There's Something Better Than Happiness

Labor Day is here, and you already miss the lapping waves and subtle breezes. Or maybe you're missing the forest, where you can think your gentle thoughts in a green shade. You found what therapists and yoga teachers call your happy place. Nothing against such pleasures, but if they concentrate your vision of ultimate happiness, that's something you may need to reconsider. Many of us think that the goal of life is to work hard, succeed and live softly for the rest of our days. Get on the sailboat to nowhere. Go to the South of France and sample every wine-paired dish. Float from one music festival to the next. This, many think, is happiness. And plenty of prominent thinkers would agree. The utilitarian philosopher Jeremy Bentham said we should seek maximum pleasure at all times and do all we can to avoid pain. Oscar Wilde, a lifelong sybarite, wrote in his letter 'De Profundis': 'I don't regret for a single moment having lived for pleasure. I did it to the full, as one should do everything that one does. There was no pleasure I did not experience.' Yet there are others who think that happiness of this sort is, if not to be avoided altogether, then taken in guarded doses. I'm with them. The German philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer warns us that human beings have two main enemies: pain and boredom. We use our intellects to guard ourselves from pain. But once we have escaped it, the mind keeps whirring on, demanding new objectives, new distractions. So off we go into folly. We gamble (and often lose); we have affairs (and fracture our marriages); we provoke quarrels. By their nature, our minds cannot rest. The problem with that happy life we're pining for is that it will inevitably breed boredom, and boredom begets trouble. Schopenhauer wrote that against boredom, a man has 'a great many fancied remedies, balls, theatres, parties, cards, gambling, horses, women, drinking, traveling.' These are temporary palliatives. Soon we're bored again. Want all of The Times? Subscribe.