“By Joy… I shall understand that passion by which the Mind passes to a greater perfection” (Baruch Spinoza)
In the moral philosophies propounded by the 17th century Dutch philosopher, we detect three dominant elements of 'the good life' or happiness. These three items are development of reason, love for 'God or Nature,' and freedom. Long before Spinoza, Aristotle was of the view that happiness consists in achieving, through the course of an entire lifetime, all the goods that lead to the perfection of human nature and the enrichment of human life.
Four years after the damages of the English Civil War in 1655, the polymath Samuel Hartlib thought the culture of the silkworm was an invention capable of bringing humanity ‘infinite wealth and happiness’. Three hundred years later, mankind was profoundly transformed by the effects of industrial and scientific revolutions. At least in the ‘developed’ countries, despite the fears expressed by Malthus in the 18th century, material comfort and longevity had leaped forward, children no longer died in infancy, and, incidentally, the epidemics seemed to have been brought under control.
In 1974, however, economist Richard Easterlin put forward a curious paradox. According to his surveys, the happiness expressed by Americans had remained stable in previous decades, though marked by continuous growth. The Easterlin Paradox concerns whether we are happier and more contented as our living standards improve. Easterlin drew attention to studies that showed that although successive generations are usually more affluent than their parents or grandparents, people seemed to be no happier with their lives.
This result has since been confirmed by numerous other studies. As lawyer Derek Bok points out in a book entitled The Politics of Happiness, the surveys even show that the level of happiness declared in different countries is not correlated with increasing prosperity. We do not declare ourselves happy if we do not have a minimum of control over our existence, but, beyond a certain threshold of prosperity which is quite low, additional means or goods have no effect on declared happiness. Studies show that, in a given individual, the level of happiness declared is generally constant: after a serious event, divorce, physical impairment, etc., it returns to its original level, its ‘point of equilibrium’.
This balance point is clearly determined by our genes, which perhaps justifies a certain pessimism. Behavioural geneticist David Lykken said that ‘trying to be happier is like trying to be bigger’. Those who are wise have known this for a long time. Witness Edith Wharton: ‘There are lots of ways of being miserable, but there's only one way of being comfortable, and that is to stop running round after happiness. If you make up your mind not to be happy there's no reason why you shouldn't have a fairly good time.’
This wisdom is unequally shared. Our consumerist society constantly invites us to let ourselves be caught up in games that resemble Pascalian ‘entertainment’. Among recent examples, the dismaying success of TikTok, a Chinese video sharing application that has become the most downloaded app in the United States. Its billion users, mostly pre-teens, are fed with ultra-short videos with particularly hollow content and a teenaged girl, Charli D’Amelio, whom the New York Times described as the ‘reigning queen of TikTok’ boasts of 61 million subscribers!
That compulsive quest for distraction is often an attempt to escape the wretchedness of life. Blaise Pascal, the 17th century French mathematician and physicist, diagnosed the malaise. In his Pensées (‘Thoughts’) he writes: ‘Despite [his] afflictions man wants to be happy, only wants to be happy, and cannot help wanting to be happy. But how shall he go about it?’ Pascal provides the answer. He says:
“We want to complexify our lives. We don’t have to, we want to. We wanted to be harried and hassled and busy. Unconsciously, we want the very things we complain about. For if we had leisure, we would look at ourselves and listen to our hearts and see the great gaping hole in our hearts and be terrified, because that hole is so big that nothing but God can fill it.
So we run around like conscientious little bugs, scared rabbits, dancing attendance on our machines, our slaves, and making them our masters. We think we want peace and silence and freedom and leisure, but deep down we know that this would be unendurable to us, like a dark and empty room without distractions where we would be forced to confront ourselves. . .”
Thus distractions and diversions cannot be our recipes of happiness. In the long run, they make us terribly unhappy. Again, in the words of Blaise Pascal: ‘I have often said that the sole cause of man’s happiness is that he does not know how to stay quietly in his room’. Distractions are only a means of passing our time and imperceptibly bring us closer to death. Pascal unmasks distractions completely when he says: ’Man is obviously made for thinking. Therein lies all his dignity and his merit; and his whole duty is to think as he ought.’
To think as we ought when we are surrounded by gadgets that offer a plethora of stimulations? Are we crumbling under our recipes of happiness?
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