Happiness needs effort, argues Richard Schoch

We’ve lost the ability to understand the essentially moral nature of happiness. 

We’ve settled for mere enjoyment of pleasure, mere avoidance of pain. Somewhere between Plato and Prozac, happiness stopped being a lofty achievement and became an entitlement.

More than two thousand years ago, when the ancient Greeks first thought about what ‘the good life’ means, happiness was a civic virtue that demanded a lifetime’s cultivation. Now, it’s everybody’s birthright: swallow a pill, get happy; do yoga, find your bliss; hire a life coach, regain your self-esteem.

But it doesn’t have to be that way. We can enrich our lives by encountering the great religious and philosophical traditions of happiness – and then put them to work in our lives today.

In the right place

Those traditions insist that we do not have to become someone else to be happy.

In a way, that’s trivial: how can we be other than who we are? But what’s far from trivial is the belief that to find happiness we must turn our backs on everything that is familiar, forge a new life, perform extraordinary acts, or exchange a dismal present for a fantastic future. Such efforts are wasteful because they squander the opportunity that is always before us: to become not someone else (that’s the perverted goal of the ‘makeover’) but a better version of the person we already are.

Whoever we are, in whatever circumstances we face – and for nearly all of us, they will be ordinary ones – the possibility of happiness always surrounds us. We are always in the right place, though we do our best to forget it.

Hard work

The sages and the saints also tell us something that we’re reluctant to hear: happiness is hard work. True happiness is the orientation of your life towards meaning, purpose, and value. It’s a reflection upon the quality, the character, of your life as a whole. Happiness isn’t about feeling good – it’s about being good. 

That’s what Aristotle meant when he called happiness an activity – because it requires skill and focus. Far from being a state of passive enjoyment, like relaxing in a bubble bath, or eating a box of chocolates, happiness demands effort. 

The Roman emperor Marcus Aurelius said that happiness feels more like wrestling than dancing, because being happy means ‘standing prepared and unshaken to meet whatever comes’. Happiness, then, is something that we resolve to achieve, and to strive for it means that we regard our life as a journey in which we move purposefully toward that ultimate goal.

How do we get to happiness? It’s like that joke about the tourist in Manhattan who, realizing that he’s lost, asks a passerby, ‘How do you get to Carnegie Hall?’ The answer: ‘Practise!’

Richard Schoch is Professor of the History of Culture at Queen Mary, University of London. He is the author of The Secrets of Happiness: Three Thousand Years of Searching for the Good Life (Profile Books, 2006)