The Pursuit of Happiness
“Life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.” The substitution of “the pursuit of happiness” for “property” in this famous triumvirate may be simultaneously the most inspiring and most troubling rhetorical move in American history.
Americans obsess about “happiness.” Whole academic disciplines are devoted to its study. We universally believe we have a “right” to it. We use it to justify our actions and to determine our decisions. We claim that it’s all that we want for our children, and for ourselves as well. For all that, Americans remain a pretty unhappy people. According to the “World Happiness Ranking,” America ranks 23rd among all nations, putting us just below the United Arab Emirates and Slovenia.
A recent Gallup poll shows that the percentage of Americans “satisfied with their personal lives” is at a near-record low (47% very satisfied, and 31% somewhat satisfied), and the younger they are, the less satisfied they are. It’s difficult to factor how the COVID pandemic with its isolating policy responses affect results, but recent studies indicate that already growing mental health problems, especially among the young, have been sent into hyperdrive. In other words, the pandemic simply exacerbated already existing trends indicating ever-increasing levels of anxiety and depression.
I’m not offering a recipe for being happy; I’m arguing instead that happiness (if by “happiness” we mean the subjective report of persistent good feelings) is really overrated and we shouldn’t spend so much time pursuing something so elusive. The more we obsess about it, the less likely we are to find it; and the more we think we are entitled to it, the more likely we will make ourselves and those around us miserable. The pursuit of it puts enormous pressure on us and intensifies the misery when we fall short of it.
Let’s address some confusion concerning the word “happiness.” In our typical usage, we use it to refer to a state of mind or how we regard our general state of being. If we “feel good,” we take that to be pretty much what happiness is. Of course, “feeling good” typically results more from circumstances than our own will. More significantly, such feelings are evanescent: we can’t rely on them coming, but we can rely on their going, and pretty quickly at that. This unstable state of affairs is part of what makes the pursuit of happiness so quixotic.
The ancient word we translate as “happiness,” eudaimonia, more literally means being blessed by a minor deity, having good things dispensed to you. In the time of Plato and Aristotle it also refers to a highest good composed of all the other goods, that for the sake of which we always act. Plato and Aristotle both connect it to virtue: the perfection of a thing in accordance with its highest activities. Aristotle, in his Nicomachean Ethics, realizes that we will disagree about what all those “other goods” are and how they can be concentrated into a “highest” good. We err in knowing the good and how grasping for those things we associate with the good can easily lead us astray. Such grasping will disrupt the harmony and integrity of the self. Everyone wants to be happy, but people do not reliably choose the right path to achieving it.
This disagreement about what is good creates enough confusion that it in turn results in unhappiness. Cicero noted that “a confusion of depraved opinions that are in opposition to one another” concludes in a mind “deprived of its health, and disordered with sickness.” Cicero went on to observe that this “sickness of the mind has all these subordinate divisions” that include “avarice, ambition, fondness for women, obstinacy, gluttony, drunkenness, covetousness, and other similar vices.” He singled out for special mention what happens to us “should money be the object of our desire.” When the love of money is unchecked, the “evil glides into our veins, and cleaves to our bowels.”
Aristotle, like Cicero after him, recognized that happiness (often referred to as “human flourishing”) gets derailed by desire attaching itself to the wrong objects. Aristotle made the useful distinction between intrinsic goods, things enjoyed for their own sake, and extrinsic goods, things done for the sake of something else. Liberal learning, friendship, play, hobbies are examples of things we pursue for their own sake. We don’t engage them for any other purpose than the enjoyment of them, and were we to do so we would pervert them. One reason Cicero singled out money as a special problem is because it is always an extrinsic good, and one that sits at the end of the rainbow for many of our pursuits. The reason why we find our avocations more rewarding and meaningful than our vocations results from our motivations. Americans express a lot of dissatisfaction with their jobs because many Americans are in it for the money alone.
