
There's More to Life Than Being Happy - dmor
http://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2013/01/theres-more-to-life-than-being-happy/266805/
======
digitalengineer
Nice comment on the origional article: _The modern definition of "happiness"
certainly refers to the hedonistic pursuit of pleasure. But it is instructive
to consider how the term has evolved since the time Thomas Jefferson enshrined
the "pursuit of happiness" in the Declaration of Independence as being a
fundamental human right. Jefferson most likely borrowed this idea from John
Locke, one Jefferson's key intellectual influences. In his essay "Concerning
Human Understanding", Locke stated that, "The necessity of pursuing happiness
[is] the foundation of liberty. As therefore the highest perfection of
intellectual nature lies in a careful and constant pursuit of true and solid
happiness; so the care of ourselves, that we mistake not imaginary for real
happiness, is the necessary foundation of our liberty." Locke was not
referring to the pursuit of sensual pleasure, but to the Aristotelian meaning
of "happiness", which Aristotle had described not as the satisfaction of our
desire for sensual pleasures, but a person's active pursuit of virtue or
excellence, or, in other words, the pursuit of meaning (the phrase "pursuit of
happiness" is actually redundant since pursuit is an essential part of
Aristotle's definition of happiness). So during the 18th Century and at the
time of the birth of this nation, the search for happiness and the search for
meaning in life were actually one in the same._

~~~
hayksaakian
I agree, but I don't think 'pursuit' was redundant. To pursue hedonism would
contradict his definition.

~~~
c0riander
I think it was saying that if "happiness"="the pursuit of meaning" then
"pursuit of happiness"="pursuit of the pursuit of meaning." Which is
redundant.

------
AngryParsley
_In his bestselling 1946 book, Man's Search for Meaning, which he wrote in
nine days about his experiences in the camps, Frankl concluded that the
difference between those who had lived and those who had died came down to one
thing: Meaning, an insight he came to early in life._

It's interesting to contrast this with the stories from Nothing to Envy:
Ordinary Lives in North Korea.

 _Yet another gratuitous cruelty: the killer targets the most innocent, the
people who would never steal food, lie, cheat, break the law, or betray a
friend. It was a phenomenon that the Italian writer Primo Levi identified
after emerging from Auschwitz, when he wrote that he and his fellow survivors
never wanted to see one another again after the war because they had all done
something of which they were ashamed. As Mrs. Song would observe a decade
later, when she thought back on all the people she knew who died during those
years in Chongjin, it was the “simple and kindhearted people who did what they
were told—they were the first to die.”_

That book has many tales of people surviving by cheating, stealing, and
ignoring the plights of others. That's the real truth: In a starvation
situation, nice people die first. A sense of meaning contains zero calories.

~~~
wfn
It might be that the experiences/conditions were a bit different: perhaps
(shameless utter speculation) Viktor Frankl had in mind those cases in which
people were not intentionally murdered, but rather died themselves (starvation
/ reluctance to eat / falling apart / suicide). e.g. (wiki):

"On 25 September 1942, Frankl, his wife and his parents were deported to the
Nazi Theresienstadt Ghetto. There Frankl worked as a general practitioner in a
clinic. When his skills in psychiatry were noticed, he was assigned to the
psychiatric care ward in block B IV, establishing a camp service of
"psychohygiene" or mental health care. He organized a unit to help newcomers
to the camp overcome shock and grief. Later he set up a suicide watch,
assisted by Regina Jonas."

Then again, e.g. his mother was killed intentionally in gas chambers. etc.

------
md224
While I agree with the gist of this article, I think it's walking a razor's
edge to differentiate between a "happy" life and a "meaningful" life. I could
argue that perhaps there isn't more to life than being happy, and what a
meaningful life brings is a more complex form of happiness, a lasting reprieve
from the existential terror that envelopes us between acts of isolated
pleasure-seeking. So yes, you may report higher life satisfaction with a
meaningful life vs. a "happy" one, but if you're going to define happiness in
such a narrow, superficial way, then you're kind of guaranteeing this
conclusion.

I think a better title would've been "There's more to life than seeking
selfish pleasure." But this is more linguistic nitpicking than anything else.

