More important than whether you're happy, says Haybron, is your contribution and legacy. Will you be deservedly well thought-of, for having lived well? So much the better if living well makes you happy, but in the long perspective of history the personal and subjective experience of virtue will barely register. Isn't that all the more reason to make happiness a priority? If you don't, who will?
That's not to endorse "acting badly" in the pursuit, but some will wonder what's to stop any of us from doing so. What compels conscience and compassion, aside from the unpleasant prospect of being poorly thought-of? Decency and virtue might be motivation enough, and their own reward, for the noblest natures. Others rightly care about the judgment of generations to come.
But then there are the deplorables, the philistines, the jerks. They claim the right to be terrible people. Until quite recently I would have said they were marginal to our civilization and not a threat to it. Lately that's less clear. "One should not be an asshole in the pursuit of happiness." You may get yourself in big trouble.
"According to some studies, having kids doesn't make us happier." Having just graduated a couple of them, I've made my own study. I can't imagine the past 20+ years of my life without them. More than that: anticipating them was a source of happiness long before their births. But I know that's not everybody's experience.
"Any life dedicated to worthwhile ends is meaningful," even if the judgment of worth is uncertain or, again, awaits the verdict of history. While we live we have to make that call for ourselves, have to believe we've chosen worthwhile ends, if we're to experience that sort of meaning. Of course, we may never know.
We do know, don't we, that those gawking consumer-touroids on p.104 are draining life of meaning even if they think they're "making memories"? Like selfish and shallow people everywhere, they look more desperate and absurd than happy.
Happiness really is an aspirational ideal, something worth chasing no matter how elusive it may turn out to be.
"Nothing in life is as important as you think it is when you're thinking about it," says Nobelist Daniel Kahneman. Hmm. As a professional thinking person that's disconcerting. But as Michael Lewis points out in The Undoing Project, Kahneman and his pal Amos Tversky have shed needed light on the extent to which we ought to mistrust our own intuitions about everything, including what will make us happy. “Man is a deterministic device thrown into a probabilistic universe." Well no wonder we often get it wrong. Wonder's that we ever get it right. On the other hand, “When you are a pessimist and the bad thing happens, you live it twice."
More uplifting (and poignant) is that heart-grabbing missive from the battlefield that closes Haybron's book. "I am such a lucky person to have the life that I have." That says it.
Tversky said it too, commenting on his own fatal illness. “Life is a book. The fact that it was a short book doesn’t mean it wasn’t a good book. It was a very good book.”
And next we turn to another good book, in Happiness class, on Epicureanism. But first, it's Thursday Happy Hour at the Boulevard. Hope it's not too hot for the patio.
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This makes me happy, reminding me of a time not so long ago when actual teenagers amused themselves by exploring the real world: "Cave paintings were discovered in Lascaux, France, on this date in 1940. Four French teenagers and their dog, Robot, stumbled upon the caves while they were out exploring one day..." WA
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September 12 is the birthday of the journalist and editor H.L. (Henry Louis) Mencken (books by this author), born in Baltimore, Maryland (1880). He graduated as the valedictorian from his high school at the age of 15, but even though he was burning to write, he did exactly what his father expected: He took a job at the cigar factory. He started out rolling the cigars alongside the other blue-collar men, and he actually enjoyed that manual labor. But when he was promoted to the front office, he was hopelessly bored... When asked what he would like for an epitaph, Mencken wrote, "If, after I depart this vale, you ever remember me and have thought to please my ghost, forgive some sinner and wink your eye at some homely girl."
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NOTE. These bits below the double lines are the residue of my old practice of checking in each morning with On This Day, Writer's Almanac, and the like, for a quick review of historical highlights and curiosities to help place the day's news in perspective and balance its preponderance of bleakness. Re-purposed old posts may thus include a dated appendage that does not coincide with the new day's date... but if it's interesting or amusing enough, to me at least, so what? Ergo,
"It's [not] the birthday of Margaret Sanger, born in Corning, New York (1879). She coined the term "birth control," she was its most famous advocate in the United States, and she was the founder of Planned Parenthood. H.G. Wells said of her, "The movement she started will grow to be, a hundred years from now, the most influential of all time."
Margaret Sanger was born into a working-class Irish family. Her mother died at 50, after 18 pregnancies... In 1921, Sanger founded the American Birth Control League, which in 1946 became Planned Parenthood Federation of America. She also funded research to create a contraceptive pill. She said, "No woman can call herself free until she can choose consciously whether she will or will not be a mother." She died in 1966, at age 87, a year after the landmark Supreme Court decision Griswold vs. Connecticut finally made birth control legal for married couples." WA
September 12 is the birthday of the journalist and editor H.L. (Henry Louis) Mencken (books by this author), born in Baltimore, Maryland (1880). He graduated as the valedictorian from his high school at the age of 15, but even though he was burning to write, he did exactly what his father expected: He took a job at the cigar factory. He started out rolling the cigars alongside the other blue-collar men, and he actually enjoyed that manual labor. But when he was promoted to the front office, he was hopelessly bored... When asked what he would like for an epitaph, Mencken wrote, "If, after I depart this vale, you ever remember me and have thought to please my ghost, forgive some sinner and wink your eye at some homely girl."
==
NOTE. These bits below the double lines are the residue of my old practice of checking in each morning with On This Day, Writer's Almanac, and the like, for a quick review of historical highlights and curiosities to help place the day's news in perspective and balance its preponderance of bleakness. Re-purposed old posts may thus include a dated appendage that does not coincide with the new day's date... but if it's interesting or amusing enough, to me at least, so what? Ergo,
"It's [not] the birthday of Margaret Sanger, born in Corning, New York (1879). She coined the term "birth control," she was its most famous advocate in the United States, and she was the founder of Planned Parenthood. H.G. Wells said of her, "The movement she started will grow to be, a hundred years from now, the most influential of all time."
Margaret Sanger was born into a working-class Irish family. Her mother died at 50, after 18 pregnancies... In 1921, Sanger founded the American Birth Control League, which in 1946 became Planned Parenthood Federation of America. She also funded research to create a contraceptive pill. She said, "No woman can call herself free until she can choose consciously whether she will or will not be a mother." She died in 1966, at age 87, a year after the landmark Supreme Court decision Griswold vs. Connecticut finally made birth control legal for married couples." WA
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