I have had an on and off relationship with happiness. Like a man dating a woman that he expects will be unfaithful and break his heart. A man in that situation can never invest fully in the relationship because he does not trust the other. Like that man, I could never fully invest in happiness because I did not believe in happiness.
I did not trust happiness because I felt that being chronically unhappy gave me an edge. Dissatisfaction kept me sharp and helped me to avoid complacency. I feared that being happy would make me lazy. I believed that if I were happy, I would sit there and smile at myself while neglecting my work. I feared that if I were satisfied with where I was, I would lose all motivation to strive for a better future.
It turns out that I am not the first person to face this fear. The question of happiness has been with us since ancient Greece, and probably long before that. But to get to the heart of the issue, I had to become a parent.
When I look back on having twin babies, I think it was one of the most amazing experiences. I loved my little ones, the soft noises they made, and the warm weight as they slept in my arms. I miss those baby days and remember them as some of the happiest days of my life. But were they?
Awakened multiple times in the night to feed, change, and rock them, my wife and I could never sleep more than an hour or two. We were exhausted, moved around in a daze, and argued over little things. Our lives felt like constant work. In short, having infant twins was no fun. If you had asked me at 2:00 am, when I was rocking a newborn who refused to go back to sleep, I doubt I would have said I was happy. And yet, I do remember having babies in the house as a magical time in my life. Am I just crazy?
It turns out other parents feel the same way. When asked what they have done in their lives that brought them the most joy, parents usually answer, “Raise children.” They savor the experience of watching their children grow and develop into persons of their own. And parents enjoy the quiet moments of reading a book with their child, or the wild excitement of watching them compete in extracurricular activities. But when researchers looked at the day-to-day experience of being a parent, they heard a far different story.
If you page parents at random times during the day to find out what they are doing at that moment and how happy they are, parents with their children report being less satisfied than those away from their children. Spending time with a child is not a constant source of bliss. Instead, it is messy, frustrating, and infuriating at times. The journey from infant to adult is long and convoluted with sacrifices made every step of the way. It is not a source of minute-to-minute pleasure. Are parents lying to others, or deluding themselves, when they insist that having children was the best thing they ever did? That question returns us to the time of Aristotle.
The ancient Greek philosophers saw happiness as the highest good and motivation for man. But they had a more nuanced idea of what happiness meant than we do today. Aristotle divided happiness into two different types. The first is what many people think of when they say “happiness,” which is the feeling of pleasure. This happiness comes from good company, good food, good drink, and good sex. The Greeks termed this Hedonia, the state of engaging in pleasure. Devoting oneself to a life of pleasure and avoiding all pain or hardship (hedonism) could lead to a sloth life. Research has shown that people who focus on materialistic and superficial pleasures are more anxious, emotionally unstable, and less happy. They don’t tell us that in the in beer commercials, do they?
The Greeks had another word for happiness. That word is Eudaemonia, and it is the ancient Greek word for “human flourishing.” Eudaemonia is more than a fleeting feeling; it is an action. Aristotle described it as an active life, one in which you do your job well and contribute to society. An experience in which you are involved in your community. A life where you build on your strengths and develop your potential rather than squander your talents. Aristotle believed that the highest of all human goods is the achievement of one’s true potential. He told us that we each have unique capabilities, which he called the daemon, and that our task in life is to figure out how best to bring those capacities to fruition.
I like to define eudaemonia as the satisfaction that comes from growing into your best-self and devoting that best-self to a higher goal. Being a parent certainly fits that definition. Being a parent involves using your abilities as best you can to promote someone other than yourself. It is a beautiful and selfless goal. Although it does not produce moment to moment pleasure (hedonia), it does provide the deep satisfaction that comes from using your unique abilities to serve a purpose bigger than yourself (eudaemonia).
The difference between hedonic and eudaemonic happiness is the difference between feeling good and doing good.
When we work for eudaemonic happiness, it does not lead to laziness and self-indulgence. It does the opposite. Motivated by the right kind of joy, we work to live up to our values and advance our top priorities. That can lead to a willingness to put in long, arduous hours for the joy that comes from doing something we can be proud of with our lives. Eudaemonic happiness can motivate parents to devote decades of their lives to all the messy and mundane tasks required to raise healthy and well-adjusted young adults. And according to Aristotle, these parents are neither lying to others, nor deluding themselves, when they say raising children is the happiest thing they did.
Eudaemonia motivates excellence by getting us to love the process, rather than focus on the pleasure that comes as a result of success. It is the motivation to set high goals, work towards them, and better ourselves by living up to our potential. Eudaemonic happiness motivated Michelangelo to carve his David, Beethoven, to compose his symphonies, Thomas Jefferson to write the Declaration of Independence and the Wright brothers to tinker with flying machines. All of those accomplishments had their frustrations, setbacks, and moments of despair. But they also had a purpose that kept the creators working through the inevitable challenges.
We will revisit the idea of living for goals bigger than ourselves. Just know that the happiness that comes from working toward a goal that is bigger than yourself is noble happiness that makes us better people, doing better work to build a better world one piece at a time.
More than a thousand years after Aristotle’s death, political economist and civil servant John Stuart Mills summed it up best when he wrote, “Those only are happy who have their minds fixed on some object other than their own happiness; on the happiness of others, on the improvement of mankind, even on some art or pursuit, followed not as a means, but as itself an ideal end. Aiming thus at something else, they find happiness by the way.”
True happiness does not come from the pursuit of momentary pleasure but ensues from living up to your potential and using your abilities to improve others’ lives and the world.
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