Chris Jepson: Your kind of happiness

“Happiness is not a goal … it's a by-product of a life well lived.” – Eleanor Roosevelt

We, for all intents and purposes, have been the same model of human being for the last 200,000 years or so. I am confident that that time frame will be “tweaked” as archeologists and anthropologists interpret new data. For 150,000 of those years, we awoke each morning to the challenges and beauty of East Africa. Regardless, 50,000 years ago “we” started walking out of “Eden.”

Imagine, if you will, what those early Homo sapiens thought about life. Early man was tiger food; life was a never-ending search for nourishment and safety from the elements. Yet, those people with the benefit of a fashionable haircut, a pedicure, perhaps, and with appropriate dress, could be drop-shipped into the 21st century and they would seem, essentially, as you or I. They would have, however, none of the context or understanding we moderns have.

My question is: how did early man and woman think about happiness? Did a warm day and a full stomach provide a modicum of contentment? What made “them” happy, and is our idea of happiness markedly different from their perspective? Did they see the beauty in flowers or a transcendent sunrise and derive joy (happiness) from the experience?

More or less 2,500 years ago, the Greeks and the Chinese (independently) started offering specific ideas on the subject of happiness. “Most philosophers and historians agree that the concept of happiness in antiquity centered around good luck and fortune, whereas contemporary Americans view happiness as something over which they have control and something that they can actively pursue.”

“… Happiness is what happens to us, and over that we have no control,” offer happiness researchers Shigehiro Oishi and Jesse Graham.

The Greeks (Socrates, Plato, Aristotle, etc.) began the Western discussion on what constitutes happiness and how to achieve it. According to these intellectual luminaries, all of us naturally desire happiness. So far so good. Ah, but there is a rub. A catch. While happiness is the ultimate goal for the individual, happiness is not pleasure nor is it virtue. Happiness is the implementation of virtue. Happiness is the culmination of the human experience and is dependent on the rational use of reason. Happiness requires intellectual contemplation.

Other Greek and Roman intellectuals were less highbrow about what constituted happiness, but they all equated happiness and virtue.

Christianity, unfortunately, didn’t push the envelope of what constitutes happiness. Arguably, religion has been an impediment to earthly happiness. St. Augustine offered that, “the earthly quest for happiness is doomed.”

Thomas Aquinas said partial happiness can be achieved only through the “theological virtues of charity, hope and faith.” Aquinas was a step forward in that everybody could, at least, be partially happy.

Martin Luther went even further asserting that, “Christians should be merry . . . To live life as a justified man was apparently to experience the world as a pleasure garden for the soul.” Only a deeply religious life, however, could be justification for earthly happiness. It took 18th century Enlightenment to move the question from “how can I be saved?” to “how can I be happy?”

We, moderns, pursue happiness with dogged determination. Science today suggests that all of us have a “genetic” default setting for happiness. A death, a divorce—time passes—and we’re back to our individual set point of happiness.

Following 200,000 years of humanity – and absent starvation and other stressors – each of us can experience happiness. Perhaps in a flower, a sunrise, or in service with others.