Hello, everyone, how’s it going? I’m Luciano Sewaybricker, and this is The Underside of Happiness.
As we talked about in a previous episode, happiness is a mess. It is also a thorny, confusing, and often disheartening subject. There’s a very good book by American historian Darin McMahon called Happiness: A History, in which he writes the following excerpt in the preface. In other words, he opens up his 500-page book about happiness with this…
Open quote:
How do you write the history of something so elusive, so intangible—this thing that isn’t even a thing, this hope, this desire, this dream? (…) It’s unsettling for any author to admit the difficulty—perhaps the impossibility—of defining their object of investigation. (McMahon, 2006, p. xi)
Close quote.
So, that’s the perspective of someone who faces the underside of happiness, as we are doing. In today’s episode, to face this kind of ugly underside, we will explore some answers to the question: “Why do we talk so much about happiness?”
And, oh boy, we do talk about it a lot.
Who doesn’t remember Pharrell Williams’ song “Happy”? It was the most-played song on Spotify in 2014, topped the Billboard charts, won several awards, and was even nominated for an Oscar. And it is still reasonably common to hear it today. I heard it yesterday at my psychology students’ graduation ceremony. Probably to force everyone to be happy (and not desperate) with all the weight of the responsibility of becoming professional psychologists.
Well, there are also ads referencing happiness that are multiplying like Gremlins. Off the top of my head, I can recall local ones in Brazil like a supermarket’s “Place for happy people” or an all-purpose store’s “Come, be happy”; and there are international ones like Coca-Cola’s “Open happiness,” and the Unilever’s ice cream’s “Share happiness”. I have the hobby of collecting pictures of advertisements that use happy or happiness, and this week I photographed the “Happy Pig butcher shop”. So many lies are being told there…
My last example is politics—perhaps the most recent domain happiness has invaded.
A few years ago, I was invited to give an interview on a lunchtime news program about an international happiness survey. The survey ranked the happiest countries in the world, and Brazil was in 10th place. Looking at the ranking and the indicators, I couldn’t stop thinking: “What on earth does this even mean?” Being in 10th place? Or better yet, what does it mean that 71% of Brazilians surveyed said they felt satisfied with their lives? Does that mean we’re doing well or doing poorly? Does being satisfied mean not going hungry or living the life you dreamed of? And even more: what does it mean to compare Brazil with Fiji, which ranked 1st, with 88% of respondents saying they were satisfied?
In the end, the news story didn’t address these points, but it clarified one thing: the sheer size of interest in happiness—so much so that countries started competing in rankings as if happiness were, I don’t know… an Olympic sport.
Going even further into politics, in 2012, the United Nations proclaimed March 20th as the International Day of Happiness to be celebrated every year precisely to encourage people to think about the importance of this topic in policymaking.
That same year, in 2012, Bhutan—a small country nestled between India and Nepal—finally launched its long-awaited Gross National Happiness measure, which had been in development since the 1970s. Nowadays, many countries have their own metrics for happiness or well-being, including England, Ireland, France, New Zealand, and the United Arab Emirates.
So, it should be clear by now that we talk a lot about happiness. But why do we talk about it so much? That’s the explanation that interests us here, not just the observation.
Since this question can be approached from different angles, I’ve organized the material into four distinct answers, which can be seen as complementary.
- The first answer is: “We talk so much about happiness because we aren’t happy.”
- The second: “Because happiness has become part of advertising.”
- The third: “Because we’ve never been closer to uncovering the secrets of happiness.”
- And the fourth: “Because we’ve oversimplified the meaning of happiness.”
In the end, since this question is such a big topic, I’ll dedicate one episode to each answer. In this first one, we will explore the first of these answers: we talk so much about happiness because we believe we aren’t happy. In other words, the less happiness we have, the more we will talk about it.
Let me start by telling a story.
