How to grow deeply happy | Jonny Thomson

So in his Nicomachean Ethics, Aristotle argues that everything we do in life is for some further purpose. So I go to school to get an education, I get an education to get a job and I get a job so that I get money to buy nice things and so on and so on. But the question Aristotle asks is what is the end point of all this? What lies at the top of the ladder? And for Aristotle the point of all human life is to reach happiness. I think it's elusive because the term itself is so laden. We associate happiness as being this beaming smile with a selfie on social media but I think happiness is not a smiling face, it's more a smiling soul. But why do we find it confusing? Why is it hard to understand? I think Taoism offers a really good analogy here. So imagine life as like a dense thorny forest and in the middle of this forest is a well-paved superhighway and it's easy to walk along that path but there are other paths. But these paths go through swamps, they go through thorns, they go up and down hills and they are difficult and I think happiness is a little bit like that. There's certain paths to happiness which feel right and are right but there are so many different paths with their different sirens calls which attract us and I think we don't realize we're on the wrong path often until it's too late and we find the going really difficult. Hi my name is Jonny Thompson, I'm the staff writer at Big Think and I'm the author of the books Mini Philosophy and Mini Big Ideas and I run the social media account called Mini Philosophy. So I started the Mini Philosophy project about seven years ago and the aim was to try to teach philosophy to everybody. The idea was to duck and weave my way through the different philosophical traditions and different philosophical schools. So if you imagine the history of philosophy as some kind of big heat map that there are certain themes start to emerge and they're all to do with happiness, they're all to do with how to live the best life, how to be a good person. You have epicureanism, you have cynicism, you have stoicism and you have skepticism and they're all trying to sell their different version of happiness and they're literally trying to sell to their disciples that their way is the best way to be happy and that interested me but if you zoom out you do start to notice certain commonalities and certain themes. So if we imagine happiness as being on the right path, if we follow the Taoist metaphor, then the question we've got to ask ourselves is if we are unhappy what's going on there and the question then is about finding the right path again. There are certain lights which emerge in the history of philosophy and theology as well which are meant to act as beacons or guides with which we can walk towards. It's found in Confucius's idea of right virtue, it's found in Aristotle's Nicomachean ethics and it's found in Al-Ghazali's idea that the right way is in accordance with Allah. So if we are unhappy then we should work towards these lights and I've identified three lights or what's called pillars of happiness. The first pillar or light number one is the idea that happiness is not measured by pleasure. So the ancient Greeks had a lot of different words for happiness and one of them is hedonia and hedonia is what we might want to call simple pleasure. It's the big night out with some friends but it's also drinking a herbal tea on the sofa. It's quite easy to measure and it's quite easy to understand because it's an emotional affect. Eudaimonia though is a much harder word to understand. It's often translated as flourishing and the reason why it's difficult to understand is that it's often understood in reverse. So there are many moments in life where we look back on our experiences and think they were really hard at the time but actually we were supremely happy. For example raising young kids or even school can be quite hard at the time but we look back and think those were moments where I was deeply supremely happy. So the idea that pleasure is not an essential ingredient to happiness appears in many different philosophical schools. So this idea is central to Buddhism. So Buddhists tend to define pleasure as being a desire satisfying. So I want a drink of water and so I reach for the water and I drink it and that gives me a pleasure. But the problem of course is that this is an unwinnable game. Every day we have millions and millions of desires and there's no way we can satisfy them all. It's like a game of whack-a-mole. If we're to be happy at all it has to be found outside of this notion of pleasure. We have to step beyond hedonia. But the problem is that we risk going too far. It's a logical fallacy to say that just because pleasure doesn't equal happiness that suffering therefore must. And it's a risk that we fetishize suffering. That we enjoy this kind of masochistic misery and we see that as essential to flourishing. But of course that's not true and the second pillar, the second light which emerges across all these traditions is moderation. That we have to find a middle way. It's essential to Taoism and the idea is that life is not black or white but rather it's a confused and confusing cocktail of things. Everything is grey. So yin tends to represent the dark, the mysterious, the elusive, water, fluidity. And yang tends to represent the exciting, the passionate, the loud, the sunny and truth. And so for Taoists we have to find the middle path which is walking between yin and yang. But this idea of moderation is also seen in everyday life and it's in the Swedish lifestyle concept of lagom which means just the right amount. And there's two elements to it really. The first element is a kind of