Happy: What we all want to be

Or do we?

Photo by Joe Caione on Unsplash

We all say we want to be, don’t we? Yet when you get right down to it, 99 per cent of our day-to-day misery is self-inflicted, with most of the remaining one per cent capable of being alleviated if only we’d learn to tolerate bad coffee made in cafés that think cleaning their goddam machine every once in a while will trigger the collapse of what little remains of civilisation.

I found myself dwelling on this whole business more than usual over the arse end of 2024, and it dawned on me that I’d become weary from what seemed like one of the more demanding years I’ve been through and my sense that the world is unravelling in so many different ways. (I know I was far from alone in this, and many others had better reasons than I to feel that way.)

That’s the thing about un-happiness, isn’t it? It has a way of creeping up on you, and before you know it your previously bubbly self is now a stew of gripes, grievances and grumbles about the world and everyone in it.

Happy entered the English language in the late 14c. At first it meant “lucky”, a sense you still hear in phrases like a happy turn of events. It didn’t take long, though, for its meaning to expand to include its more usual modern day sense of “greatly pleased and content”.

In case you’re thinking that life must have been so abject before the 14th century as to render the need for happy redundant, let me set the record straight. Old English had more than one synonym for the word, including eadig (a portmanteau of ead, “wealth”, and gesælig, “silly”) and bliðe, which you and I now know as blithe.

The name Edith is related to eadig. It’s a reworking of an Old English name, Eadgyð, from ead + guð “war”. Its popularity, which has waxed and waned over the years (it was among the top 50 girls’ names in America until about a hundred years ago), probably stems from St. Eadgyð of Wilton, who lived from about 962 to 984. The daughter of King Edgar of England, she spurned three offers from her father to become abbess of a convent and may have even turned down an offer to assume the English throne. Are you listening, Elon?

In case you’re wondering, that symbol ð comes from the Old English and Icelandic letter eth, which was also used in Middle English, Faroese (a Danish language), Icelandic and Elfdalian (a North Germanic language still spoken by about 3,000 people today). Faroese and Icelandic still use it, while English - which can be surprisingly dull at times - displaced it with the far less pleasing th.

But I digress. Happiness, as we all know, can be infuriatingly elusive. Our ancestors, likely recognising this, may have been much more pragmatic than us; there’s plenty of evidence that they felt it to be an infantile pursuit, preferring instead what is commonly quoted as allowing “no joy or pleasure, but a kind of melancholic demeanor and austerity”.

According to one Harvard paper, the Enlightenment is when things started going wrong. As we chased off the demons and welcomed in rational thought, we also decided that being happy was not merely worthwhile, but a requirement for getting through life. Improved dentistry helped; as teeth became less disgusting, opening one’s mouth to smile became less likely to terrify children and small animals.

Philosophers, as is their wont, have developed three main theories of happiness: hedonism, life satisfaction and the emotional state view.

Hedonism equates happiness more or less with pleasant experiences, or what I like to call wine tastings. Life satisfaction theories tend to equate happiness more closely with a person’s attitude - the more favourable your attitude, the happier you’re likely to be. The emotional state view identifies happiness with your emotional wellbeing, a broader notion than mere attitude, and possibly something over which we have less control.

If nothing else, this surely tells us that even more elusive than happiness may be a clear notion of what it is. This led one philosopher, Dan Haybron, to dub happiness a “mongrel concept,” a term he borrowed from his colleague Ned Block, who first used it in relation to the concept of consciousness. The point Haybron (and Block) was making was that we use the term to mean different things in different contexts, and often have no clear sense of what we are referring to.

In any case, it may be that today we have become neurotic about happiness. It’s almost mandatory on social media to present a heavily curated version of one’s life, creating the impression that it is composed entirely of blessed moments on the beach, or with children, with family, with pets, with unphotoshopped Michelin quality brunches, and skipping joyfully across the globe in one’s private jet, touching down only to experience the finest that each sun-drenched destination has to offer before, once again, rising above all earthly cares on the way to the next wonderful moment to be shared with one’s adoring followers.

Someone who’s played an important part in my life has recently challenged this unspoken rule, sharing her experiences on Facebook as she copes with the recent death of her husband, and father to their two young children. Every day is hard, and she makes no attempt to pretend otherwise. Her grief and devastation are raw and open for all to see, often highlighted through the sharing of family photos from happier times. Yet what she is doing is a world away from “melancholic demeanor and austerity”, but a willingness to look life straight in the eye, recalling good times when they were there, and unflinchingly recording the gruelling path she is on right now. She’s a reminder, if ever anyone was, that being fully in life means allowing all of it in, unvarnished, uncurated and unburdened by the need to present a shiny happy face in every picture.

Devastating events aside, time has seen my view on the possibility of happiness shift over time. I’ve gone from seeing it as something to be pursued to something that’s a matter of choice. A turning point came the day someone told me about a friend who’d declared that henceforth she would be happy at all times as a matter of her word. At first, I thought the friend was an idiot, but the more I thought about it, the more I saw her as having taken a stand, refusing to have mere circumstances dictate her experience of life, instead making herself responsible for her own happiness.

For that reason, I say last year’s descent into misery was my own doing, not the economy’s or social media’s or the strange winds of these troubled political times. I reserve the right to become grumpy again, but give up the right to blame anyone else when I do.

Except those cafés that serve shitty coffee. No human should have to put up with that.

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Bits and specious

Among Ned Block’s claims to fame is a 1981 paper that argued a non-intelligent computer system could pass the Turing test. Others quickly dubbed his paper the Blockhead argument (who says philosophers don’t have a sense of humour?).

These days, large language models like ChatGPT regularly pass the Turing test with ease. Philosophers who have little truck with Block’s argument may well see this as evidence of actual intelligence.

According to the Codex-Calendar of 354, the Colosseum in Rome could seat 87,000 spectators. If true (and many modern scholars doubt it), that would put it among the world’s 25 largest stadiums today.

The world’s largest sports stadium is India’s Narendra Modi Stadium in Ahmedabad, which seats 132,000. No prizes for guessing what sport is played there.

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Quote of the week

There is no such thing as fun for the whole family.
Jerry Seinfeld