~~~
arkonaut
This post can be added to the pile of why HN discussions are getting more and
more pedantically lame.

The post adds so little. And even in the post, it acknowledges this, yet has
so many words/syllables/phrases to read through just for everyone, even the
poster, to come to the same conclusion.

I really don't like being negative. I guess it's the negative pedantry that
has bothered me to the point of saying something. If I'm in the minority and
just venting, apologies (My comment might just be the ticket to get it out of
my system).

~~~
spitx
This is just a reflection of the sorry state of the publishing industry.

We are fast approaching the point when one cannot expect a robust piece of
writing (specialized or general) of lasting worth, unless its behind a
paywall.

Frankly I don't blame them. Although some new entrants like QZ (dot) com and
very few others are trying, there have been no inroads made in this direction,
over the past five years.

We need some form of a micropayments mechanism to incentivize good work.

~~~
sliverstorm
Agreed, and the saddest part is I think anybody with half a brain can see it
coming, and nobody wants it, but we'll wind up there anyway.

It's sort of a great example why the idea of a good "race to the bottom" no
longer excites but rather uneases me. We've just gotten so darn good at
reaching new lows.

------
strlen
Along with other commenters, I think our society redefined happiness to mean
something it doesn't. I normally dislike self-help books ("The only way to get
rich from a self-help book is to write one."), but on someone else's recommend
I picked up: "A Guide to the Good Life: The Ancient Art of Stoic Joy" by
William Irvine ( [http://www.amazon.com/Guide-Good-Life-Ancient-
Stoic/dp/01953...](http://www.amazon.com/Guide-Good-Life-Ancient-
Stoic/dp/0195374614/) )

It is written by a philosopher and its aim is to rehabilitate the Stoics and
explain how their philosophy could be useful in modern society. I'd highly
suggest reading it (along with the works of actual Stoics as well as pre-
Socratic philosophers), particularly to those who like the core message of Zen
Buddhism but find it less suited to their way of thinking and difficult to
practice.

------
zeteo
Inside your brain there's a monkey brain. It is very certain about what it
wants: tasty food, sexy partners, leisure time to sit in a tree and do
absolutely nothing. You can use your amazing powers of reasoning and problem
solving to give the monkey all it wants. Or you could question its wisdom,
give it the occasional snub, and work on things that will still be important
in a hundred years instead.

~~~
jlas
Your comment and this article remind me of Maslow's hierarchy of needs
(<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maslows_hierarchy_of_needs>).

Maslow conceptualized human beings' needs into a hierarchical system. Where
things like food and sex are lower level (and more necessary) than things like
friendships and family.

Viktor Frankl chose to remain with his family rather than pursue his career in
America. In Maslow's hierarchy, Frankl was rational in pursuing familial ties
over his own "self-actualization".

------
Confusion
The article never actually gives a reason for preferring the pursuit of some
meaning to the pursuit of happiness[1], does it? At most it provides anecdotal
evidence you are more likely to survive a concentration camp.

[1] Ignoring the debate on how much they are, or can be, mutually exclusive.

------
eriktrautman
Pure ambition is the most naked representation of this principle at work -- an
infinite purpose that is never achieved. There is a surprising level of
unhappiness in those individuals who have risen to the greatest heights of
professional success for precisely this reason. Happiness and contentedness
seem to require an ability to say "that's enough for now"... so can a highly,
intrinsically driven individual truly achieve happiness?

------
alberich
"Frankl concluded that the difference between those who had lived and those
who had died came down to one thing: Meaning, an insight he came to early in
life."

So the thousands who died on the camps were some kind of nihilists, eh?

Why people always want life to be meaningful. Life may very well be absurd.

Is the pursuit of meaning a requirement for living a good life? I don't think
so.

