What is Happiness?

0:00Smart, sharp, and slightly unhinged. Late night's fresh perspective. The last show with David Cooper. Everybody wants to be happy, but what does that actually mean? What is happiness exactly? Is it a feeling, a life well lived, or something being sold to you by algorithms, marketers, and the self-help aisle? Well, we're here with a philosopher who might help us untangle that question and rethink what happiness is. He's a philosophy professor at Northwest University in South Africa. And his name is Anne Verhoof. Anne, welcome to the show. Yes, thank you, David. It's so common to hear the phrase, to hear people say, I just want to be happy. What do you think someone means when they say that? Because to me, it's not always obvious. Yeah, I think people often say, like we do with birthdays, happy birthday, or happy new year, or I wish my children happiness or my friends,

1:00but somewhere we lost the content or the meaning of the word. It's just the introvert we use. So I started to rethink what we actually mean, we're free. So if I can just give a little bit background on this word, of course it was something really meaningful for Aristotle in antique philosophy. We said, happiness is eudomania to have a good, ethical life. And then later on, we saw in the Middle Ages, happiness became basically God, that you can only find happiness in God. But that changed with the modern age, with the Renaissance, being humankind, human beings became more important and their own happiness. So they became a new way of living where we were trying to be happy, to obtain it and not link it only to God. It's even a right to pursue happiness in America. It is, it's right there in that way, at the Declaration of Independence or the Constitution.

2:02But of course, you write that happiness is such strange people, who often say it's something too personal to define. Or it's so related, if you know for me, it's eating chocolate, somebody else will go to the gym and say, no, it was happiness. They experienced doing tough exercise. So the problem of happiness often is that people give up on answering this question. So it's too relative, we cannot answer it. But somewhere we just slip back to us through the definition, we get of happiness through consumerism, that basically sell us what's happiness to sell more products. We get a definition through the happiness sciences that reduce it to a certain form of happiness and then want us to achieve that through self-help books. And of course, happiness is still promised through so many religions that it's still with only to be found in a relationship with God or in the afterlife on Arbara. It kind of reminds me of the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy.

3:03Like they figure out the answer to the life universe and everything. It's the number 42, but they don't know what the question is. You know, like these books, influencers, marketers, they're just selling us something that'll make you happy, but they're kind of skipping the deep question of what is happiness. Yeah, so yeah, they basically want to sell anything and happiness became a good medium, like six, to sell certain products. So we saw that with a big campaign of Coca-Cola that basically said happiness is inside and certain cards, marketing that if you drive that card, you will experience happiness. You will find happiness all over in the marketing world. But what makes this, I think, worrisome and really problematic nowadays is that the kind of happiness and association of happiness with certain products and a certain lifestyle are really marketed within the digital world through influencers, for example,

4:03through people doing it unconsciously, taking photos of food or happy places, happy faces. And that all creates a sort of feeling or the perfect picture of happiness. And then, of course, that is built into the algorithms of so many AI tools and digital platforms that manipulate us in the aim to really try to work or obtain that kind of happiness, but it's actually just limited to certain products and a certain lifestyle. Is happiness just about experiencing joy and positive emotions because for me, some of the things that have made me feel a great sense of purpose, meaning something I want to do are the whole range of human experience. I mean, take, for example, kids. I don't have kids, but people say kids give them great joy. Well, the experience of having a baby is not all joyful. That thing's crying at 2 a.m., but it's the whole range of human experience that you go through over time that can give you happiness.

5:04Am I on to something here? Am I getting close? Now, typically, so people often would say, happiness is children, and they never refer to small children, not teenagers, for example. But happiness is defined within the, it's beside the happiness sciences and specifically in positive psychology as a state of mind, this feeling of joy, of pleasure. It's something to mood, but that's a really, I would say the most narrow or reductive understanding of happiness. It's part of happiness, but that's such a short-lived type of experience that we cannot just say that is happiness. If we do that, we will learn from one exciting experience or pleasure moment to the next. It's, they may trap and they do not take, it don't take more. And so we cannot just define happiness with pleasure, joy, with a state of mind. The bad side of that would be that people start to use drugs

6:04to have that experience the whole time. So happiness has been defined in many more ways, which I can quickly explain. Yeah, no, I think for me, I kind of get the problem, and I'm up the question, what is happiness then? I'm still kind of hazy on the answer, so please give me some guidance here. So I think a good starting point for understanding happiness is, do explain it as a good experience. Of course, that experience of joy and pleasure, but we see now in happiness science as positive psychology, say now it's more, it's a well-being, to be healthy and healthy, to be successful, to have a good life in terms of your children or achieving you or doing good in your career, things like that. So the circle is a little bit wider. But then there's a further definition to say, now it's not all about me, it's also leading an ethical life to ensure others are also happy, that I find happiness in the fact that others are also happy. So it's already a little bit broader,

7:06this is Aristotle's understanding of happiness. But happiness can also include luck, just to win the lotto or just to receive certain things out of the blue, that can also be happiness, why not? But that's not in your control, which is a little scary, I guess. Exactly, so if you started to find happiness as a more comprehensive term, you are challenged with two things, and that I explore in my book, the first is the unappiness that is basically always there. Even in moments of extreme happiness, unappiness is not the leader to overcome. But so many people would argue for a kind of happiness that would try to delete or move away from unappiness. And that is extremely exhausting. Life is never worth out unappiness. Even if you just have in your memory, some examples of moments of unappiness. So in a way, we have to think happiness,

8:08unappiness to get it, and the second thing, which I argue for is that we think about chance, luck and tragedy at the same time, if we think about happiness. Now, where does purpose come in? Dry, feeling like you're on a path in your life towards something and enjoying that path, not just focusing on the destination? Yeah, so that's another way of understanding happiness. I explain the circles that can get wider and bigger. So some people say, no, it's a meaningful life, or to have a drive or purpose or destiny. That is what happiness is. But the problem with that is that it's often something that is lost through life, a feeling of purpose, a feeling of meaning, or a yard being contained with this life. So even that can be challenged. As soon as we make that a criteria for happiness, it might exclude people who don't, well, it would never experience that. And besides, anyway, possible.

9:10Arne, I've enjoyed this chat. Very much. Thank you so much for being on the show. It's the time up already. It is, yeah. Very much a pleasure. And I hope all your listeners would be happy after the lesson to this interview. I think that's the hope as well. Anne Verhoof is a philosophy professor at Northwest University in South Africa. Anne, again, thank you for being here. It was a pleasure. Thank you, David. This episode is brought to you by Athletic Brewing Company, no matter how you do game day. On the couch, in the crowd, or manning the snack table, Athletic Brewing fits right in. With a full lineup of non-alcoholic beer styles, you can enjoy bold flavors all game long. No hangovers, no buzz, no subbing out for water in the second half. Stuck the fridge for tip off with a variety of non-alcoholic craft styles available at your local grocery store or online at AthleticBrewing.com. Near beer, fit for all times.