fair usage policy where if I take all of the cookies in the cookie jar then it leaves none for anybody else. And so what I do will affect other people. The second element of lagom is a kind of recognition that sometimes less really is more. And so for example if I'm having a coffee with a friend that's fun, that's enjoyable. But if I have seven coffees it's not so much. And this idea of moderation and balance appears again and again through different threads in philosophy. But the third thing that I noticed appearing is the idea that happiness is an unavoidable emergent state of goodness. That you cannot be truly and meaningfully happy unless you are also virtuous. But of course this raises a problem and the problem is what does virtuous mean? Because if we zoom in on any different culture and any different time what people define as right and wrong and good and bad will change from person to person from philosopher to philosopher. So if you look at the history of philosophy what you find is that certain virtues have always been called virtues and certain vices have always been called vices. I think we can identify five. The first is altruism and the vice egoism. So this is seen in Augustine's code for monks and it's seen in Islam's zakat. It's there in Peter Singer and Immanuel Kant and Thomas Aquinas. And the idea is a sense of other-regardedness, charity and caring for other people. The second is kindness and cruelty. So this is best represented by the golden mean. Which most people are familiar with this from the gospels which is do unto others as you'd have them do unto you. But it's not just in the gospels it's seen in Sanskrit, in Tamil, in Persian, in ancient Greece and in the Vedas. But it's also seen in modern times in Kant's first categorical imperative and in Aquinas's natural law. Be good and kind to other people. And the third virtue vice is justice and injustice. I think if you put Plato and Mencius and John Rawls in the same room they would agree about the need for justice. Which is the idea of some kind of retribution for wrongdoers. The fourth virtue vice is wisdom and ignorance. Socrates famously wrote that the unexamined life is not worth living and the Buddha encourages disciples to meditate at great length on the universe. I can't think of any major philosopher who's been treated seriously for long who advocates for ignorance. And the fifth virtue vice is humility and arrogance. And I think this has two strands really. The first is a kind of intellectual humility which is represented best by John Stuart Mill and the second is a kind of existential humility which is represented by the religions. It's in Karl Barth, it's in Maimonides and the word Islam literally translates as surrender to Allah. This is the idea that you are not the centre of the universe. There are things outside of your understanding which are far more powerful and which we occasionally have to bow to. So taking all these together how can we actually apply these three pillars to our day-to-day life? And I think for pillar number one which is the idea that happiness cannot be measured by pleasure I think a really good example of this is parenting. If you ever go on social media and you see a reel or a post about a new parent it's inevitably moaning about something. Their sleep deprived nights or the germs or their kids aren't eating anything and it's full of stress and what appears to be misery. But then if you commented on those posts saying well why did you bother having kids in the first place or why do kids make you unhappy? Often parents will reply I'm the happiest I've ever been and I think parenting is an example of looking back at a stage of your life and thinking all of the ingredients might have been pretty hard in themselves but as a whole I was deeply existentially happy. Pillar number two is the idea of moderation in all things and I think this is best seen in dieting. So most diets end within a month or if not weeks and most news resolutions end pretty quickly. It's I'm going to go to the gym every day and run half marathons or I'm going to give up chocolate or I'm never going to drink alcohol ever again and they fail because they are so extreme and the best diets in history allow a degree of flexibility and moderation. So dieting when it's done at these extremes does work for some people no doubt but for most people dieting is best when it happens in the middle way. So pillar number three is that happiness requires goodness which might seem ridiculous to lots of people because we can point to people who seem to be pretty cruel or immoral and yet they seem to be also very happy. But the evolutionary psychologist Robin Dunbar did a study into gossip and he argued that gossip is a kind of social culling where we talk about the cheaters and the liars and the thieves in our lives so we can shun them from society. Inversely those who are friendly and kind will be welcomed into society. So what we can conclude is those who are kind and those who are friendly will have friends and those who have friends are also happy. What I find really interesting is if you zoom out and look at the history of philosophy you see these three pillars emerging and they act essentially as a diagnostic tool. If you feel you are unhappy in life you can look at these pillars and think which of these three am I not meeting? Is it that I'm confusing a hard patch of my life of being unhappy? Is it that I'm going to two extremes? Or is it that possibly I'm not being as good as I could be? If we recognize that those are the problems in our life we can take steps to fix it. Want to dive deeper? Become a Big Think member and join our members-only community, watch videos early and unlock full interviews.