Happiness
Why did the Declaration of Independence guarantee life and liberty, but only promise the pursuit of happiness?
Perhaps the secret of happiness is that happiness is not something we can achieve. We can make happiness more probable by setting the groundwork for it to arrive, or we can make happiness less likely to occur, but the most we can hope for is to shift the odds in our favor.
Sometimes, happiness happens to happen, and sometimes it doesn’t happen. The difference is a matter of luck, of happenstance. Perhaps we will be happy. Perhaps we will not.
Full Transcript:
Jonathan Cook:
I want to ask for your indulgence, in the meandering path that this episode takes, and in the meandering path I took to putting it together. I have been pursuing the completion of this episode for a few weeks now, and it’s not just the holiday activity around the turning of the year that’s to blame for that.
I suspect that I am in the company of many who anticipate in the year 2024 an unpredictable path. Humanity is in the midst of several historic transitions, and here in the United States the upcoming election contest between Donald Trump and Joe Biden seems to be focusing combining an overall sense of uncertainty with the feeling that a great deal is at stake. This is a year when people across the world, not just in the United States will be grappling with fundamental questions of what we value, and what we must do in defense of our values.
Months ago, I determined that happiness would be the second episode of this third season of Stories of Emotional Granularity, and yet I have struggled to do justice to the feeling in the context of this winter of apprehension.
In spite of this trepidation, I wish you with sincerity a happy new year! This is the greeting, and the wish that people traditionally share with each other at this time of year.
It’s an easy thing to say, that we want other people to be happy. It’s also easy to think that we know what we mean when we say “happy new year”, but do we know what we mean by the word happy? Do we understand what happiness is?
Happiness seems like a simple emotion at first, a basic emotion. When people are asked to define what happiness actually is, however, people are often unsure what to say. Happiness feels so basic that we can take it for granted that we understand what happiness is all about. Yet, articulating happiness presents a surprising challenge. So, instead of defining happiness, we most often describe what happy moments are like.
Consider the moment of happiness Michael Hofeld experienced, as an example.
Michael Hofeld:
I don't know about you, but if you could tell me the happiest moment of your life, not the proudest moment, right, those are different things, people would be like, the happiest moment in life is when I had my watching my daughter go down the aisle and get married. Like, those are proud. I'm not saying they're not happy, but to me, the happiest moment of my life was with Russell. He and I were on the beach, and for whatever reason I took his leash off and he was just running, running to run like a child to run. Suddenly I was running alongside him in the same way, and the sun is beating down, and there's no thought in my world but just me, him, the beach, and it wasn't about a single thing. All thoughts had gone. It was like almost pure enlightenment or not enlightenment because it wasn't a thought process, but just every weight had been lifted.
Jonathan Cook:
Michael has taken that moment of happiness with his dog Russell, and placed it at the center of his professional life, running a business with the mission of helping people try to achieve more happiness with their pets, but with a twist.
Michael Hofeld:
My name is Michael Hofeld. I am the founder of a company called PawWord.com. I'm a serial entrepreneur. I've written four different books, one book about starting business, managing it. It's called Don't Be a Schmuck. I've written three books about, two children's books, one called Purple Zach and Purple Jenkins. The other one called The Christmas Bulldog. And the latest book I wrote is called Journey Over the Rainbow Bridge, which is actually a backstory of the town that is over the Rainbow Bridge that we use in PawWord. I was in Internet travel and still am. I consult for major travel companies. I've been doing that for since almost 30 years, you know, almost as long as it's been around.
Jonathan Cook:
“Over the Rainbow Bridge” is a euphemism for the dog afterlife. So yes, Michael Holfeld is running a business that helps people cope with the death of their dogs, of their pets. We're going to get more into those details of Michael's work later. For now, let's focus on his model of happiness and how that interacts with his work, because his work is full of stress, and yet he's doing work that's inspired by his dog. Happiness for him is defined by the time that he has been able to spend with his dog.
Michael Hofeld:
It's always an interesting experience running a startup. You never know when something is going to catch on fire, usually a few times a day, so putting out a couple of fires before we started. But other than that, you know, I'm pretty happy. I've got my bulldog next to me. What else could you ask for in life?
Jonathan Cook:
How can we be more happy? There are many simple things we can do. We can go for a run. We can spend more time with our dogs. If these things are simple to accomplish, though, why is happiness so difficult to achieve, and to maintain?