This is not a new problem. Once again, we turn to Alexis de Tocqueville, not only for his keen socio-political analysis, but also for his insight into human behavior. Tocqueville, readers may recall, argued that democracy’s egalitarian social state rendered us all increasingly “alike.” Democracy tended, he believed, toward uniformity; where society doesn’t homogenize, markets will step in and do the job. In a world where distinctions are not, as in aristocracies, given in the nature of things, we seek to distinguish ourselves through success in competitive enterprises; and, furthermore, we will seek to provide ample evidence of that success.
Long before Thorsten Veblen spoke of “conspicuous consumption,” Tocqueville understood the need of democratic persons to use displays of wealth to mark themselves off from one another. Money, the cash nexus, becomes key to the enterprise, because money allows us to take real wealth — productive property and land — and to liquidate it. The fluidity of wealth both reflects and intensifies the unstable social sphere. In aristocratic society, Tocqueville argued, the pursuit of money was unseemly, but in democratic societies it becomes laudatory. In one of his earliest observations about America, Tocqueville wrote that “I do not know a country where the love of money holds a larger place in the heart of man.”
This love of money, Tocqueville believed, affected not only our social relations but the operations of government itself. Aristocratic societies sever the relationship between money and office-holding. Aristocrats do not hope to gain (more) wealth by holding highly lucrative offices or by using the benefits of office to benefit themselves. Aristocrats more likely seek office out of a sense of honor or public service, while democrats more likely seek it for self-interested reasons. “It follows that in aristocratic states, those who govern are hardly accessible to corruption and have only a very moderate taste for money, whereas the contrary happens in democratic peoples.”
In democracies, candidates use money to buy votes — either through patronage or through swaying the electoral process. This makes electoral politics more likely to elevate talents for “low intrigues” and “guilty maneuvers.” One key difference between aristocracy and democracy, Tocqueville argued, involved the path of getting to power: in aristocracies the pre-political arrangement of social life confers political authority, while in democracies the competitive grasping at power unleashes ambition and attempts to satisfy the desire for status. Aristocratic politics stress refinement and obligation, while democratic politics revolve around a “coarse and vulgar” arriving to power where candidates engage in “robbing the public treasury” and “selling the favors of the state for money.”
What’s true of political life is no less true of those who do not have a vocation for politics. Aristotle and Cicero, both concerned about the corrupting influence of money and luxury, distinguished between work and leisure. Work relates to necessity while leisure relates to freedom. Work narrows our horizons while leisure (note: not amusement, and certainly not indolence), by encouraging contemplation, enlarges them. Aristocratic societies tend to be well-governed because of the existence of a leisured class: that is, a class sufficiently freed from the necessities of caring for material needs do that they have the time and repose required for deliberation. Because they are members of this class, the children of aristocrats can be trained in the proper use of leisure from the earliest ages.
Not so democracies, where wealth, being unfixed, becomes an object to be constantly pursued. Democratic persons, even if rich, do “not know what to do their leisure” and direct that time toward “some operation of industry or commerce,” by which all human energy “uplifts the idea of working to procure lucre.” Aristocrats, he says, don’t scorn the idea of work, but only the idea of work “with a view to profit.” In democracies, on the other hand, the ideas of work and material gain are “always visibly united.” Democratic persons engage in the relentless and ceaseless activity of “increas[ing] his resources.” This impulse flattens out all distinctions between vocations because all seek the same end: enriching themselves. “There is no profession in which one does not work for money. The wage common to all gives a family resemblance to all.” And as we argued earlier, working for a wage is pursuing an extrinsic end or purpose rather than doing the activity for its own sake. The truth of this is validated by the fact that almost all Americans, were they wealthy, would not continue in their jobs. Lottery winners immediately quit their jobs, validating the truth of Tocqueville’s insight. Even “the President of the United States works for a wage as well. He is paid to command just as they [citizens] are to serve.”
