A happiness fallacy
October 6th, 2008
A happiness fallacy
image: konaboy
Surveying the happiness landscape, there is an obsession that grips a significant number of commentators on the subject and it is the money issue. Distilled into the question, can money buy happiness?
To anyone with more than just a passing interest in the state of human affairs it is abundantly clear that this is the most wide of the mark question it’s possible to pose in the endeavour to understand happiness. Happiness is a subjective quality, a diluted form of being that transcends misery but as an end in itself utterly futile. The desire to acquire or DTA is a primeval instinct that in our emancipated condition has no real place, it is something of an orphan in a developed society but more significantly for you and I in a developed individual.
Happiness is a perceived external condition that comes from the sense of fulfilment, satisfaction and integrity to purpose demonstrated by an individual. To do something because it makes you happy is not a worthy objective, being happy because you are doing something that is interconnected with a worthy objective is far more potent in terms of living a life of account.
This is where the Greek concept of eudaimonia is misinterpreted by seeing happiness through the veil of the twenty first century and a completely different set of sensibilities to those that persuaded and motivated the Greeks. When Aristotle says that the attainment of happiness is the ultimate expression of human life he does not mean dancing around in fields and singing like an extra in an MGM musical.
His happiness is to do with assimilating a higher purpose in one’s life, pursuing that and being filled by the well-being that gives rise to. A driven man is not always a happy man in the ‘happy clappy’ sense, but take away the drive and the struggle then is to find something purposeful to do. To experience this, try visiting a community where the industrial engine that was based there has moved on or simply ceased to exist.
An individual is a community in their own right, with many different components adding up to the whole that they are. Bereft of purpose the individual or community begins to lose its way.
The question about money and happiness in this context really is a nonsense and can only serve as a distraction to those whose enquiry is more than just a passing fancy.