Happiness Is a Byproduct of Virtue

The connection between our level of personal virtue and our level of happiness is so obvious to me that I wrote a book about it. Well, two books actually.

The first is a series of short essays exploring various topics related to personal character and its impact on the relationships we inhabit.  The second is an examination of a number of common character traits and the dynamics that underlie them. Included in this examination is quite a bit of reflection on the nature of virtue and its relationship to happiness. 

Let me give you the short version.

“Happiness” as we commonly think of it is a mirage, an illusion that recedes from us the more vigorously we chase it.  This surprises a lot of people.  The understanding of happiness contemporary culture gives us is a superficial one.  The media, our education, all our peers tell us in a million subtle ways that the object of life is to achieve a positive inward emotional state which they call happiness.

Rarely do they say it out loud but the chief avenues prescribed for reaching this state are hedonism and consumerism. If we can only obtain enough nice objects, attain enough material goods to signal our superior status we’ll be halfway there. That’s the consumerist part. The real purpose of all these goods is simple : to provide ourselves an endless array of pleasurable experiences.  That’ the hedonist part.

Happiness then, in the contemporary formulation, is essentially an adjunct of the market. Once we have adequately indebted ourselves to the market, we are told, we will cross a line into a magical zone where our positive inward state is imperturbable, a bright, acrylic land never to be dulled by shade.

The problem, of course, is that there is no line, no portal to the land of perpetual good feels. 

There are, in fact, only the recurring demands of an existence which requires much of us. This is the reality from which our entire culture offers escape and which, despite the lies of the slickest marketers, can never be escaped.  The source of the frustration, anger and bitterness in which our society is currently awash is the disappointment millions feel realizing the promise of permanent good feelings has been only part of the largest bait and switch scheme in history.

We need and alternative view of happiness, one more in keeping with our nature and with the nature of reality. Fortunately, such a definition of happiness is available.

An older vision sees happiness not as an emotional state, but as a condition of overall flourishing, a manner of living that brings us into harmony with the principles that govern human and natural relations.

Achieving this sort of happiness does not require purchasing something, it requires becoming something. To achieve happiness in this older, more enduring sense, we must become self-aware. We must consciously choose again and again behaviors that bring us into alignment with ourselves and our neighbors.

This practice of choosing the good again and again we call virtue. Naturally, this process involves more than good feelings. Choosing the good may at times be excruciating. We may suffer in our duties. 

Even so, our sense of harmony and integrity endures, and this enduring sense of spiritual flourishing is the core of that older (and therefore more relevant) understanding of what it means to be happy.

Unhappy people today could do much worse than to alter their fundamental understanding of happiness. Moving from an emotion based to a duty, virtue and harmony based view of happiness would offer a third option to millions who now veer wildly between naive trust in the cultural narrative and disappointed, cynical despair. 

Few resources exist however to help make that shift. That’s one reason I wrote two books about the problem. In them, In them, I expand at length on these ideas, ideas that, in the long run, make us not wise merely, but happy.