~~~
DigitalTurk
Well, I think the trick is the find meaning in small things and not to worry
too much (all of the time) about how what you do fits in the grand scheme of
things. Because, indeed, things that are meaningful on a small scale might be
absurd when you put them in a bigger context.

So I don't see a contradiction here.

Of course worrying about what things mean on a larger scale can be virtuous,
but you also want to come to terms with your limitations as a human being in a
specific context.

------
sidcool
This is purely a philosophical article. Everything boils down to happiness,
call it anything. It's about happiness.

EDIT - I have immense respect for Dr.Victor. I didn't intend to sound
arrogant.

------
lmm
If suffering makes life more meaningful, should we set out to inflict
suffering on others for their own good?

~~~
strlen
First, not all suffering makes lives more meaningful. It's the process of
suffering through something and prevailing or even being overwhelmed and yet
later finding a way to get back up that gives us meaning.

Second, we do not have the right to make others' lives more meaningful if they
do not want them to be. The state's core role is to protect our rights.
Libertarians and conservatives define rights negatively, while liberals also
speak of positive liberties in addition to negative one, but this is the core
premise of liberal democracy. What we do with these rights and liberties is up
to us.

Of course there are exceptions: this is a big argument for having national
service or conscription even in countries that can afford professional
militaries and don't have hostile neighbors. I happen to disagree strongly
with the idea of any kind of national service or conscription, but I don't
find it something that should be dismissed outright and without debate.

More to the point, we do voluntarily inflict suffering on ourselves all the
time: most obvious being physical exercise, pain of childbirth, but less
obviously difficult academic programs (e.g., EECS at UC Berkeley or CMU).
Indeed, we pay a great deal of money to have others inflict suffering on us as
long as we're able to extract meaning from it.

------
conroe64
Articles such as these are very strange to me. There always is some unspoken
nebulous assumptions which the author doesn't even bother to justify. What is
the "better" that the author is referring to? She seems to think that it is
better to be a person who could survive living in a Nazi prison camp than
someone who could not. But what are you giving up to gain this ability? And
why is it so important?

Listing out a recipe for how to become a "better" person is also a strange way
of trying to help somebody. I mean, doesn't the idea of becoming a better
person appeal the old base instincts of greed and fear? Greed of having the
ability to appear confident, strong and satisfied, thereby the social status
ladder, and fear of falling behind. By following her advice from such a
viewpoint, you might be allowing yourself to be ever more aligned to instincts
that drive people to despair.. ever chasing the carrot just out of reach.

Of course, it's just my interpretation. The author may never have intended to
appeal to such base emotions, and is simply trying to help you achieve a
higher plane of thought by example. And the book she pushes may truly be full
of insight to guide you to the next step in your path to enlightenment and
fulfillment.

All these self-help guru's all do seem to follow the same pattern though, it's
always some sort of plan to appeal to your basic instinct to be better than
the people around you. If they were truly altruistic, then why is it always a
solution to your problem their peddling, and there is usually some next step
tied to giving someone somewhere money?

I think they are often doing a disservice to people who take this stuff too
seriously. By constantly bombarding you with the assumption that you're broken
and they have the fix, they leave you feeling not to bright, helpless and
insecure, when in fact if you just trust in yourself, you'll get over it. But
telling people to do that doesn't sell.

------
pdx
He had a pregnant wife, that he chose not to protect, in favor of staying with
his parents.

That's a tough position, and I am slightly critical of his decision, but
recognize it as a tough call. Optimally, he would have put her on a ship and
stayed with them, I suppose.

