We need to understand the attentional obstacles to being happier if we are to consider ways in which we can be happier. The next three posts will consider the three main attentional problems: mistaken desires; mistaken projections; and mistaken beliefs. On the face of it, we ought to desire what makes us happy. Nonetheless, there are many scholars who believe that attending to certain goals, such as achievement, bring happiness in themselves and others who maintain that there are objectives, such as authenticity, that transcend happiness. I consider these to be mistaken desires, for the reasons outlined below.
There is no doubt that achieving a goal can feel pretty good in itself: in video game players, achieving goals releases dopamine, which is the pleasure-producing neurotransmitter in our brains. But even if the goal is achieved, these are only fleeting moments, and so the process of attempting to get there should be a pleasurable and/or purposeful one too. It is also true that the desire to achieve can bring happiness later on – but only for those who do achieve.
Be especially alert to the fact that a desire for achievement may help in achieving a narrow set of goals but at the expense of the more important goal of happiness. It is good being motivated to be successful at work but not at the cost of health and personal relationships. Sometimes we can get so wrapped up in things that the attainment of a goal becomes all that matters. Some people will make extreme sacrifices to achieve them – like the many climbers who have died on Everest because they are obsessed with getting to the top. In these cases, the attainment of their goals comes at too great a price for happiness.
As elsewhere, we need more research and better evidence on the full costs and benefits of different decisions and life courses. We do know people are happier with their lives over time if they are satisfied with aspects of their jobs like their boss, pay, and daily tasks, which suggests it is most important that the job is a good fit for the individual rather than the type of job per se. This might help explain why some of the happiest workers in the UK are florists and some of the least happy are bankers. Of course, the florists could have started out happier than the bankers before any of them started work. We need more happiness data on the same people over time so that we can see how their happiness changes in response to their jobs.
I will remind my kids that, whatever else they may achieve in their lives, their greatest achievement of all will be their happiness. I actually think that, deep down, other parents tend to agree with me, when at first it might appear that they do not. Many of the middle-class parents I come across in Brighton are seemingly obsessed with their kids achieving as much as possible at school. There are many potential reasons for this, but I’m pretty sure that the main reason why parents care about achievement in quite narrow terms is because they see achievement as a route to happiness. They think that if their kids excel at school, they will later go to a good university and land a well-paid job, and that all this will make their kids happy. They may have mistaken desires for their kids’ achievements but it would be sadistic for them to want something for their kids that they knew for sure would make them unhappy.
You might continue to maintain that it is perfectly rational to have some desires that you know might make you less happy. You may have “higher-order” desires for morality, freedom, truth, knowledge, aesthetics, beauty, and the preservation of species of birds and animals, which may not be based solely on the consequences for your happiness (or, importantly, for the happiness of those you care about). But it strikes me as rather odd, to put it mildly, to desire something that will never show up in better sentiments of pleasure or purpose.
Consider perhaps the most famous critique of happiness, developed by Robert Nozick, a philosopher who came to prominence in the 1970s. He asks you to imagine being connected up to what he calls an “experience machine”. Every neurotransmitter in your brain would be connected to a system that could simulate the happiest life for you. You could have a fabulous career, fantastic kids, and a great partner, all without any pain or suffering. In a straight choice, which life would you choose: your “real life” with all of its associated pain and suffering or an “artificial life” with greater happiness created by the experience machine? Nozick suggests that most of us would choose the former. The authenticity of real life seems to be of value to us beyond simply feeling good.
But I think most philosophers, with a few notable exceptions like Roger Crisp, have been too quick to jump to this conclusion. In the experience machine example, you know what the alternative scenario is. You can’t unknow what you know. So the cat is already out of the bag when you do the thought experiment. I would probably also be persuaded to choose reality over being a brain in a vat if I was aware of being a brain in a vat. But if the thought experiment were taken literally, your life right now could be one big experience machine—and you wouldn’t know. And since you would never know, it makes most sense to live the life with the greatest happiness in it.
Many of the conclusions reached by philosophers are based on thought experiments that I don’t think stand up to scrutiny. By making them the focus of attention, they ensure that concerns for the truth, etc., are bound to be considered important. And they do so in a contrived way – how can you truly imagine not knowing being a brain in a vat when you know you could otherwise be a “real” person?
Many economists and philosophers will maintain that getting more of what you want is what really counts in life. This is why economists spend so much time talking about income: all else equal, more money means that you can buy more of what you want. It is not the income in itself that makes you better off but, rather, the increase in choice that means you can satisfy more of your desires. You could choose to buy more stuff or you could decide to work a little less, or maybe both.
But why would you want more possessions or more leisure time unless you imagined (correctly or otherwise) that you would be happier as a result? If something won’t ever show up at all in your happiness or in the happiness of those you care about (which can sometimes include strangers), I cannot see where its value can reside.
Let me give an example to illustrate (and a chance to get something off my chest, if I’m being totally honest). I like to read, and, as I hope you can tell, I read loads of academic papers and nonfiction books. But over the years, many people have told me that I should read novels. I have never read a novel in my life (unless you count Of Mice and Men at school – we were also supposed to read The Mayor of Casterbridge but have you seen how long that is?). Let’s suppose that I listen to these people and that I develop a taste for literature and that I then devote time to reading other stories. I have developed a new preference, and it is being satisfied. So that would be enough for many economists and philosophers to say that I was better off, especially as reading novels is likely to be seen by them as a preference worth having.
But what if I was not made any happier from reading novels? Developing a new preference that is now satisfied isn’t important in itself. It only makes me better off if it makes me or those I care about happier than we were before I started reading. I make no grand claims for the significance of anything – a job, a spouse, a house, The Mayor of Casterbridge – beyond its effect on happiness. Everything except happiness requires some justification or other: it is just obvious that happiness matters.
Now, other considerations, such as achievement or authenticity, are clearly important. But they are only important because of their instrumental value; that is, they matter only insofar as they produce more happiness. They may generally promote more happiness but we should not be slaves to them. It would be masochistic and sadistic of me to tell the truth about something if I knew for sure that I would create only misery for myself and others. We’ve all heard of pathological liars. Telling the truth in such, admittedly rare, circumstances would be an example of being pathologically honest. We need to judge each behaviour on its specific consequences for happiness and not on the basis of whether or not it accords to a generally good rule.
Once we accept that the experience of happiness (for yourself and others) is the final arbiter of the rightness of what you do, we can move away from making moral judgments based on ill-conceived ideas about what is right and wrong. We can instead use factual assessments of the consequences for pleasure and purpose to judge the goodness of what we and others do (including policy makers) and to guide our views about how society ought to be organised.
So experiences of pleasure and purpose are all that matter in the end. Hedonism is the school of thought that holds that pleasure is the only thing that matters in the end. By adding sentiments of purpose to pleasure, I define my position as sentimental hedonism. I am a sentimental hedonist and I think that, deep down, we all are.
Happiness by Design is available on Amazon UK and Amazon US.