Happiness seems simple at first, and yet, what it means to be happy has been a matter of debate since at least the time of the philosophers of ancient Greece. Even more argument has been had over the secret of achieving happiness. The eternally frustrating search for the secret of happiness begs the question: Why, if happiness is so simple, would the path to happiness be a secret?
Ironically, the apparent simplicity of happiness is part of what makes it so elusive. Happiness is like common sense in that it’s something that everyone claims to want, but few people can agree upon. Happiness is an emotion that tells us we’ve gotten to a good place in life, but what it takes to arrive at that happy place is a matter of individual perspective. Happiness exists at the intersection of what we want and what is actually possible.
One of the first great disappointments in life is the discovery in early childhood that not everybody wants the same thing, and so, what makes one person happy can make another person feel deeply unhappy.
This is the distinction between functional optimization and the emotion of happiness. We can’t engineer a technical solution that will make everyone happy because happiness can’t be technically defined. Happiness is individual, and subjective.
There are some people who still haven’t figured this out, of course. There are adults who still believe that what makes them happy should make everybody else happy too. This self-centered approach leads to fights about happiness, putting happiness even further out of reach.
Happiness feels simple and obvious when we’re feeling it, but when we are trying to obtain happiness, it can feel maddeningly elusive. Because it is at the core of a life that feels on the right track, but also a subjective emotion that’s individually experienced, happiness is a highly controversial topic.
The very concept of happiness is at the heart of what is shaping up to be one of the most divisive elections in the history of the United States. One of the few things that most Americans can agree upon these days is that Democrats and Republicans agree on almost nothing at all. The fundamental nature of these disagreements was articulated in a section of a document put together by the Republican-allied Heritage Foundation called Project 2025. Project 2025 articulated plans for what will happen in the Executive Branch of the US federal government if Donald Trump should win the 2024 election. Project 2025 covered many different policy areas, but one statement in the document caught my eye, although most analysts haven’t mentioned it. It reads:
“When the Founders spoke of ‘pursuit of Happiness,’ what they meant might be understood today as in essence ‘pursuit of Blessedness.’ That is, an individual must be free to live as his Creator ordained, to flourish. Our Constitution grants each of us the liberty to do not what we want, but what we ought.”
This passage goes all the way back to the first moment of separation of the United States from the British Empire to identify something that irritates the authors of Project 2025. It refers to a well-known passage from the Declaration of Independence of 1776 which asserted that people have “unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness”.
Happiness was so an important a goal to the writers of the Declaration of Independence that they chose to place it immediately after life and liberty, as a foundational component of the basic purpose of government. This Declaration repeated the same idea in the same paragraph, in order to drive home the point of how central happiness was to the political project of the founders of the United States of America. Government exists, the Declaration states, to help people take actions “as to them shall seem most likely to effect their safety and happiness.” The point is this: That government does not exist to control people for the benefit of their rulers, but rather to benefit them by protecting their lives, ensuring their liberty, and enabling their efforts to find happiness.
Still, it is a haunting thought that of the three unalienable rights identified in the Declaration of Independence, while life and liberty could be guaranteed, when it came to happiness, the founders could only promise that people would be able to pursue it.
For the authors of Project 2025 at the Heritage Foundation, the concept of the pursuit of happiness is intolerable. They suggest that the pursuit of happiness is morally corrupt to such an extent that Americans should go all the way back to their origins in the year 1776 and revise the Declaration of Independence itself so that Americans are guaranteed the right of the pursuit of blessedness instead of the pursuit of happiness.
The problem with the pursuit of happiness, the authors of Project 2025 state, is that it suggests that Americans should have the freedom to do what they want. Instead, Project 2025 proposes that Americans have a severely restricted version of freedom: The freedom to do what they ought to do, as determined by their Creator god. To replace the pursuit of happiness with the pursuit of blessedness is to replace a person’s desire for satisfaction on their own terms with the compulsion to seek approval from a higher authority as a reward for obedience.
The political argument of the pursuit of happiness versus the pursuit of blessedness points to the central question of the presidential election of 2024: Will the United States of America remain a nation of individual freedom, or will it become a nation in which citizenship is defined by the obligation of obedience to authority?
It is not a coincidence that the same question motivates me to pursue the creation of this podcast, Stories of Emotional Granularity. The question that is always in my mind as I edit together these episodes is whether emotion will remain something that people will be able define for themselves, according to the particularities of their own fluid experiences, or whether emotion will become a standardized commodity that is quantitatively standardized so that emotion can be systematically regulated for the benefit of the titans at the helm of digital corporations.
