The Best Self-Help is Free: The Myth of Complete Happiness

Before you proceed on any path to self-improvement, you need to recognize that you will never be completely happy - ever. In fact, complete happiness is neither a possible nor a desirable state, when we define happiness in the sense in which most of our contemporaries use that word.

First, let us distinguish between classical happiness and contemporary happiness. The fact is, happiness as defined by most of our contemporaries did not even occur as an idea to most people in most ages of human history. Their lives - surrounded by death, disease, pestilence, famine, war, tyranny, injury, trauma, filth, and psychological abuse - were simply far too miserable to conceive of anything so fanciful as a trouble-free life. The best our ancestors were able to come up with as regards happiness is the Aristotelian concept of eudaemonia or classical happiness.

Eudaemonia says nothing about being free of troubles or gratifying one's every desire. Rather, it is a highly sophisticated approach to ethics - entailing prudence, virtue, moderation, and self-restraint in all things, from work to pleasure. Classical happiness is highly entwined with the use of one's intellect in rational judgment and the pursuit of knowledge. A classically happy person recognizes his own limitations and is able to thrive within them by enjoying what is accessible to him and not stepping outside the bounds of the tried and true. He can achieve his full potential while recognizing that his potential is limited - often in rather severe and tragic ways. If he experiences difficulties or great sufferings, he bears them with dignity, content that his troubles do not overwhelm him or erode his composure.

Beginning with Aristotle, the classical concept of happiness inspired such widely influential philosophical schools as the Epicureans and the Stoics and had a considerable impact on Renaissance and Enlightenment thought. A transformed version of eudaemonia was what the American Founders meant by the "happiness" they claimed all men had a right to pursue.

I believe in a somewhat broader view of happiness than the classical philosophers adhered to, but - like the classical thinkers - I do not adhere to any utopian illusions regarding what is possible for man in this world. The contemporary view of happiness suggests that it is the natural right of every human being to be gratified in all of his desires - be they sensory, intellectual, or emotional. If we are not satisfied in any of these dimensions, this view suggests, it is time for us to make a stern resolution for change and to radically transform our lives and environment to make us happy, darn it! -- no matter how many of the structural foundations of our lives and our relationships with other people we destroy in the process.

The widespread prevalence of divorces, abortions, career and educational abandonments, addictions, grudges, emotional abuses, and feuds in our society arises in large part from the actions of those who find some perhaps legitimate faults with their situation and thus attempt to overturn everything in that situation - destroying what is mostly good along with a little bit of what is bad. Instead of taking an incremental, evolutionary view of happiness and self-improvement, too many people take an all-or-nothing revolutionary view. Instead of trying to make a flawed situation marginally better, too many people try to radically change their lives overnight - and end up with much less happiness, prosperity, or stability than they started with.

But none of the great thinkers on happiness ever suggested anything along the lines of this utopian, revolutionary conception. The closest that has been suggested by rational examiners of the subject was a right to the pursuit of happiness in the Declaration of Independence. But this simply means that each of us as an individual has the prerogative to do what he believes will enhance his well-being. I grant that no government and no busybody should have the right to stop a person endeavoring to improve his own condition - even if the means that person chooses for self-improvement are flawed - provided that he imposes no coercive harm on anyone. But a right to the pursuit of happiness is not a right to happiness itself. In pursuing happiness, you are by no means guaranteed to succeed - although some approaches have shown to be much more reliable than others. All too many people, in considering themselves naturally entitled to happiness, thereby deprive themselves of any chances of attaining actual reasonable satisfaction with their lives.

It is absolutely wonderful that many of us no longer live in the world of our ancestors. The very fact that the contemporary conception of happiness as a life filled with bliss and no suffering arose is a testament to how much better our lives are compared to those of our ancestors. We can actually imagine a state free of troubles, and we can actually make intelligent arguments for why we think ourselves capable of reaching such a state. It is surely much better to be able to imagine such prospects than to be so enveloped in misery as to be oblivious to them.

But just because we live in a much better world does not mean that we will ever be completely satisfied with our lives. As humans solved vast problems, their perspective was opened to still other problems that arose in their place. As they cured diseases that would kill millions of people in their thirties or forties, they now face the formidable challenges of curing cancer and biological senescence itself. After the great heroes of mankind - scientists, doctors, and engineers - cure those diseases, there will be still other threats to our well-being that will cause us great concern and anguish. Never will any of us be with good reason able to sit back and say, "I have conquered all my problems. Now it is time to enjoy pure bliss."

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, the great German dramatist, philosopher, and scientist, wrote: "That which moves not forward, goes backward." Entertaining the idea that there exists some trouble-free state called happiness leads one to either overturn one's life in an attempt to find that elusive specter, or to sit back in idle contentment - doing nothing and expecting one's "natural right" to happiness to be somehow granted. Recently, there have even been self-esteem books - such as The Secret - that suggest that all we need for complete happiness and fulfillment in all things is to simply wish for it hard enough. According to the authors of this work, we can lose weight, cure otherwise fatal diseases, gain indefinite quantities of money, and obtain any object or relationship whatsoever if we simply display enough positive thinking and ask "the Universe" for what we desire. But if wishing made it so, we would all indeed be living in a world of bliss - for who except the seriously disturbed does not want to lead a comfortable, prosperous, healthy, and fulfilled life? There is a danger to believing that the objects of human desire can be obtained as easily as that. Such thoughts detract one from the genuine means for improving one's condition. If you believe that your thoughts alone suffice to bring you happiness, then you will be hesitant to act in genuinely efficacious, life-improving ways.

You will never have all that you desire - even though you might someday get everything you desired at a prior point in time. But as older desires are fulfilled, they give rise to new ones. As one old question is answered, scores of others arise in its place. Many simple ideas, easy to conceive of, give rise to projects that take tremendous amounts of hard work to accomplish - and yet you will not be satisfied until you accomplish them. And then there will be other projects to complete and other questions to answer. Of course, that is the best of all possible worlds. Reality is often much more brutal. Nature continues to bring upon us disasters and diseases. A meteorite can still ram into the Earth and eradicate all human life. Other people, jealous of our successes or desirous for power, can plot to undermine us out of sheer envy, spite, or fear. They can often do so through safe, legal, impersonal ways - by means of a huge apparatus of expropriation and organized violence known as the government. Even without the interventions of natural and manmade crises, complete happiness in the contemporary sense would be impossible; with these setbacks and catastrophes periodically barging into our lives, it is hardly even a reasonable objective.

What is, then, a reasonable objective? If complete happiness is not it, then a different goal must take its place. This goal, I submit, is a much better and stabler one than happiness - because, aside from being a goal in itself, it is also a process and one that need never end so long as one continues to live and has the energy to act. It is a more ambitious and optimistic goal than the classical eudaemonia - while borrowing many of eudaemonia's best elements. Unlike the contemporary utopian conception of happiness, this goal is also firmly grounded in the real and the possible. I will call that goal incremental progress, and it will be the focus of subsequent chapters.

Read all chapters of The Best Self-Help is Free.