I’ve been dreaming of buying an espresso machine for some time now. I even took a barista course to learn how to prepare coffee properly. But those machines are pretty expensive. Whenever I brew my coffee with my humble pour-over dripper, I look at it and think about the espresso machine. Because I want that machine so much, I constantly notice its absence. It could be sitting in my kitchen, all glorious in polished aluminum. I could be savoring sips of my perfectly balanced espresso—acidic, bitter, and sweet all at once. But I’m not…
This idea ties back to the answer to the central question of this episode. We deeply desire happiness, but it’s not present in our lives—at least not how we’d like it to be. That’s why we think and talk about it so much. The more we feel the absence of happiness, the more we will talk about it.
Notice that this answer has two underlying ideas that are necessary for it to make sense:
The first is that happiness is something everyone wants—a lot! After all, who would refuse to be happier? Has anyone in history ever said: “Enough with this happiness thing, I’m tired of it. I’ve been too happy for too long, that’s enough, don’t bring me any more happiness!” It is hard to imagine. Even for research on “happiness aversion”, which is a thing, might be debatable if the problem is really with happiness. But that might be a topic for another episode.
The second idea is that today, we perceive ourselves as less happy. In fact, we perceive ourselves as less happy than people did at other times in history or we did in the past.
We’ve already talked quite a bit about the first idea, and there’s not much debate around it. It is a common definition – in philosophy at least – that happiness is the most important thing in life. Now, the second one—that today we are significantly less happy—requires a deeper examination.
Notice that we’re not talking about unhappiness but about happiness and how happy we perceive ourselves to be. In the end, this means that perceiving oneself as less happy is tied to an expectation we have.
For example, if I didn’t expect my life to be much more impressive with an espresso machine, I wouldn’t feel its absence or lament my imagined alternative life.
And the problem with this expectation? It’s all the fault of the ancient Greeks. Back in ancient Greece, when Socratic philosophers started questioning what they could control in their lives (versus what was in the hands of the gods), they were gifted with dissatisfaction. They began imagining alternative lives—what they could do differently, have differently, or be differently.
After all, if I have control over some aspect of my life, I can change it; I can improve it. That’s what the so-called Socratic Greek philosophy is about: thinking of life (including happiness) as something we control, at least in parts, no longer as something that simply happens to us.
For instance, I know I can change if I perceive myself as being grumpy. I may not believe I can become the most happy and exuberant person in the world, but I can be less grumpy. I can imagine my future and desire aspects of that future. But here’s the catch: if I’m imagining and desiring a future, it means it’s different from what I have or who I am today.
This is exactly what Plato wrote about in his famous work The Symposium. We only desire what we don’t have. Once we have it, we no longer desire it.
If listening to this podcast makes you very, very happy (which I know to be the case), you might think: But I’m experiencing true happiness right now, and yet I still desire happiness. In this case, what you likely desire isn’t happiness at this exact moment but rather to be just as happy in the future. And in the future, you’re not happy—or at least you’re not sure you will be. After all, this episode will end at a certain point.
For example, you don’t desire to breathe. It happens naturally, and under normal circumstances you don’t control it or don’t need to control it, you’re confident you’ll continue breathing in the future. As Plato showed us, we desire what we don’t have.
But you might be wondering: what does all this have to do with the fact that we have less happiness? Hold on, my hearing friend, we’re getting there. We’re still in Ancient Greece, and things only worsen as we move through the Middle Ages, the Enlightenment, and modern times.
Well, if the Greeks put that little bug of desire in our ears, Christianity replaced it with a barking dog — one of those really loud ones.
Think about it: dreaming of a future different from the present is something that Christianity deeply reinforces, and it’s rooted in its teachings. I should aspire to live like Jesus Christ (which, let’s be honest, is a pretty high standard: the guy loved people unconditionally! These days, who can do that? We’re out here on the internet fighting over the color of a dress). It doesn’t take much to see that, compared to that standard, we’re not doing great.