In a world of eight billion people, the preservation of individuality is always going to be contested. There will never come a time when respect for our freedom and our feelings is finally obtained, for once and for all.
It seems to me that happiness itself, in all of its false simplicity, is at the heart of these struggles, perhaps because the pursuit of happiness is the pursuit of an understanding of what might make us happy, as much as the pursuit of an experience of happiness itself.
The idea of the pursuit of happiness as a chase in which success cannot be guaranteed, made me think back to Michael Hofeld’s moment of happiness realized running alongside his dog. It was an unplanned experience, a spontaneous achievement of happiness, and yet in its very nature ephemeral. Michael and his dog could not keep running forever.
Within happiness, everything feels right. When we’re happy, life feels like how it is supposed to be. So, there is a sense within the pursuit of happiness of trying to get back to something that was lost. This context of lost happiness came up in my discussion with anthropologist Richard Currier, which you may remember from the previous episode of this podcast, on the subject of anxiety.
Richard Currier:
Since I finished Unbound, I started another book, specifically on that subject. And my next book, which I'm working on right now, is called Unnatural: How modern society is destroying human happiness, and the thesis of the book is that in spite of unprecedented longevity or average longevity, in spite of an abundance of food, clothing and shelter, in spite of an abundance of transportation and communication, and all the other benefits of modern society that we are familiar with, people in modern society seem to have higher levels of depression, anxiety, self-doubt, and all the things that go with it, than people in smaller scale pre-industrial societies.
Jonathan Cook:
The subject of Richard’s upcoming book is the destruction of happiness. What is it, though, that is being destroyed? What is happiness? Richard defines happiness in terms of what it is not.
Richard Currier:
It's the absence of some of the negative states of mind. The absence of anxiety. The absence of fear. The absence of tension. The absence of depression.
Jonathan Cook:
Richard’s reverse definition of happiness helps us to see part of what makes happiness a pursuit rather than something that can be guaranteed. Happiness can feel like a state of mind that exists in a place and time that we are struggling to get to, though it certainly isn’t here. Happiness is something that we need to go on a trek to find.
Author Ethan Gallogly has pursued this sense of happiness in his private life as a backpacker, and in his writing in the form of a novel called The Trail.
Ethan Gallogly:
My name is Ethan Gallogly, and I'm a retired professor. I'm a backpacker, and I am the author of the book The Trail, a novel about two gentlemen hiking the John Muir Trail across the High Sierra in California, and what happens to them along the way. I'm not sure if you're aware, but the John Muir Trail is about a 211-mile trail across the rooftop of the Sierra Nevada. In the story, there's a young guy, Gil, who really is not in shape. He's kind of wasting his life after his father's death. He is just going from one hook up to another in Los Angeles. He gets a phone call from Sid, who is his father's old hiking partner, is now a retired professor of philosophy from Berkeley. Sid, as it turns out, is dying of cancer, and he is in kind of a holding pattern as the cancer's coming back, is relapsing. His dream is to hike the John Muir Trail while he still can. And so he calls Gil up and invites him. Gil does not want to go, but the story is very much the young novice learning and experiencing things that his father used to love with, sort of the older mentor. And, you know, it's a relational story between the two men and it's authentically set on the John Muir Trail. I've liked the trail twice to make sure that all the details are good.
Jonathan Cook:
In Ethan’s novel, the trail is a special kind of place. A trail is the opposite of a destination. It’s a space that is dedicated to the project of getting somewhere else, defined by the struggle of moving forward. In that way, the trail can be thought of as a place of pursuit. For those who are lucky, the trail could become a place to practice the pursuit of happiness.
Ethan explains that the trail is inherently a space of uncertainty, and of danger.
Ethan Gallogly:
Sid has other issues, but for Sid, I think his biggest issue is if he dies out there in the wilderness, what's going to happen? There's no hospital. There's nothing like that. There's no 911 phone call, and in the time that the book was set, there's no satellite phone that he can use to call rescue. So, Sid is intentionally walking into a fairly dangerous situation, although I think his attitude is, well, that's possible, but it's worth it to accomplish his goal. He already knows that at some point he's going to die. So, he's struggling with that. I think Sid's biggest issue is mortality.
Jonathan Cook:
Ethan’s vision of the trail is crafted in opposition to the places of civilized modernity that Richard Currier identified as destroyers of human happiness.
