Rethinking the Good Life
Happiness is slippery. We know money doesn’t buy it, yet we struggle to grasp or even define it in the present, often recognizing it more readily in the past. It is typically described as a blend of features—pleasure, peace, and self-actualization—experienced retroactively as nostalgia. Despite all our talk of happiness, we live in a society afflicted by despair and meaninglessness. Perhaps we should address this meaninglessness directly, considering the value of the human world against the backdrop of the vast universe. Given these results, is happiness worth pursuing? To answer that, we must first ask: What is happiness?
Happiness as Good Memories
To describe happiness, we often recount memories of a happier time. Nostalgia arises from the contrast between a past experience—perhaps mundane at the time—and its later idealized recollection. By romanticizing the past, we diminish the present. But was the past truly happier, or do these memories merely reflect our present dissatisfaction? We easily dismiss our grandparents’ rosy recollections as somewhat delusional, yet our own secondhand happiness is hardly more credible.
Happiness as Good Feelings
We often think of happiness as present-tense pleasures such as surprise, bliss, and joy. Yet even in moments of enjoyment, we are rarely fully present. We anticipate the next experience, and the pleasure often falls short. The pursuit of gratification can be self-destructive.
Pleasure can also manifest in overtly destructive behaviors, such as public shaming. Observe the barely suppressed joy of a social media pile-on, in which large groups of strangers righteously band together to destroy someone’s life while masking their repressed thrill beneath the guise of mob justice. In fits of public sanctimony, we project our worst qualities onto scapegoats and tap into the heart of darkness within the unconscious.
From wistful nostalgia to the titillation of public shaming, these forms of happiness reveal the destructive undercurrent that runs through our pursuit of pleasure, described by Lacan thusly: “The drive is profoundly a death drive.” Whether it's the fleeting high of immediate gratification, the perverse joy of vicarious cruelty, or the undermining of the present in favor of a supposedly better past, pleasure often becomes entangled with darker impulses.
There is nothing inherently wrong with enjoying life’s simple pleasures, but emphasizing their pursuit is hardly a profound insight. Most of us are already doing this anyway. Yet given their fleeting nature and our tendency toward self-sabotage, it’s clear that a lifelong chain of simple pleasures does not reliably add up to a life well-lived.
Happiness as Self-Actualization
Another theoretical path to happiness lies in the ideal of self-actualization. The drive toward individual self-realization began at least 2,300 years ago in Greece, with Aristotle. He believed each being has a function (ergon), and happiness lies in fulfilling it through reason and rationality.
On this theory, the philosopher John Gray writes, "We think of a happy life as one that culminates in eventual fulfillment. Ever since Aristotle, philosophers have encouraged us to think in this backward-looking way. But it means thinking of your life as if it had already ended, and none of us knows how we will end. Spending your days writing an obituary of a person you might have been seems an odd way to live."
No one can predict their life's course, and even our best-laid plans can be undone. Given our limited knowledge in youth, such a demanding and uncertain mission may be unrealistic for many.
Happiness as Tranquility
Moving beyond pleasure and self-actualization, inner peace is another common conception of happiness. Conscious thought defines us (as Descartes noted), yet we often seem happiest transcending it. Our defining feature is also the source of our deepest suffering, and in my work, I often help people quiet their minds to live more fully.
Many approaches, including meditation, the pursuit of "flow" states, and Stoicism, propose achieving happiness by suspending the thinking mind. These strategies, though promising, are difficult to sustain and often fail. None account for the power of the unconscious, which consistently undermines such strategies in pursuit of its own irrational aims.
Lacan reframes this dilemma as, “I think where I am not, therefore I am where I do not think.” As a psychoanalyst, he recenters the essence of our being around the unconscious, over which we have little knowledge and almost no leverage. Driven by primal urges and amoral drives, the unconscious exerts a powerful influence over our thoughts and actions, frequently undermining our best intentions. Even the most consummate rationalist is driven by unconscious forces of which they are entirely unaware.
A Good Life
Rather than pursuing a state or experience, the good life may consist of toggling between worlds, gaining awareness from this movement. We live mostly in the human world, structuring our lives around families, economies, and religions that are inscrutable to all other living creatures. Yet this human world is nestled within a universe that, as far as we can tell, is mostly not alive and is radically indifferent to human affairs.
This movement unlocks a particular wonder: contemplating an incomprehensible universe that encompasses an equally complex human world. This is not a sustained state of mental peace, but a fleeting moment of openness, in response to a sunrise, powerful music, starlight, a great book, or a cool breeze.
The pursuit of happiness can prevent this movement, trapping us in cognitive loops and fooling us into believing that the human world is the only world worth considering. As Lacan’s work suggests, the pursuit of understanding can itself be a trap, a way of avoiding the fundamental mystery at the heart of being. The crucial insight is that both the human and non-human worlds profoundly matter, yet both elude our comprehension.
These moments are not eurekas of understanding but rather of non-understanding—a recognition of the limits of human knowledge. They open us up to a richer, more meaningful existence, one that embraces the limits of our sentience. What if, instead of striving for happiness, we simply aimed to see things as they truly appear? Perhaps then we could accept the world, and ourselves, with the clarity of awe.