Is Our Obsession With Happiness Making Us Miserable?

Coming from a family tree brimming with cases of depression, I developed a fixation with the concept of happiness, or rather the lack of it, at a very young age. My worrisome mother, having been one of those cases, encouraged me to spend a great deal of time reflecting on my well-being; sending me off to therapy sessions as often as other moms would send their kids to soccer practice. My eventual own diagnosis of the disorder felt like a fat slap to the face, hit with irony of all the time and effort I wasted striving towards this ‘ultimate’ state of happiness. It was not until recently that I stopped looking at this as just a big screw you from genetics.

Could this obsession pushed upon me to constantly seek happiness actually be the cause to the unwavering insatisfaction I now feel? Philosopher Giorgio Agamben proposes that the conscious experience of happiness is essentially impossible - “whoever realizes he is happy has already ceased to be so” (Agamben 20). This relies on the theory that true happiness “does not obtain the form of a consciousness” (Agamben 20), for it cannot be described, thought, or even desired - it can only be experienced. A “hubris implicit in the consciousness of happiness” (Agamben 21) arouses these conditions, since insomuch as striving towards happiness implies that you believe you deserve it, however “the only happiness that is truly deserved is the one we could never dream of deserving” (Agamben 21).

Heraclitus professed similar ideas supporting this theory, writing “Unless he hopes for the unhoped for, he will not find it, since it is not to be hunted out and is impassible” - making it no coincidence the majority of moments which I recall having left me most content were the ones which relied on the element of surprise. Yet if this is true, what persuades us as a society to invest millions of dollars into industries and treatments selling a promise of this so called ‘true bliss’? Are the stories of people reaching such metal state with the help of things like therapy and self-help books plain bullshit? Our ignorance of this could be supported by Heraclitus’ idea that “conceit is a holy disease (and that) sight tells falsehoods”, allowing us to interpret these ‘success stories’ as the result of peoples’ hubris creating a convincing illusion of reaching happiness.

Nevertheless, I have a hard time believing humanity is as idiotically gullible as to fund whole industries selling a simple illusion. If not true happiness, we must be buying into something which is at least on some level attainable - even if such thing has a paradoxical relationship with one’s true happiness. Although filling my everyday life with anxieties of what I could change, I would be lying to say that my years in therapy accomplished nothing. Sure infinite euphoria was far from what I was left with, but the feeling that I was deservent and capable of happiness felt like a step towards that; a step towards being undeniably satisfied with myself.

In this indulgence of hope is where I believe our fault lies. Maybe desiring what we imagine to encompass a total liberation of worries doesn’t require attempting to solve those worries, but rather, accept them; “there is only one way to achieve happiness on this earth: to believe in the divine and not aspire to reach it” (Agamben 21). By accepting that all of our feelings and emotions are in a constant state of flux, forever transitioning to another as we enter a new ‘now’, we are able to observe this process without feeling burdened to manipulate it.

This feeling of liberation and total freedom is comparable to what Agamben sees as the only exception that allows someone to be happy and know that he is - ‘magic’. “In the final instance, magic is not knowledge of names but a gesture, a breaking free from the name. That is why a child is never more content than when he invents a secret language. His sadness comes less from ignorance of magic names than from his own inability to free himself from the name that has been imposed on him” (Agamben 22).

Work Cited:

Agamben, Giorgio. Profanations. Zone Books, 2007