Ethan Gallogly:
What happens when you're hiking as opposed to in the city, I mean, let's say I'm just hanging out at home. I might if I get bored, pull out my phone and look at that or check the news or check my email. There are there are many, many distractions in our lives that just call us away from being present and being focused.
When you're out hiking a trail like the John Muir Trail and you're away from all that, there is no cell reception, there are no TVs, there's no media. You're just in nature. It's much more meditative. You start to think. You really start to think, and as you're hiking, if you don't bring any music or anything like that, but you just let your mind wander, you find after a day or two, you really start to just meditate on whatever it is that that's in your mind or in your heart. It just happens very naturally and you start to mull over these things and over time, you know.
So, I remember when I was in graduate school, we used to work on these incredibly complicated problems and it would stress me out and I'd go backpacking on the weekends and I wouldn't think about anything. And yet these complicated problems would start to sort themselves out in my head, and when I came back to work, I was doing much, much better. I was much more productive and I knew how I wanted to solve these things. And I think whatever we bring with ourselves to the woods, whatever we're working on and we're digesting wherever we are in our lives, having that time and space away from distractions, away from the constant noise of the city gives us time to think and reflect and be human and really, really helps us work through whatever it is we need to work through.
Jonathan Cook:
As I listened to Ethan, I noticed how he talked about the way that unexpected things seemed to happen on the trail. His characters began their long pilgrimage feeling stuck and needing things to happen that could not happen in the city, with all of its distractions, and obligations, and noise. As with Richard Currier’s negative definition of happiness, in order to find what they needed Ethan’s characters needed to get away from a place that was the opposite of what they were looking for.
The trail is a place where things can happen, though we can’t say exactly what will happen, or when it will happen. Could it be that what makes us unhappy in our civilized lives is that, in civilization, as opposed to what happens in nature, nothing just so happens to happen? Almost everything in the city is planned. Cities and civilized life seem so tightly constructed that they would quickly fall part if they were not planned. Imagine what would happen if we allowed so many people to come together, without any planning, and just decided to see what would happen.
For Ethan, writing The Trail brought him to the realization that disconnection from civilization and its relentless demands is part of what makes moments of happiness possible.
Ethan Gallogly:
I'm going to point that electronics again, but it may not be electronics for everyone, it could be relatives or a stressful job or something, but we have all these distractions, all these things that draw on our time. I think as humans, the way we've evolved, we need downtime. We need time to reflect and digest. I think our modern world has just eaten up most of that time, and I think one of the things that really, at least for myself, makes me happy and that I think really helps is taking time out. So, you know, I'd say time out is really time in that. That's how I think about it.
Jonathan Cook:
When I asked Ethan to describe what happiness feels like, he arrived at the same challenge met by Richard. Reflecting upon the struggle of defining happiness, Ethan came to realize that there’s something about happiness that evades our direct intentions.
Ethan Gallogly:
I would say that it's really just being in the moment, and the word “present” is dangerous because present implies conscious and fully focused. And I don't sense that. But I do sense that I'm completely in the moment, so that, you know, my greatest joys in walking and working are those moments like that, but it's very tough to put the answer to this into words.
It's akin to the same sense of all you feel when you look at the mountains. It again, there's a worthlessness. There's almost, you know, again I come to the divine or religious almost. There's just a sense of connecting into everything and being a part of it all. You know, it's like I said, those the best sections of my book don't feel like I consciously wrote them. They feel like they wrote themselves. Now, I know I was sitting there typing. It's not like some, you know, ChatGTP or something typed it for me. That was all me, but there is a lack of intentional awareness that happened in those special moments.
I do know that those moments, those moments of connections, a funny word to use here, de-connection is also strange though. Those moments of I'm going to use the word flow because I don't have another word for it. It's. It's almost like you're a part of the dance. You're dancing perfectly in sync with the universe, with your surroundings, with everything. And you're just in harmony with it all. Those, for me, are almost always the most enjoyable moments of my life, and I can't put a definition on what it is. I can tell you that brings you far more happiness than any material object, I mean, any of the things Madison Avenue wants you to think will make you happy. True happiness comes from those just moments of pure, I don't know whether I want to call it connection or disconnection, but it's just pure being.
