Where Happiness (Really) Comes From — Even in a Decade Like This One

Does Happiness Even Still Matter? Of Course it Does, But it Doesn’t Happen the Way You Probably Think

Image Credit: Mireia B.L.

Another year gone by. And these days, friends, I feel old. Older than I should. I imagine we all do. These are strange, troubled times. The ship of progress is unanchored from the moor. Rough seas beckon. Another voyage.

I find myself thinking, these days, of Odysseus. Not as me. As all of us. The fearsome challenges that await us, yet unknown, as we try to find our way back to the shores of a place we once used to call home. Civilization, democracy, peace, prosperity. What happened to those?

How do you survive a decade like this? Where do you begin? I don’t just mean economically or financially — we’ll talk about all that in the coming days and weeks. I mean emotionally. Spiritually. With your sense of selfhood and sanity…if not completely intact, then at least, persevering through these storms.

Let me put that another way. These are deeply unhappy times. The most pessimistic in a century. I’ve talked about this in the abstract. Great Ages and Great Transformations. Agrarian Age, Industrial Age — Age of Extinction. How do you stay…happy…amidst all this? Is it even fair to? To want to?

I think it is. I certainly don’t mean that you should turn into Elon Musk or Andrew Tate, look at the parlous state of the world, and smile. But I do mean that, well, this is your one life. And despite the age, for every age brings with it challenges and turmoil, one must take a perilous voyage of one’s own. Towards fulfillment.

So. Where does happiness come from? If it’s fair to try and find in this age — even as we grieve and lament for all that we’re losing, throwing away, even as we find ourselves raging at the lunatics and zealots and crackpots, for whom nothing but brutality and possession matter — where do we begin?

Let me begin with an observation. This is a profoundly unhappy age for a very simple reason. It’s a profoundly lonely age. Now, when I say that, many of you will think of social media and so forth, but in truth, we’re living through something like a Great Loneliness, and it both predates and cuts deeper than apps. Just as Durkheim predicted, and his intellectual progeny, like Polanyi, began to witness, the Age of Democracy and Industry brought with them a price. Life became dislocated, alienated, sundered from millennia of stability and connectedness.

Now we could all live in a modern way. In cities or towns, our living standards exploding, and labour-saving conveniences at our literal fingertips. But the cost, too, was that the old ways began to fade. They didn’t die, but certainly, fewer of us live them now. And those are about individualism, atomization, and the virtues of the self. So even today, if I say “virtue,” most people think of things focused on the self, like “grit” or “resilience” or determination or hard-workingness. But the classical notion of virtue was of course about others. And that was because life was allocentric, other-focused. We worked together, in our little villages, in the Agrarian Age, to sow and to reap, to celebrate and to mourn. And now, in this age…we live apart from one another, intensely so.

So intensely that many people don’t even notice how isolated their lives are.

Now, this isn’t just my opinion. It’s a fact. The number of friends people have has collapsed. Not even a third of adults report feeling satisfied with how many friends they have. A third report having no close friends. Think of how startling that is, in the context of millennia of human existence, because for most of them, you couldn’t escape social bonds. But now? You can simply shrug them off. And too many of us do.

This grim trend is only growing, and it’s worse and worse as generations age. Young people have fewer social bonds than older ones. Precisely because our societies are undergoing something like a traumatic, shattering collapse in sociality itself, in relations, bonds, and ties. Durkheim’s prediction, more than a century ago, of modernization undoing sociality, and replacing it with anomie, as people lived in little atomized bubbles — back then, it was just a theory. Today, we can observe how true it was — and is.

And that’s not good. Because…well…let me explain.

Happiness. Where does it come from? There’s another strange thing we do in this modern age. We constantly ask the question of where happiness comes from. If you Google that question, you get about a billion results. Good luck sorting through those, LOL. That’s some indication of just how not just bewildered we are by this most basic of questions — but bedeviled by it. It’s a ghost we can’t quite catch hold of — but we never stop looking. Here and there, we catch a glimpse, and then, maddeningly — poof — it’s gone again. And we keep on asking.

Where? Where does happiness come from? Tell me! So, by now, it’s turned into an industry all its own, sometimes called “self-help.” The answers to this question are as numerous as the voices asking it. Some say happiness comes from accomplishments, some say from a deep investigation into the self, some say from a “healthy” outlook on life, whatever that might mean.

On and on the answers go — and yet none of them hit home. They don’t work. We know that, because if any one of these did, then of course, immediately, people would stop asking. But because even the more common sense answers don’t work very well, of course, then the more tenuous ones begin. Manifest happiness! Just tell yourself The Secret, over and over! If that worked, if it was that simple…wouldn’t we all be beatific?

Let’s call the road ‘faux happiness.’ You walk down it, on a forlorn, desperate quest. Seeking some kind of answer. You’ve hit a crisis point in your life — quarter-life, mid-life, divorce, layoff, health scare. You search and search. And at the end of this road? There’s a truckstop, crowded with magicians, who promise that if you recite this spell, well, happiness. Beyond them is a pit, in which fascists and lunatics howl — happiness comes from pure blood and true faith!! And those who don’t have those must be annihilated!! It doesn’t end well, this fruitless search. Sometimes, wandering in the desert takes you places. But not when we already know where the road ends.

It’s funny, all the above, in a strange kind of way. Because happiness? It seems to be hidden better than any Philosophers’ Stone…because it comes from a place…that’s so obvious…our modern minds…are blind to even seeing it.

I’m going to tell you a secret. I hope that it stays with you forever, because I promise, if you really absorb it, and enact it, it’ll change your life. Lots of people say that. I’m not kidding. I mean it. I’ve lived it.

Happiness comes from the very thing that modernity cost us. That is why there’s so little of it to be had. Furthermore, because modernity is premised on that thing not really existing in abundance, happiness seems to elude us. Further-further-more, because most of us don’t know how to create that thing — since we’re told, in another facet of the transition to being moderns, that our “job” is to be producers and consumers first, last, and most — we’re baffled when anyone even tells us this secret. So bear with me as I tell it to you. It’s going to seem mundane, maybe ridiculous, but…I’m going to explain to you why it’s not. Why it really is transformative.

Happiness comes from relationships. Let me say it again. Happiness comes from relationships. That’s it. It’s that simple. Again, that’s not just my opinion. We know that, as more or less established scientific fact. People with more and better relationships are better off in every conceivable way — healthier, more resilient, less pessimistic, less easily defeated, more secure, and so forth. But we also know it from Durkheim’s Prediction — the one that came true: as modernization undid social bonds, well, an era of loneliness dawned, and brought with it “anomie” in his terms, or in our terms, all the modern forms of unhappiness, which today we call depression, anxiety, and so forth. Once you see the arc of history — modernity undoing social bonds that persisted for millennia (how long did our great-great-grandparents know the people in their little villages?), and individualism dawning, you can see the root cause of unhappiness a mile away.

Now. It’s true that “other things” contribute. I’m not going to spend a lot of time on those, because, well relationships come first. Sure, if you’re desperately poor — you’ve got to be unhappy, right? Well, yes and…no. Plenty of countries are dirt poor, and people in them aren’t completely miserable, because their lives are incredibly rich socially. So nothing about happiness is simple, except its first precept. It comes from relationships.

But what does that mean, in practice? You see, when I say that to most people, they struggle with really grasping it. I don’t mean that condescendingly at all. I mean it in an empathetic one. We’re so alienated from relationality in this age that it’s baffling when someone says something like that. What does he mean? Tinder? Apps? Facebook? I should…get more dates? Swipe right on everyone?

I don’t mean that at all.