In summation:
In democratic countries a man, however opulent one supposes him, is almost always discontented with his fortune, because he finds himself less wealthy than his father and he fears that his sons will be less so than he. Most of the rich in democracies therefore dream constantly of means of acquiring wealth, and they naturally turn their eyes toward commerce and industry, which appear to them the promptest and most powerful means of getting it. On this point they share the instincts of one who is poor without having his needs, or rather they are pushed by the most imperious of all needs: that of not sinking.Tocqueville believed that this constant pursuit of money, itself not a stable or dependable thing, makes us unstable. Pursuing something so liquid, so evanescent, intensifies the restiveness emblematic of democratic persons. Money, for those living in a democracy, “troubles their souls but arranges their lives.”
All of this helps illuminate the central paradox investigated by “happiness” scholars: why are Americans so unhappy in the midst of their affluence? Never have we been better off, and never have we been more miserable. Gregg Easterbrook documented this carefully in his 2003 book The Progress Paradox: How Life Gets Better While People Feel Worse. There, he marshals the (now dated) research, demonstrating the (to a degree) inverse correlation between material well-being and “happiness.” What all the studies indicate is that there is a point at which increased wealth produces no increase in happiness. Easterbrook offers some explanation for this paradox: a lack of gratitude for what we have, fear of death, fear of backsliding, worries about “the economy” downgrading our standards of living, but he offers none of the acuity of Tocqueville.
“In America I saw the freest and most enlightened men placed in the happiest condition that exists in the world; it seemed to me that a sort of cloud habitually covered their features; they appeared to me grave and almost sad in their pleasures.” Principally, the “first [poor in aristocratic societies, who “ordinarily show a serene countenance”] do not think of the evils they endure, whereas the others [democratic persons] dream constantly of the goods they do not have.” Americans, demonstrating a “feverish ardor” in pursuit of worldly goods always seek “the shortest route that can lead to it.” They get frustrated easily by impediments to their desires. Democratic man flits about from one material satisfaction to the next, trying to “grasp them all but without clutching them,” allowing each “to escape from his hands so as to run after new enjoyments.” We grow “weary of this useless pursuit of a complete felicity that always flees from” us, welcoming death itself as a respite from the exhausting restiveness. On the one hand, the thought of death intensifies our desire to grab all we can while we can, and on the other hand it promises an end to this futile effort. We live, Tocqueville realized, in a state of “unceasing trepidation.”
In other words, life in a democratic society makes us crazy. It unleashes desires and passions but at the same time makes us so individually weak and helpless, and in such intense competition with others, that we can never achieve any kind of satisfaction for those desires. The pursuit of happiness is what makes us unhappy. The more equal we become, the more agitated we are by even slight differences between us, driving us ever deeper into the comparison sweepstakes. We want to be no worse off than anyone else and seek to demonstrate that we are better off, our wealth evidence of our merit. But the equality we desire “constantly escapes [our] grasp.”
It is to these causes that one must attribute the singular melancholy that the inhabitants of democratic lands often display amid their abundance, and the disgust with life that sometimes seizes them in the midst of an easy and tranquil existence.Aristocracies are stable and democracies unstable (“and the most unstable thing of all is the human heart”). In aristocracies everything is different but nothing changes, while in democracies everything changes and nothing is different. The actors are different, but the play is the same. “Men who live in democratic times have many passions; but most of their passions end in wealth or issue from it. That comes from the fact not that their souls are smaller, but that the importance of money really is greater.” Democratic people will tend not to step outside of themselves unless they are paid for it, a tendency only offset by our willing engagement in voluntary associations. But if government takes over the functions of these associations, the importance of money for us intensifies. The pursuit of material well-being not only leaves us exhausted, it leaves us one-dimensional: Americans are both bored with and made boring by money-making. The “violence of our desires” both “troubles our souls” and “arranges our lives.”
Jefferson’s substitution of “pursuit of happiness” might please our quasi-Marxists with their suspicion of property rights, but “property” introduces a stable element into our unstable affairs while “pursuit of happiness” only intensifies the problem. The gain in rhetorical appeal is offset by the loss in social and personal well-being. We would do well to reinvigorate the classical view that a modest amount of productive property is all a person needs to be content with his or her “lot” in life.
Director of the Ford Leadership Forum, Gerald R. Ford Presidential Foundation
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