Jonathan Cook:
We’ve talked about flow in an earlier episode of this podcast, but as I listened to Ethan talk about the relationship between flow and happiness, what struck me was the unpredictability that is inherent in flow. Flow isn’t mechanical. It’s directed by fluid dynamics that seem to have an element of chaos to them. Ancient Mesopotamians imagined chaos as embodied in the great waters of the ocean, with flow as a powerful but unruly aspect of life that needed to be defeated in order for civilization to survive.
Now, thousands of years later, our civilization has grown so powerful that its architects, in semi-mythical pinnacles such as Madison Avenue, overplan the happiness out of our lives, and sometimes we need to walk out into the wilderness to find places where flow still seems possible.
Something similar to this idea of a conflict between our plans and the actual achievement of happiness came up in a conversation I had with Michael Connolly. Michael works in health care, where the goal is to preserve quality of life, although this goal is often thwarted.
Michael Connolly:
I'm a father of three, two boys and a girl and have four grandkids, and I've been married to my high school sweetheart for forty-seven years. I've been a health care CEO for thirty-five years, ranging from a large urban hospital in Chicago to a multistate health system with like fifty hospitals. I've had the benefit of working in virtually every sector of health care during that time, all across the country. So, whether it's health insurance, whether it's physician practices, whether it's long-term care, whether it's hospice, I've been very passionate about health care reform. In that context, that deal, everything I've tried has failed. Health care has gotten worse during my career rather than better. So that's a bit disappointing.
I've spent the last five years researching and writing a book called The Journey's End, which is really to help people understand how health care works and how to use it as they age and what they need to assume responsibility for. If they want to have more say in how their life is managed from a health care point of view at the end of life.
Jonathan Cook:
When we think of happiness, we rarely think of old age. Happiness in old age is possible, of course, but it comes along with challenges that aren’t present when we’re younger, and the space between our desires and their satisfaction is not so large.
Michael Connolly:
There was an article in The New York Times about this, two brothers fighting on this issue, and you know, one brother was like, well, you know, they don't really know what's going on and they seem happy and maybe that existence is okay. And the other brother is like, no, Dad would have never liked that. That's also the classic illustration of thinking about those issues before you get Alzheimer's.
Jonathan Cook:
Michael has purposefully entered a profession that meets people at times in their lives when their ability to achieve their goals is weakened. In the space opened up in the absence of achievement, however, there is the potential for something else to arise.
Michael Connolly:
There is a natural ebb and flow of life, and I think that the end of life, there's a lot of research in this area. It's about shifting more to the, you get off the achievement train, you stop trying to achieve, and you get on the meaningful train, meaning you want to create meaning in your relationships, and creating meaning is often very contrary to achieving.
There is an awful lot of research done by Arthur Brooks. He actually teaches a course at the Harvard MBA program called Happiness, and he's done all this research about it. He tells the stories, I’ll tell the story as a context a bit about Beethoven and Darwin. Both Beethoven and Darwin were, you know, incredibly successful before they were 30. I mean, you know, Darwin's theory had been created when he was 28, and Beethoven was writing these phenomenal symphonies in his teenage years. But after they crossed 30, they were no longer impressive, I mean, like they had been in their early years. So, he talks about that is an analogy to our lives.
In Beethoven's case, he evolved. He accepted that he was no longer going to be a great musician in the sense of, you know, writing these things and composing them. But he could be a teacher and he could help other people. So, he shifted, and he may not have found those things as rewarding or as stimulating, but they were what his gifts now were, and he was going to accept those gifts and use them that way, whereas Darwin was very bitter, and he died angry. It was just you know, his efforts to be significant got worse and worse. So, he had a very unhappy last few decades of life.
I actually have my own simple theory on that subject. Happiness is a derivative psychologically of your expectations. If you have unrealistic expectations, you will be constantly unhappy because you will not achieve them. But if you have more achievable, I could say lower expectations, but I think it's maybe more achievable expectations, then your likelihood of reaching them is more likely to happen, and that moment of happiness is from that sense of achievement. You know, you reach the goal, you accomplish.
Jonathan Cook:
When I listen to Michael Connolly talking about happiness in this way, what I hear him talking about runs counter to the idea that the secret to happiness is working hard until we achieve our dreams. He observes that our ability to manifest the ideas that we hold in our minds is limited, and that this is true even in the case of highly accomplished original thinkers such as Beethoven and Darwin. Our ability to achieve is limited by our surroundings and by the limitations of our own endurance.
