Everyone wants to be happy, and almost everyone is told to chase it: the next job, the next purchase, the next holiday. The old philosophers were suspicious of that chase. Strikingly, modern research has ended up close to where they started.
Epicurus is remembered as the philosopher of pleasure, and the word “epicure” now means a lover of fine food. He would have hated that.
“By pleasure we mean the absence of pain in the body and of trouble in the soul. It is not an unbroken succession of drinking-bouts and of revelry … which produce a pleasant life; it is sober reasoning.”Epicurus, Letter to Menoeceus 131–132 (tr. R. D. Hicks)
His recipe was simple food, friends, freedom from fear, and time to think. His school met in a garden.
“Health is the greatest of gifts, contentedness the best riches; trust is the best of relationships, Nirvana the highest happiness.”Dhammapada 204 (tr. Max Müller)
The Buddha’s diagnosis was that craving itself is the problem: getting what we want only resets the wanting.
“There is no guilt greater than to sanction ambition; no calamity greater than to be discontented with one’s lot; no fault greater than the wish to be getting. Therefore the sufficiency of contentment is an enduring and unchanging sufficiency.”Tao Te Ching 46 (tr. James Legge)
For Aristotle, happiness (eudaimonia) is not a feeling but an activity: living well, using your best abilities, over a whole life. You can read more on our Meaning and Purpose page.
After a breakdown at twenty, the philosopher found that happiness came only when he stopped aiming at it.
“Ask yourself whether you are happy, and you cease to be so.”John Stuart Mill, Autobiography (1873), chapter 5
Illustration: the full bowl
In 1971 the psychologists Philip Brickman and Donald Campbell named the hedonic treadmill: we quickly get used to good fortune and return to our usual level of happiness. A famous 1978 study found that lottery winners were, a while later, not much happier than other people, and took less pleasure in everyday things.
The Harvard Study of Adult Development, following the same men (and later their families) since 1938, has found that the strongest predictor of a happy, healthy old age is not wealth or fame but the warmth of close relationships. Epicurus, with his garden full of friends, would not have been surprised.
Go deeper: Money and Enough, Loneliness, or the journey Calm in Anxious Times.
In the 1970s Bhutan’s king declared that Gross National Happiness mattered more than Gross National Product, and the country later built official happiness measures into policy. Since 2012 the World Happiness Report has ranked countries by how people rate their lives; the Nordic countries usually lead, not because they are richest but because of trust, social support and freedom. Inside a life, the Harvard Study of Adult Development, following people since 1938, has found again and again that the warmth of relationships predicts health and happiness better than money or fame.
Epicurus, Letter to Menoeceus · Stanford Encyclopedia: Happiness · Hedonic treadmill · Harvard Study of Adult Development
