Chapter 4: A Satisfaction that is not based on circumstances
Ecclesiastes 2:24 ‘A person can do nothing better than to find satisfaction in their own toil...’ but that is exactly what eludes him. He describes a life of accomplishment that very few achieve. Eccl. 2:4,8,10
Nevertheless he says: ‘I hated life... my heart began to despair over all my toilsome labour under the sun.’ Eccl. 2:17,20
Nothing brings satisfaction: This is an abiding human problem and there is plenty of empirical research that backs it up. Studies find a very weak correlation between wealth and contentment, and the more prosperous. Society grows, the more common is depression. (Quoted from Haidt)
The things that human beings think will bring fulfilment and contentment don’t. Two approaches to happiness then exist. What Haidt calls the ‘early happiness hypothesis of ancient times.’ The principle being: we are unhappy even in success because we seek happiness from success. Buddha and the Chinese sage sand the Greek philosophers in the west saw that wealth, power, achievement, family, security etc. Can lead to only momentary happiness, which fades when taken away leaving you more empty than if you had never never tasted the joy. The answer, they said, was to not seek to change the world but rather to change your attitude toward the world. Epictetus: ‘do not seek to have events happen as you want them to, but instead want them to happen as they do happen and your life will go well.’
In short: don’t try to fulfil your desires, rather control and manage them.
However, modern research has shown that some external circumstances do correlate with increased satisfaction. In particular love relationships are important and therefore the advice of emotional detachment may actually undermine happiness.
Haidt describes the ‘modern happiness hypothesis’ as being: whilst warngin against overdoing it, modern culture encourages its members to find satisfaction through active efforts to change our lives, not just accept life as it is.
Keller adds: despite huge social, moral and technological advances ‘no one is arguing that we are significantly happier than our ancestors were.’
Some respond: it doesn’t matter, just carry on without worrying about happiness. Others that according to research we are in fact happier than we used to be. Still others acknowledge that ‘happiness’ is the wrong word and that when asked ‘how are you?’ Most people say ‘I’m fine,’ but the statistics on suicide and depression reveals this may not in fact be the case.
More accurate a gauge than ‘happiness’ we should ask about joy, fulfilment and satisfaction in life.
Our levels of lasting contentment, Keller argues, are actually quite thin. Peggy Lee recorded a song in 1969 that sums up how we often feel: As a 12yr old she was taken to see a circus performance called ‘the greatest show on earth.’ But as she watched she ‘had the feeling that something was missing. I don’t know what, but when it was over I said to myself, ‘Is that all there is to a circus.’ Then she fell in love with a boy who later left her and she thought she’d die. “But I didn’t and when I didn’t I said to myself ‘Is that all there is to love?’ At every turn everything that should have delighted and satisfied her did not - nothing was big enough to fill her expectations or desires. There was always something missing, though she never knew what it was.
Cynthia Hemel a columnist who saw friends go from anonymity to Hollywood stardom saw them discover to their horror that they were no more happy or fulfilled than before. Young people might say ‘It’d be different for me.’ No it wont:
That’s what the wisdom of the ancients and all the anecdotal evidence in the world will tell you.
The two main approaches: Satisfaction (‘it’) is still out there (to come or be sought) vs satisfaction (‘it’) isn’t possible.
It is out there:
The young: ‘it is out there’ We get busy preparing ourselves to be happy.
The resentful: We blame the things that stop us getting ‘it’
The driven: Constant reinvention assuring ourselves that ‘it’ is at the next level.
The despairing: we can never get it.
Francis Spufford: (we’re to blame so we hate ourselves)
But the day comes when you’re lying in the bath and you notice you are thirty-nine and that the way you’re living bears scarcely any resemblance to what you thought you always wanted, and yet, you realise you got there by a long series of choices.
It doesn’t exist:
Altruism then: helping others is the only right path for finding any personal contentment (although this uses the needy to selfishly serve self)
Cynicism: Stop chasing rainbows, stop crying after the moon. Lower your expectations. This makes you condescending toward anyone not as sophisticated or ironic as you, worse it ‘dehumanises you’ Martin Heidegger: what makes us human and not animal is a desire for joy, meaning and fulfilment.
Detachment: Epictetus: ‘what harm is there while you are kissing your child to murmur softly, ‘Tomorrow you will die?’ However modern research supports intuition that diminishing your love others does not increase satisfaction.
Some say this desire for happiness comes from an evolutionary trait carried forward.
Augustine read Cicero who said: every person sets out to be happy but the majority are thoroughly wretched. He then concluded that the extreme scarcity of human contentment might be a judgment of divine providence for our sins.
Augustine saw that it was actually product of our ‘displaced loves’:
We are most fundamentally shaped most by what we believe or think but by what we love. For when we ask whether somebody is a good person we are not asking what he believes or hopes for, but what he loves.
A virtue is nothing more than what we love: Courage is loving your neighbour’s well-being more than your own safety. Honesty is loving your neighbour’s interested more than your own, even when the truth will put you at a disadvantage.
- What you love most at the moment is what controls your action at that moment.
Our loves also have an order to them. A just and good person: is also a person who had rightly ordered his love, so that he does not love what it is wrong to love, or fail to love what should be loved, or love too much what should be loved less (or love too little what should be loved more).
The reason even the best possible worldly goods will not satisfy is because we were created for a degree of delight and fulfilment that they cannot produce.
...Even goods on this scale cannot fill the vacuum. The cavern in our soul is indeed infinitely deep.
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