The philosophy of happiness, explained in 10 minutes

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 so 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 ogy 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 realise we're

on the wrong path often until it's too late and we find the going really difficult. Hi my name's

Johnny 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 a 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 found in Confucius idea of right virtue it found in Aristotle Nicomachean ethics and it found in Al 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 I like to call 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 satisfied. 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. You're going to whack the most? Move! That's fun

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 lagong, which means just the right amount

And there 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' 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 encouraged his 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 of 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 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 with 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