~~~
3pt14159
That she ended up dead, as well as both his parents, is sad. I would
personally have probably tried to find a third way of doing things (sneak
parents out of the country through any means necessary), but given some
strange binary choice, I would have left with my wife. It isn't like the
parents would survive conditions that got bad enough to kill his wife.

~~~
wtracy
Like many others, he may simply have underestimated just how bad things were
going to get.

------
kafkaesque
I submitted this article a while ago when it was first published in The
Atlantic, but it received no up-votes, so I deleted it. I wanted there to be a
discussion on HN even though I doubted whether this was the appropriate place
to have such a discussion.

The reason I posted it was because I wanted to see where people's logic would
allow them to go regarding happiness and human action. I wanted to contrast
what The Atlantic had written on Frankl with one of his contemporaries and
Auschwitz inmate, Jean Améry. Améry was a Holocaust writer and survivor, but
his ideas were in extremely stark contrast to Frankl. Améry was an
intellectual in the old sense of the word. As in, he treated the world
logically. He believed he had nothing in common with Jewish people. And, more
to the point, he didn't theorise or philosophise his way out of the
concentration camp like Frankl did. That is, Améry preferred to see the real,
raw, tangible truth of how many Nazis treated them.

To quote a blog post about Améry, which I recommend
([http://dgmyers.blogspot.com/p/jean-amery-biographical-
introd...](http://dgmyers.blogspot.com/p/jean-amery-biographical-
introduction.html)), that quotes him:

'"[W]hoever is, in the broadest sense, a believing person, whether his belief
be metaphysical or bound to concrete reality, transcends himself," Améry says.
"He is not the captive of his individuality; rather he is part of a spiritual
continuity that is interrupted nowhere, not even in Auschwitz.'

This, of course, Améry was not. Before publishing On Suicide: A Discourse on
Voluntary Death, he tried to take his own life but failed. After the book's
publication, he tried once again and was successful. In this book, he talks
about an internal, "other" logic that is only attained when one is suicidal.
Yes, he is in favour of suicide once it has been thought about 'objectively'
(even though he admits subjective occurrences are what drives the suicide). I
highly recommend reading him.

But I must say, I've read some posts/submissions on suicide here and have
never commented, because my opinions are unintentionally controversial and
probably not systematic enough on the matter. I believe if given the option,
one should always choose life, but I could never fault those for wanting to
end theirs, because given the current state of many Western, developed
countries, societies are unfortunately too cruel for some individuals. I
remember when I wrote an essay in favour of suicide, my professor accused me
of being hypersensitive. That may be true, but this is just one way how
society has suppressed any real helpful way to have a discourse on voluntary
death--by marginalising and labeling the "minor" numbers that end their lives;
that is, "we" have to fix "them"; surely, nothing can be wrong with "us".

All this is just an excuse to recommend Améry. Reading him was, despite my
young age, just like Kafka wrote:

I think we ought to read only the kind of books that wound and stab us. If the
book we are reading doesn't wake us up with a blow on the head, what are we
reading it for? ...we need the books that affect us like a disaster, that
grieve us deeply, like the death of someone we loved more than ourselves, like
being banished into forests far from everyone, like a suicide. A book must be
the axe for the frozen sea inside us.

------
linuxhansl
"Happiness" means so many things. Almost all of our pursuits are just achieve
this nebulous goal: To be happy.

Through meditation I came to the conclusion that what we typically call
happiness is just a temporary satisfaction of desires that won't last.

True happiness seems to be accepting what is, without judgment by realizing
"emptiness" (a term describing that nothing exists on its own or has a
distinct identity, including the self).

Once you see this you'll wonder how you could have missed this all this time,
since it is so obviously true. The problem is remembering this when things go
wrong; that is distinguishes people truly at peace from the rest of us.

