiness less on what you want and more on what is worth wanting. That is, these theories seem to actually hold that happiness is about getting what is objectively good, even if you don’t happen to want it. To this extent, these theories collapse into a different kind of philosophy of happiness: happiness as the objectively good thing in life.
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Putting aside problems with the more sophisticated versions, any version of desire-satisfaction theory also faces worries as an approach to pursuing happiness due to psychological findings that suggest a “satisfaction treadmill” similar to the hedonic treadmill above.
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It is clear that a happy life does is a life where you sometimes get what you want, but holding that happiness just is getting what you want is problematic and can set you up for failure in the pursuing of happiness in your own life.
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This can lead to your needing more resources and more frequent and intense pleasures to reach the same level of satisfaction and so the level of happiness as before. As in the hedonic treadmill, the better your circumstances get, the harder it can be to stay happy and become happier.
It is clear that a happy life does is a life where you sometimes get what you want, but holding that happiness just is getting what you want is problematic. And because of treadmill effects, it can set you up for failure in the pursuit of happiness in your own life.
3. Happiness as Having Objectively Good Things in Life
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This is a more substantial view of what happiness is and how to achieve it. It makes happiness not a subjective matter of what you happen to like or want, but an objective matter of what is, in fact, good or worth wanting. Different objective list theorists (e.g., Amartya Sen and Martha Nussbaum) have different lists of what the objectively good things are. The list can include all kinds of things ranging from pleasure, wealth, and health, to having capabilities and opportunities, to friendship, knowledge, and virtue.
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This approach to happiness, like desire satisfaction theories, has the merit of ruling out the possibility of false happiness based on lies or illusions. It also has the merit of providing practical guidance to our pursuit of happiness. For it clearly lays out what you need to get in order to have a happy life and to make your life happier: more of the good things.
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Despite its appeal, there is something missing in this view of what happiness is and how to achieve it. For there are people who have all the material comforts and professional success you could hope for and families and friends that love them, that are miserable. You can have all the love, comfort, and support you can wish for in life, but if you spend your days agonizing about everything you don’t have or sleeping, you are not happy. You are not living a happy life.
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Merely having good things in life is not enough. You have to actually give the things in your life the right place and meaning in order to be happy. You have to appreciate your success, to exercise your virtue, to love your loved ones for those things to really make you happy. And this last insight leads us to the fourth and my preferred view of happiness:
4. Happiness as Living a Good Life
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In this approach to happiness, it’s not really about what you have in life. It’s about how you move through life.
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Philosophers who hold this view include ancient eudaimonist philosophers like Socrates and Aristotle who hold that all our intentional actions ultimately aim at some telos or final end, which is eudaimonia, living life as a whole well. Eudaimonia is the Greek word for happiness, but its meaning is closer to success/flourishing and not so close to enjoyment in comparison to the English ‘happiness.’
But I think versions of this approach to happiness can be found in a lot of spiritual and religious traditions like certain forms of Buddhism that locate enlightenment and escape from suffering in living a life that does not attach itself to fleeting things. We can also find it in some self-improvement approaches that located happiness in making progress and contributing to something greater than yourself, like Tony Robbins’s or Dean Graziosi’s.
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Different versions of this approach have their own particular vision of how to move through the world so as to live a good life. But they all emphasize the role of how you engage with what is around you in determining your happiness. In addition to ruling out false happiness and providing substantial practical guidance for becoming happier, this approach empowers you in your pursuit of happiness. For it holds that you can find happiness (and become happier) not by getting good (and better) things in your life, but by relating to what’s already in your life in a better way. This approach puts the reigns of your happiness in your hands and helps you build a life in which your happiness does not depend on anything external.
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This is my preferred philosophical approach to happiness. It provides a theoretically sophisticated analysis of what happiness is and a practical framework for becoming happier in your own life. It's all about finding the way of moving through the world that works for you. It's about designing and living out a truly good life on your own terms.
If this philosophy of happiness appeals to you, then the next step is for you to figure out which way of living the good life fits you best. To do this, check out my philosophical life design posts. You can use these philosophical concepts and tools to get life direction and clarify your own vision of the good life and to gather data and information on which ways of living out your vision of the good life make you truly happy.
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Conclusion
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A big reason why happiness sometimes feels so elusive is not that you’re incapable of it, but because you often don’t have a thought-out conception of what happiness is and how to achieve it.
In this post, I have shared with you four different philosophical approaches to understanding what happiness is and how to achieve it. I submit to you that the best way to understand what happiness is and to achieve it is by thinking of happiness not as pleasure, as getting what you want, as having the good things in life — but as living the good life. This is, of course, not the end of the conversation about the philosophy of happiness. I have not given an exhaustive review of every theory of happiness.
But I have surveyed some common plausible approaches to happiness and have argued that thinking of happiness as living a good life is the philosophy of happiness that best equips you to achieve real, lasting happiness in your own life.
This is my preferred philosophical approach to happiness. It provides a theoretically sophisticated analysis of what happiness is and a practical framework for becoming happier in your own life. It's all about finding a way of moving through the world that works for you. It's about designing and living out a truly good life on your own terms.
If you like this philosophical approach to happiness and are interested in pursuing it seriously in your own life, then you can take the next step by clarifying your vision of the good life. I've put together a unique tool that you can use to calibrate a Good Life Compass. This Compass will provide you with this clarity and guide you in your pursuit of the good life and happiness. Just sign up with your email and get this philosophical resource for living your own good life. You'll also get two free bonus resources that provide you with mindsets and reflections to make sure you're living your good life by making the best of whatever life throws at you!
If you're committed to living a truly happy life with this philosophical approach, then you simply must consider joining me for happiness coaching! I can use my almost twenty years of philosophical experience to help you navigate these issues and nail down your own way of living out the good life and finding lasting happiness, FAST. Save yourself the pain and wasted effort of fumbling around with approaches that won't get you lasting happiness. Accelerate your path toward true happiness with my unique philosophical approach to happiness coaching.
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Here's to Your Lasting Happiness,
Santi
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