What Michael Connolly proposes is a perspective that makes sense for someone with experience working in hospice. He advises us that we are more likely to find happiness by accepting the circumstances in which we find ourselves, and adjusting our goals to those circumstances. There’s some common ground here with Ethan Gallogly’s focus of being on The Trail. When we are backpacking on a long backcountry trail, we can’t deal with the problems with our lives back at home. We can’t do anything to work toward our professional aspirations or address anything that is outside of that trail. Happiness on the trail can be achieved only when we come to terms with the conditions that are right in front of us, and find a way to keep moving forward in that moment.
Like Michael Connolly, Michael Hofeld came to his understanding of happiness by confronting the reality of death. Eventually, however, Michael Hofeld took a bit of a different turn, building a business that helps grieving pet owners to find happiness again by enabling them to engage in a fantasy that their pets remain alive, even after death, living in a beautiful village on the other side of a Rainbow Bridge.
Michael Hofeld:
In my life, never had a dog at, like, I think around 42 years old, I had my first dog. My girlfriend wanted it and talked me into it. We got an English bulldog. His name was Russell. It was love at first sight. We were best friends. It'll always get me every time, he passed away, kind of in the middle of the pandemic, very young, four and a half years old. It hit me hard, and I decided to do something to honor his life. I started a support group for people who lost their dogs called Angel Paws, you know, kind of consoling people. We do Zoom meetings. I met a ton of people over time and learned about their emotional connections with their animals, what made them unique, all this stuff. Then, deep in the back of my mind, I always wanted to be able to hear what Russell was up to over the Rainbow Bridge.
So, I tried a bunch of different things, and as I learned from my friends and the Angel group, I got to understand like all the different, you know, emotions that people deal with. And over the past year, about a year ago, I was working within artificial intelligence and I said, You know what? I always wanted to write a book about Russell, and this technology seemed cool, so I wrote a really quick small children's book called The Christmas Bulldog, and it was illustrated about Russell. And then a few months later, I saw more of the tech and I was like, oh, you know, we can actually send stories from over the Rainbow Bridge.
In March, I started building a startup called PawWord that allows people, both pets here on Earth and over the Rainbow Bridge, and, you know, the parents, pawrents, whatever you want to call them, can give all the information about a dog's personality. Then, I've spent a lot of time understanding how to turn that into interesting tales. People get them via email or they get them via a text message. The cool part, you get these great illustrations that go with it. So again, I'm trying to, you know, give the drink from a fire hose version of this. It's obviously there's a lot more to it. But, you know, it started with me losing my dog, wanting to make that loss mean something and has wound me up where I am today.
There's this specific incident where, you know, Russell was named after a basketball player from Oklahoma City at the time, Russell Westbrook, not his real name. His first name was supposed to be Mr. Khatchadourian, a line from a Billy Joel song. But somebody close, he won't answer to that. So, we named him Russell by accident. And, you know, on social media, somebody knew that in the mail. I don't know how they got my address, but there arrives a basketball jersey for Russell, and I never in my life had just gotten a gift from somebody I never met for, and I had no, you know, no reason, no ulterior motive.
I just thought it was the kindest thing and that not like more gifts, but like, that's the type of thing that just made me realize that everybody's not after something. They some people just want to make the world a better place and a happier place. And that that opened my heart to kind of being the same way and trying to look at life not so much as a dog-eat-dog world, but like when we pull away the veneer of kind of how the world has been divided, there is still this you know, there is this part of humanity where we just care about each other.
I'm a true believer that happiness is simply who you want to be, and on your way there, right, this is who you are. That's who you want to be. If you're headed towards who you want to be, you're happy. I really think happiness comes for the most part in those fleeting moments that you cannot script. All you can do is put yourself in position to be happier. And again, I think the state of mind, like I said, of being who you are versus who you want to be, is kind of a better, happier overall state. True happiness joy happens in those fleeting moments, and that's probably also those come freer and easier if you're in that state of mind that you're not worried or angry.
I mean, my personal opinion is that life's not meant to be pure joy. So, in the book, the most recent book, it's just my philosophy. Even in this perfect dog utopia, where dogs go over the Rainbow Bridge, it's not perfect because nothing can be perfect because without the rain we wouldn't appreciate the sun. I think that, you know, it's why generally there are, you know, wealthy, happy people or unhappy people, There are healthy, unhappy people, but there are poor, happy people. It's like we assign these things that we need to be happy and they aren't really true. So, I think it's the idea of people accepting that life isn't supposed to be perfect and that happiness, it's almost when you can forget about the world. It's why children have more happiness because they don't have things to think about. They're kind of in that moment all the time, and dogs, too. That's why I think, you know, we love dogs and children.