~~~
alberich
If nothing exists, why seek anything? I don't disagree with your assertion, I
just think it could be further developted to explain some reasons why it would
be interesting to struggle to live and not throw the baby out with the
bathtub. I believe Nietzsche was going to tackle this question, but died
before he could.

~~~
linuxhansl
Yep, that's the interesting question. Along with: Why is there something
rather than nothing?

Note that I did not say "nothing exists" I said "nothing exists on its own".
Could have said "Don't take the self so seriously, in only exists in relation
to other things".

Indeed, why seek anything? That only makes sense if there's something missing.
Meditation would have it that there is nothing missing and that we just don't
know that.

------
zwischenzug
My Catholic grandmother - who was born Jewish but orphaned and survived Nazism
in Vienna - bought my my teenage atheist self this book. It worked on me in a
way religion did not and has shaped my life since, leading me towards Ruskin
being a pin-up in my historical studies.

It's a little crude but really is a great book, and the older I get the truer
I think its premise is.

------
rdl
I can't imagine any parents expecting, encouraging, or wanting their children
to remain in Nazi-controlled Europe when their children had an opportunity to
flee to the US, as Frankl did.

(Also, every Western country who denied visas in the 1930s to the vast
majority of Jews...wtf?)

------
eli_gottlieb
Meaning is happiness for grown-ups.

------
primespiral
“Happiness is a byproduct of function, purpose, and conflict; those who seek
happiness for itself seek victory without war.” \-- William S. Burroughs

------
jpdoctor
If you have not read the original book ("Man's Search for Meaning), do so.

------
dkarl
The article would have benefited from some clarity about the different
meanings of happiness: Frankl's, which isn't discussed at all, and the
definition used in the psychological research cited by the article. I think
the author wrote a short article about a very provocative point raised in
psychological research, dressed it up by bookending it with references to
Frankl, and then completely ignored the contradictions and interesting
questions raised by juxtaposing the two.

I mean, look at the transition from the Frankl intro to the meat of the
article. First, the discussion of Frankl seems to imply that happiness depends
on meaning. Quite possibly -- depending on the definition of happiness.
"Research" is invoked to support Frankl: "having purpose and meaning in life
increases overall well-being and life satisfaction" and so on. Then this non-
sequitur:

 _"It is the very pursuit of happiness," Frankl knew, "that thwarts
happiness."

\---

This is why some researchers are cautioning against the pursuit of mere
happiness._

... followed by a discussion of how meaning and happiness are _different_ and
can be achieved independently. The article jumps from Frankl's point, which is
that happiness cannot be pursued because it must "ensue" from meaning, to a
very different point, which is that happiness _can_ be achieved without
meaning, and this is a socially harmful thing because it is associated with
selfish feelings and behaviors! They're completely different ideas going in
completely different directions, and the article just staples them together,
with Frankl being the piece incongruously tacked on.

However, at the heart of the article is a psychological study that tackles a
challenging question that goes back at least to Socrates' discussion of the
Ring of Gyges. It is a common feature of many Greek schools of philosophy that
they start from the assumption that the purpose of life is to be happy and
conclude that happiness requires living (roughly) a moral life. This is a
convenient but dubious coincidence: we may not be convinced, but we dearly
wish it to be true.

Now we have psychologists apparently warning that scientific evidence is
accumulating against this cherished link between "happiness" and virtuous,
socially constructive living. This is a fascinating point. It's a scientific
challenge to what you might call a very common "religious" belief that is a
core belief of many non-religious people as well. The Greek philosophers, and
many people today whom we might call progressives or liberals, believe that to
make people good, you only have to educate them[1]. Understanding will compel
them to act virtuously, even if their only concern is their own happiness. The
belief that people who properly understand themselves will be good,
compassionate people continues to be widespread today, bolstered by research
into our empathic, social nature. Against this is the conservative view of
people as innately morally flawed beings, driven by selfish desires, socially
redeemable only through order and punishment, morally redeemable only through
divine grace. The conservative view is bolstered by the evolutionary
reasoning, which points out that genetic self-interest is only partially and
accidentally congruent with ordinary notions of morality.

Anyway, I'm off to read the new study that prompted the article[2], and I can
at least appreciate the article for surfacing this study, linking to it, and
prompting me to think about these things again.

[1] Buddhists can be included in this group, and I'm sure there are many
others I've left out.

[2] [http://faculty-
gsb.stanford.edu/aaker/pages/documents/SomeKe...](http://faculty-
gsb.stanford.edu/aaker/pages/documents/SomeKeyDifferencesHappyLifeMeaningfulLife_2012.pdf)

