We’ve been wrong about happiness. Here’s what philosophy says

There's certain paths, there's certain ways 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 realize we're on the wrong path, often until it's too late, and we find the going

really difficult. Why is happiness elusive? I think it's so elusive because the term itself is so laden, and there's very different

There's lots of different ways of understanding the term happiness. So my four-year-old son at the moment, for example, is learning how to read emotions in kindergarten

And they teach them how to recognize sadness and anger and happiness

And of course, the happy photo is someone with a beaming smile. And of course, that's what you do for a four-year-old child

You teach them to read the basics of emotions. But the problem is when we grow up, we don't really lose that image of happiness

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. And I think we don't really

like religious terms as much these days, but I think that expression, smiling soul, is probably

the closest we can come to understanding what happiness really is. And in fact, Aristotle

when he uses the word eudaimonia that translates literally as good spirit So I think the idea of a laughing or a smiling soul is really important to happiness But why do we find it confusing Why is it hard to understand

I think Taoism offers a really good ogy here. So Taoism is about the Tao, which is the way

which is this kind of mystical, kind of fundamental force which underpins everything

And an ogy that some Taoists use is that 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

It's even fun 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, there's certain ways 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

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. If we return back to this kind of heat map ogy 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

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. And if we are unhappy, we should walk

back towards these. So if we're trying to find our way back to the path and we're trying to

follow these lights, we have to know what those lights are. And 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 eating a mischlin starred steak but it's also binging on the KFC bucket

It's a 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. It's pleasure

This idea is essential 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 it's like a game of impossible whack-a-mole and there's no possible way we can satisfy them all Even if we had all of the time in the world and all of the money of Elon Musk there no way we can satisfy all of our desires So if we to make sense of that word happiness if we to be happy at all it has to be found outside of this notion of pleasure And what interesting is

about 2,000 years ago, in a very different tradition in Protestant Denmark, Soren Kierkegaard

was making the same point. Kierkegaard wrote a book called The Seducer's Diary, which is found in

his work Either Or, and in there we meet a character called Johannes, who is this esthete, who's living

the life of Riley. They're like a first-year university student going out drinking and

womanizing and having the time of their life. But the problem is, as we read the book, we realize

that his life is pretty shallow and Johannes gets bored. When I teach Kierkegaard, I tend to describe

him as similar to a vampire in one of those vampire movies. There's a common trope where the vampire

who's been living for hundreds of years is just bored of existence. They've drunk all of the drinks

they can drink, they've done all the drugs they can do, they've slept with all of the people they can possibly sleep with and they're lying on their sofa in this kind of listless state of

dissatisfaction and they're just bored of life and so they often turn to increasingly brutal

and disturbing things to keep the entertainment going but the idea is that if we want to have

more in life if we want to be truly happy we have to step beyond pleasure we have to step beyond

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