Jonathan Cook:
Michael knows very well that the village over the Rainbow Bridge isn’t real, but he finds happiness, and provides happiness to others, through a temporary act of pretending, an immersion in the fiction that death is the illusion.
Michael Hofeld:
There's a Vonnegut book, and I can never remember which Vonnegut book it is. He goes to an island in the Caribbean and they have a religious text, and the very first page of the religious text says this is a book of lies, but if you follow it, you'll live a happy life. And that has always stuck with me. And that's kind of the way I see Spencerville, which is, yes, it's fiction, but sometimes fiction helps us, right. Like when we were kids, we wanted to believe in Santa Claus that helped us. I get I don't get into the religious thing, but, you know, there are many religions in this world and there are all kind of meant to do the same thing, to make us feel better and to act like a good person, you would hope.
Jonathan Cook:
What sticks with me in Michael Hofeld’s efforts to achieve happiness after loss is that he accepts the impermanence of happiness. Just as life is ephemeral, happy moments are, he says, fleeting. We are lucky to find happiness when we can, and the best we can do is appreciate moments of happiness while they last, because just as we do not have the power to compel true happiness to arrive through force of will, we cannot prevent happiness from fading away in time.
Perhaps the secret of happiness is that happiness is not something we can achieve. We can make happiness more probable by setting the groundwork for it to arrive, or we can make happiness less likely to occur, but the most we can hope for is to shift the odds in our favor. No matter what we do, happiness is never guaranteed.
Sometimes, happiness happens to happen, and sometimes it doesn’t happen. The difference is a matter of luck, of happenstance. Perhaps we will be happy. Perhaps we will not.
Did you hear what just happened with the language of happiness?
In the second season of this podcast, I referred to Ralph Waldo Emerson’s idea that language is fossilized poetry. Each word is like a poem in that it is a metaphor with a meaning that has shifted over time, showing us unexpected depth even in the most familiar language we use today.
The fossilized poetry of happiness begins with the Vikings. As they raided the coasts of Britain hundreds of years ago, the Vikings brought into English the word hap. Hap was a word for chance, or fortune. This sense of hap is preserved in the words happenstance and perhaps. Negatively, we speak of mishaps, which are unfortunate events.
The sense of feeling happy as a kind of positive emotion only developed in English in the 1500s. Originally, happiness was just a matter of luck. Happiness just happened to happen.
As a concept, hap does not contain a sense of destiny. Rather, hap speaks of randomness and unpredictability. The universe imagined by hap has no justice. People do not receive happiness as a reward for good behavior, nor do they experience mishaps as a consequence of their misbehavior. Happiness is not like karma. Held within the very core of happiness is the idea that the pleasure of the feeling of being happy is just a matter of dumb luck. We can tweak the odds of achieving happiness, perhaps. There are no guarantees.
This sense of completely amoral chance is, I think, part of what the authors of Project 2025 at the Heritage Foundation were writing against. They could not accept the idea of a world without a morally-fixated god who sets clear and absolute rules of right and wrong, administering rewards of happiness and punishments of unhappiness to keep the system in order. The pursuit of happiness, to them, is a kind of blasphemy, containing the implicit understanding that people should have the power to determine the course of their own lives, and to choose their own paths, with happiness as something that can be hoped for, but is never guaranteed.
I’m not going to tell you which philosophy to follow. That’s up to you.
An idea I hope this episode has left you with is that happiness is anything but simple. Practitioners of the new craft of Emotional Artificial Intelligence seek to reduce happiness down to a “basic emotion” with no more depth to it than a happy-face emoji, something that can be measured quantitatively by robots scanning your face for a smile.
If we can perceive the complexity of happiness, then we also can grasp the uncertainty with which happiness is obtained. If we can see that happy people aren’t happy because they’re good, and unhappy people aren’t unhappy because they’re bad, we might be able to summon more compassion for people in moments of unhappiness, and more humility when we happen to find ourselves in a moment of happiness.
In two weeks’ time, I want to bring you an episode that further explores the complexity of emotion, by considering a Czech emotion in which people feel a sense of happiness hidden within an experience of sadness.
In next week’s episode, however, I want to take a step back to give some credit to researchers who have created some other resources that describe the diversity of emotion.
Until then, thanks for listening.