And the bar gets even higher. Saint Augustine, perhaps the most important philosopher of Christianity, wrote that true happiness can only be achieved after death. For him, happiness consists of having what you desire. Nothing new there. And if you desire something you don’t have, you’re not happy. Again, nothing new. The problem Saint Augustine presented is that the ideal, true, complete happiness can only be experienced in the presence of God. “The one who is with God is happy,” he wrote. Omnipresence, omniscience…
So, don’t even try to be like Jesus Christ… I could stop fighting people on Reddit forums, but even that wouldn’t be enough for Saint Augustine. For him, I can only be fully with God after I die, in the afterlife. My human condition prevents me from achieving earthly happiness – because I won’t be with God.
But if you think it can’t get any worse, believe me, it can. That little bug of desire that Plato put in your ear, which turned into the barking dog of ascetic ideals, kept evolving — like a Pokémon — and became a zombie dog, straight out of a Resident Evil game.
The guilt that comes from religious asceticism is undeniably a heavy burden. But for a long time, it was a burden shared collectively through community life. People understood their lives as interconnected and dependent on those around them, especially family. Because of that, desires were mainly shared, as was the guilt of not having or being what one desired. It wasn’t exactly my fault I wasn’t happy—“Look at the conditions I was born at and all my social obligations!”
The individuality we value so much today was gradually built over time. However, some researchers, including the French scholar Louis Dumont, place great importance on the Enlightenment—the so-called Age of Reason, which spanned the 17th and 18th centuries.
During this period, many thinkers, such as Adam Smith, John Locke, Thomas Hobbes, and Renè Descartes, wrote works that strengthened the individualist perspective in economics, politics, sociology, and even how we understand the world.
In stark contrast to Saint Augustine, Descartes believed that happiness was entirely possible for anyone who guided their life by reason — with the bonus of not waiting for the afterlife.
Well, if anyone can guide their life by reason — since reason is a purely individual exercise — and achieve happiness, then if I’m not happy, it’s because… well…. I’m stupid, incompetent… I don’t think Descartes would use those exact words, but the idea is pretty much that. If the means to happiness are right in front of me, and yet I don’t perceive myself as happy, it must be my fault, my incapacity.
That zombie dog in our ears is the price of betting everything on reason.
The U.S. Declaration of Independence makes this very clear:
Open quotes.
“We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness.”
Close quotes.
Happiness became so desired and individual that it became an unalienable right of every human being to seek it (American, in this case). Happiness has come to be considered an inherent mode of human existence. This is, in the end, a very high stake in happiness. Yet, we still face the old problem of desire, beautifully summarized by playwright George Bernard Shaw:
Open quotes.
“There are two tragedies in life: one is to not get your heart’s desire. The other is to get it.”
Close quotes.
I desire what I don’t have. When I have it, it ceases to be an object of desire. Pure, platonic catastrophe. In other words, I will always feel indebted to myself. Throughout history, we’ve tried to grasp happiness, understand how it works, and it seems to only grow more complicated.
As Alexis de Tocqueville noticed in his book, Democracy in America (1961, p.278), open quote
“no one could work harder at being happy than Americans do and still a cloud habitually hung on their brow” (1961: 278).
End quote.
But there’s a piece of this chapter’s answer we still haven’t resolved. If this last “zombie dog” thing happened around the 17th and 18th centuries, why would we be significantly less happy today?
The answer: hope and advertising.
The French philosopher André Comte-Sponville, an author I greatly enjoy reading, proposed that a specific type of desire is problematic. That is, he challenges Plato’s idea that all desire is always the desire for what we lack or don’t have. According to Comte-Sponville, it is indeed possible to desire something we already have. But that’s not the most important point for us here. What matters is that Comte-Sponville identifies a type of desire that is particularly problematic — in fact, especially so in today’s world: hope. Let’s break this down to better understand.
Open quotes.
“We only hope for what we do not have, and for that very reason, the more we hope to be happy, the less happy we are. We are constantly separated from happiness by the very hope that seeks it.”
