What Makes You Happy? How Our Notions of "Happiness" Can Doom Us to Sadness

I think it is probably fair to assume that most Americans today consider happiness not only something that would be nice to have, but something that we really ought to have -- and, moreover, something that's within our power to bring about, if only we set our minds to it. We can be happy, we tell ourselves, teeth gritted. We should be happy. We will be happy.

That is a modern article of faith. But it is also a relatively recent idea in the West which dates from the 17th and 18th centuries, a time that ushered in a dramatic shift in what human beings could legitimately hope to expect in and from their lives. People prior to the late 17th century thought happiness was a matter of luck or virtue or divine favor. Today we think of happiness as a right and a skill that can be developed. This has been liberating, in some respects, because it asks us to strive to improve our lots in life, individually and collectively. But there have been downsides as well. It seems that when we want to be happy all of the time, we can forget that the pursuit of happiness can entail struggle, sacrifice, even pain.

Roots of happiness

Language reveals ancient definitions of happiness. It is a striking fact that in every Indo-European language, without exception, going all the way back to ancient Greek, the word for happiness is a cognate with the word for luck. 'Hap' is the Old Norse and Old English root of happiness, and it just means luck or chance, as did the Old French 'heur', giving us 'bonheur', good fortune or happiness. German gives us the word 'Gluck', which to this day means both happiness and chance.

What does this linguistic pattern suggest? For a good many ancient peoples -- and for many others long after that -- happiness was not something you could control. It was in the hands of the gods, dictated by Fate or Fortune, controlled by the stars, not something that you or I could really count upon or make for ourselves. Happiness, literally, was what happened to us, and that was ultimately out of our hands. As the monk in Chaucer's Canterbury Tales declares:

And thus does Fortune's wheel turn treacherously And out of happiness bring men to sorrow.

In other words, the wheel of fortune controls our happenstance, and hence our happiness.

There were, of course, other ways of thinking about happiness. Those who have studied Greek or Roman philosophy will know that happiness -- what the Greeks called, in one of several words, eudaimonia -- was the goal of all Classical philosophy, beginning with Socrates and Plato, then taken up even more centrally by Aristotle, then featured prominently in all the major "schools" of Classical thought, including that of the Epicureans, Stoics, and so forth. In their view, happiness could be earned, a perspective that anticipates our modern one.

But there is a crucial difference between their ideas of happiness and ours. For most of these Classical philosophers, happiness is never simply a function of good feeling -- of what puts a smile on our face -- but rather of living good lives, lives that will almost certainly include a good deal of pain. The most dramatic illustration of this is the Roman statesman and philosopher Cicero's claim that the happy man will be happy even on the torture wrack.

That sounds ludicrous to us today -- and perhaps it is -- but it very nicely captures the way the ancients thought of happiness, not as an emotional state but as an outcome of moral comportment. "Happiness is a life lived according to virtue," Aristotle famously says. It is measured in lifetimes, not moments. And it has far more to do with how we order ourselves and our lives as a whole than anything that might happen individually to any one of us.