Some further thoughts about eudaimonia. What is happiness? I suggest that happiness is, literally, what it feels like to live well.
An analogy with pain: why does pain hurt? If it’s a warning, why can’t it just be a warning, without the hurting that seems so unnecessary? Because the painfulness of pain is the warning. You might wish that, like a fire alarm, it wouldn’t go off when there’s no fire, or you could turn it off when there’s nothing more to do about the fire. There are drugs that will turn off pain, but for everyday purposes you can’t take the painfulness out of the pain because then you’ll be in the situation of children born without the ability to feel pain at all. They usually get dreadful injuries, wear out their joints, and end up crippled. You won’t heed the warnings because they won’t be warnings any more. How good are people at heeding milder warnings like “yet another game of 2048 would be a really stupid waste of time”, or “I notice that I am confused”? If pain was that mild a warning, people would ignore it, because that is what a minor warning feels like from inside. Pain is what an urgent warning of physical damage feels like from inside.
In the same way, happiness is what living well feels like from inside. It’s like a meter reading on a control panel. The meter reading is telling you how well you’re doing, and happiness is what a high reading on that meter feels like.
You want that reading to be high, but there’s no point in grabbing hold of the meter needle and turning it all the way over to the right. It would be as futile as living on morphine to take the painfulness out of ordinarily functioning pain. Or like satisfying a desire for an Olympic medal by making one—the medal itself isn’t what you really wanted, but the achievement of winning one. Or like keeping a nuclear reactor running smoothly by disconnecting all the sensors and replacing them by fake signals saying everything’s fine.
Happiness tells you how well you’re living. It only looks like a goal in the context of a well-functioning system that doesn’t deliver the sensation without achieving the real goals that the sensation is measuring your approach to. If you obtain the signal without the reality, as I’ve heard that crack cocaine does, your life will fall apart.
Eudaimonia.
Some further thoughts about eudaimonia. What is happiness? I suggest that happiness is, literally, what it feels like to live well.
An analogy with pain: why does pain hurt? If it’s a warning, why can’t it just be a warning, without the hurting that seems so unnecessary? Because the painfulness of pain is the warning. You might wish that, like a fire alarm, it wouldn’t go off when there’s no fire, or you could turn it off when there’s nothing more to do about the fire. There are drugs that will turn off pain, but for everyday purposes you can’t take the painfulness out of the pain because then you’ll be in the situation of children born without the ability to feel pain at all. They usually get dreadful injuries, wear out their joints, and end up crippled. You won’t heed the warnings because they won’t be warnings any more. How good are people at heeding milder warnings like “yet another game of 2048 would be a really stupid waste of time”, or “I notice that I am confused”? If pain was that mild a warning, people would ignore it, because that is what a minor warning feels like from inside. Pain is what an urgent warning of physical damage feels like from inside.
In the same way, happiness is what living well feels like from inside. It’s like a meter reading on a control panel. The meter reading is telling you how well you’re doing, and happiness is what a high reading on that meter feels like.
You want that reading to be high, but there’s no point in grabbing hold of the meter needle and turning it all the way over to the right. It would be as futile as living on morphine to take the painfulness out of ordinarily functioning pain. Or like satisfying a desire for an Olympic medal by making one—the medal itself isn’t what you really wanted, but the achievement of winning one. Or like keeping a nuclear reactor running smoothly by disconnecting all the sensors and replacing them by fake signals saying everything’s fine.
Happiness tells you how well you’re living. It only looks like a goal in the context of a well-functioning system that doesn’t deliver the sensation without achieving the real goals that the sensation is measuring your approach to. If you obtain the signal without the reality, as I’ve heard that crack cocaine does, your life will fall apart.