How to Be Happy: Lesson #3
As I noted in Lesson #2, the Buddha was the numero uno happadvocate in history on The Pursuit of Happiness website. Moving from East to West, the second person on the list is the ancient Greek philosopher Socrates (469–399 BC). Besides his infamous encounter with hemlock, Socrates gets credit for, among many other accomplishments, founding Western philosophy. He is also, according to TPOH, “the first known figure in the West to argue that happiness is actually obtainable through human effort.”
Here’s a quick summary of Socrates’ ideas on happiness (thanks and a tip of the hat to Plato for writing them down!) from the TOPH site:
- All human beings natural desire happiness.
- Happiness is obtainable and teachable through human effort.
- Happiness is directive rather than additive: it depends not on external goods, but how we use these external goods.
- Happiness depends on the “education of desire” whereby the soul learns how to harmonize its desires, redirecting its gaze away from physical pleasures to the love of knowledge and virtue.
- Virtue and Happiness are inextricably linked, such that it would be impossible to have one without the other.
- The pleasures that result from pursuing virtue and knowledge are of a higher quality than the pleasures resulting from mere animal desires. Pleasure is not the goal of existence, however, but rather an integral aspect of the exercise of virtue in a fully human life.
That’s quite a list for discussion, but the phrase that catches my eye especially is “education of desire” (EOD). When I googled those words, I discovered that some famous souls also found interest in it: Karl Marx, for example, and Michel Foucault. Those guys, however, are in the deep-thought end of the pool, so to speak, a place where I can barely tread water, let alone swim. I prefer the shallow end where one can present the illusion of paddling masterfully while walking along the bottom.
The EOD concept seems simple: teach yourself to put a yearning for learning and not being a dick* above getting the next iPhone or having an elegant meal or visiting Timbuktu. Not a trivial task by any means. It would certainly be easier to do that if we in the developed world weren’t being constantly reminded of things we don’t have and should have, things we haven’t done and should do, places we haven’t been and should go. But should we give up physical pleasures? Is the loin-cloth-and-cave brand of asceticism the only true route to happiness? It seemed Socrates thought so.
Others disagree. In her Atlantic article “For the Love of Stuff,” Julie Beck tells us that “loving objects doesn’t necessarily make someone greedy or materialistic.” She interviews a psychologist who describes two types of materialism: one, terminal materialism, the shallow and empty kind, and two, what you might call transcendent materialism, where “things transcend their thing-ness” by becoming “repositories for the meaning people project on them.”
This dichotomy suggests that another road to happiness, or at least to being happier, is to go through your possessions, sort them into a terminal pile and a transcendent pile, throw out/recycle/give away the terminal pile, and keep the transcendent pile, even if it goes back in the attic where most of it has been living since you bought your place in 1988. To be honest, I get a “bearable lightness of being” feeling just from thinking about doing this. But how does one decide which is what? Someone needs to invent a sorting hat for things. It might work like this. When you don the cataloguing chapeau and pick up an object, the hat will pronounce “Treasure It” if it’s transcendent or “Trash It” if it’s terminal, and you then take the appropriate action. I know that some people can make these pronouncements without outside help, but these individuals swim at the deep end of the making-life’s-tough decisions pool. But me, well, you know where I stand.
Speaking of trying not to be a dick, the TNTBAD® website is now open for viewing. Have a look and tell me what you think. It’s still in the evolutionary state (but what and who among us isn’t?).
(Published originally on RatBlurt™, December 12, 2018.)
