The Pursuit of Happiness) The right to pursue happiness is promised to Americans by the US Constitution, but no one seems quite sure which way happiness runs. It may be we are issued a hunting license but offered no game. Jonathan Swift conceived of happiness as "the state of being well-deceived", or of being "a fool among idiots ", for Swift saw society as a land of false goals. It is, of course, un-American to think in terms of false goals. We do, however, seem to be dedicated to the idea of buying our way to happiness. We shall all have made it to Heaven when we possess enough.
And at the same time the forces of American business are hugely dedicated to making us deliberately unhappy. Advertising is one of our major industries, and advertising exists not to satisfy desires but to create them — and to create them faster than anyone's budget can satisfy them. For that matter, our whole economy is based on addicting us to greed. We are even told it is our patriotic duty to support the national economy by buying things. Look at any of the magazines that cater to women. There advertising begins as art and slogans in the front pages and ends as pills and therapy in the back pages. The art at the front illustrates the dream of perfect beauty. This is the baby skin that must be hers. This, the perfumed breath she must breathe out. This, the sixteen-year-old figure she must display at forty, at fifty, at sixty, and forever. This is the harness into which Mother must strap herself in order to display that perfect figure. This is the cream that restores skin, these are the tablets that melt away fat around the thighs, and these are the pills of perpetual youth.
Clearly the happiness-market is not running out of customers, but what is it they are trying to buy? Defining the meaning of "happiness" is a perplexing proposition: the best one can do is to try to set some extremes to the idea and then work towards the middle. To think of happiness as achieving superiority over others, living in a mansion made of marble, having a wardrobe with hundreds of outfits, will do to set the greedy extreme. To think of happiness as the joy of a holy man of India will do to set the spiritual extreme. He sits completely still, contemplating the nature of reality, free even of his own body. If admirers bring him food, he eats it; if not, he starves. Why be concerned? What is physical is trivial to him. To contemplate is his joy and he achieves complete mental focus through an incredibly demanding discipline, the accomplishment of which is itself a joy to him.
And who will dare say it is more false than happiness paid for through an installment plan? Although the holy man's concept of happiness may enjoy considerable prestige in the Orient, I doubt the existence of such motionless happiness. What is certain is that his way of happiness would be torture to almost anyone of Western temperament. Yet these extremes will still serve to define the area within which all of us must find some sort of balance. Thoreau had his own firm sense of that balance: save on the petty in order to spend on the essential.
Possession for its own sake or in competition with the rest of the neighborhood would have been Thoreau's idea of the petty. The active discipline of raising one's perception of what is eternal in nature would have been his idea of the essential. Time saved on the petty could be spent on the essential. Thoreau certainly didn't intend to starve, but he would put into feeding himself only as much effort as would keep him functioning for more important efforts. Effort is the essence of it: there is no happiness except as we take on challenges. Short of the impossible, the satisfactions we get from a lifetime depend on how high we place our difficulties. The mortal flaw in the advertised version of happiness is in the fact that it claims to be effortless.
We demand difficulty even in our diversions. We demand it because without difficulty there can be no game; a game is a way of making something hard for the fun of it. The rules of the game are an arbitrary addition of difficulty. It is easier to win at chess if you are free to change the rules, but the fun is in winning within the rules. If we could mint our own money, even building a fortune would become boring. No difficulty, no fun. Those in advertising seem too often to have lost their sense of the pleasure of difficulty. And the Indian holy man seems dull to us, I suppose, because he seems to be refusing to play anything at all. The Western weakness may be in the illusion that happiness can be bought. Perhaps the oriental weakness is in the idea that there is such a thing as perfect happiness.
Happiness is never more than partial. Whatever else happiness may be, it is neither in having nor in being, but in becoming. What the writers of the Constitution declared for us as an inherent right was not happiness but the pursuit of happiness. What the early patriots might have underlined, could they have foreseen the happiness-market, is the cardinal fact that happiness is in the pursuit itself, in the pursuit of what is engaging and life-changing, which is to say, in the idea of becoming. A nation is not measured by what it possesses or wants to possess, but by what it wants to become. (Words: 1,005)
