Satisfaction

LISTEN. Today in Happiness we consider "life satisfaction" and Daniel Haybron's assertion that To be satisfied does not mean you think your life is going well for you...

If you've spent the bulk of your life imprisoned, and declare upon eventual release that you were and are happy, does that bode ill for happiness as a worthy object for a life's quest? Or does it just speak well of the temperament of the ex-con who persevered so heroically?

Plato's cave-dwellers in Book VII of the Republic must have thought themselves happily ensconced in their subterranean prison, else they'd not so have resented their enlightened peer's attempt to shine a light on their situation. Happiness surely does not supersede delusion. 

Wittgenstein's dying words, "Tell them I had a wonderful life," belie his morose reputation. So did old Schopenhauer's Scrooge-like visage. But maybe happiness can take the form, for some, of delight in adversity and mental anguish and deep pessimism, after all. 

Or maybe they need to join Philosophers Anonymous, and acknowledge their impotence to alter a power larger than themselves. But what would that power be? Temperament? Genetics? Fate?

Or maybe not. Maybe Wittgenstein and Schopenhauer and the cavers and the ex-con knew satisfaction, but not happiness.  I'd like to think so, and I think a lot of us would. We'd like to think our respective pursuits of happiness won't just satisfy but ultimately will uplift, transport, and redeem us. 

Ultimately. For now, though, day by day, how do we measure our satisfaction and judge its contribution to our ultimate happiness? After all, we're "just born, and there you are. So it's hard to know where to set the bar for a 'good enough' life." 

I say set the aspirational bar high, but be prepared to appreciate and celebrate close to the ground.  A low and mean life would have to be pretty low and mean to be flatly unsatisfactory. It can still be lacking, disappointing, wounding, depleting, whatever, but still satisfy in ways oblivion obviously cannot. "It sure beats being dead."

It does, doesn't it? Sophocles in Oedipus Rex -- “...count no man happy till he dies, free of pain at last” -- was chronically unhappy, no fit role model for us. Right?

If you don't know you're pain-free, you might as well not be. If you're happy and you know it, that deserves some applause. But if you think, with Schopenhauer, that the hunt for happiness gives rise to deluded hope and dissatisfaction, well, good luck. And don't worry, the end is always near.