Close quotes.
This kind of hope, therefore, distances us from happiness because we only hope for:
- what we do not have,
- what we do not know, and
- what we cannot control.
For example: “I hope to pass the job interview.”
- I desire to pass the interview because, for me, the approval does not yet exist (if I had already passed, I wouldn’t be “hoping” for it).
- I don’t know whether or not the interviewer will approve me for the role (if I were sure I’d pass — say, if the interviewer was my mother, who thinks everything I do is wonderful — I wouldn’t need to hope for it).
- And I don’t have control, at this moment, to ensure my approval (if I knew, for example, that the only selection criterion was to show up at the interview location, I wouldn’t “hope” to be approved).
Therefore, I only hope for what I don’t have, what I don’t know, and what I can’t control.
Comte-Sponville suggests that we’ve never hoped so much for happiness. If I meditate, I hope to be happy. If I travel to Europe, I hope to be happy. With a new job, I hope to be happy. But this hope for happiness, ultimately, only reinforces the massive gap between how I actually feel and how I wish I felt; between the life I live and the life I desire. After all, the more I hope—or rather, the more I desire—the more it means this thing is not part of my life.
For him, as long as we understand happiness this way—as a promised reward at the end of the journey, hoping for it clumsily, not knowing what it is, not knowing how to have it—as long as we keep hoping for happiness, we’re doomed. And it doesn’t make a tiny bit difference to make an unalienable right.
I only hope for what I don’t have, what I don’t know, and what I can’t control. But where does so much hope for happiness, so many promises of a happy life, come from?
This is where advertising comes in, something very particular to our times. Stop and think: what makes you desire things? What makes you wish for a different life?
A breakfast commercial is the first thing that comes to mind when I ask myself this question. Beautiful sunny day, the family sitting at the table with the glorious suggary-cereal plate, bread, jam, butter, everyone smiling, cheerful, fulfilled, with the golden retriever wagging its tail, perfectly behaved. It’s a life where everything works out. All desires were satisfied. Nothing more, nothing less. I smile along with the commercial… I buy the cereal, put it on my table… and then realize my life is far from the one in the ad. My dog jumps on me and drools on my plate…
If you are from a younger generation, Gen Z, Alpha, Beta, or whatever new name they are giving it, the most probable cause of desire will be social networks like Instagram, Snapchat, or TikTok. Filters and the incentives embedded in these social networks make the breakfast commercial logic very much present there. Posts are, below the surface, advertisements.
Advertising, therefore, produces desires and consumption, and with them, hope: I desire the life in the ad or Instagram post, and by buying things, that desire takes the form of hope for a piece of happiness.
Hope because I only hope for what I don’t have, what I don’t know, and what I can’t control.
I don’t have happiness; I don’t really know what it is (even though it seems the family in the ad knows); and lacking options for what to do, I passively hope that something like the ad happens to me. A passive hope – as all hopes are.
And if happiness doesn’t come, doesn’t happen to me, well, it’s entirely my fault. As I’m free to pursue happiness and I have so many things (products and services) to support me…
Thank you very much, Enlightenment thinkers.
To recap, the core of why we are especially less happy today is:
- Advertising, social networks, and consumption make the gap between what I desire and my life increasingly more significant.
- Meanwhile, the individualistic nature of contemporary society makes the failure to be happy entirely my responsibility.
With that, we wrap up this first answer—super optimistic—to the question: “Why do we talk so much about happiness?”
In the next episode, we’ll continue with the second response, which builds on this one:
- Because happiness has become part of advertising, part of consumption.
And what answer would you give to the question: “Why do we talk so much about happiness?”
Share your thoughts with me on….hum… Well…. A social network. LinkedIn is now the best one to do so.
To close, a quote from the Roman philosopher Seneca:
“When you unlearn how to hope, I will teach you how to want.”
I hope you enjoyed it, and see you in the next episode.
The Underside of Happiness 