Geluk is een Gerucht

When I was young my parents were not very strict. When I spent all my pocket money all at once on stickers instead of saving it, they were not disappointed but rather asked me why. They would not get mad when my grades were not that high: they would maybe help me study but only if I wanted to. They did not expect me to make good money in the future. They did not expect me to go straight to university after highschool. They did not expect me to study to become a doctor. When I came home drunk, although my mom told me to not drink more than three glasses of wine, they never got mad. They only set one simple rule: do what makes you happy. How lovely it must be if the only expectation that is set for you in life is that you must pursue happiness. So I set aside my plan to study medicine and I went to art school. The saying ‘do what makes you happy’ seems to drive the contemporary artworld, or at least the one I find myself in. The people surrounding me, my friends and colleagues, chase their own definition of happiness. They are all intelligent and very capable. They could have chosen a different path for themselves but they chose the path of low income, uncertainties, dishonest power structures. A path only walked upon by the brave ones, it seems, fostered by hope. Hope for happiness, hope for a better world, maybe sometimes even hope to ‘make it’. “Today we live in hope of improvement. The idea that we can become happier is part of that belief: in particular the idea that the general happiness can be improved in the long run by building a better society.” 

In order to research happiness, it’s important to define our understanding of the word happiness itself. This attempt at definition boomerangs back into the many texts I have read on happiness. To discuss, measure and answer questions about happiness, I will utilize a theoretical framework for its definition, so that we can move on shared grounds. 

In her essay Killing Joy: Feminism and the History of Happiness, Sara Ahmed states that “the etymology of happiness relates precisely to the question of contingency: it is from the Middle English word hap, suggesting chance. The word happy originates from the word ‘hap’ meaning having “good ‘hap’ or fortune”. In Dutch, the word for happiness is the same word as having good fortune: geluk. Ahmed later declares that happiness is a promise: “...if you do this or if you have that, then happiness is what follows.” This perception of happiness as a promise indicates that happiness is something we can not grasp. It is like a cloud. When we fly above the clouds, they look solid, as if we could just step on them. However, upon the attempt to touch a cloud an inevitable disappointment will follow, as clouds are made from water droplets which are not dense enough to sustain the weight of a human being. If happiness stagnates at the state of being a promise, it will inescapably be followed by disappointment. We are often too focused on pursuing it to actually achieve it. 

In philosophical theory, we can distinguish between two definitions of 'happiness' that go beyond its original etymology. On the one hand, there are some movements and thinkers  who  focus on happiness as a state of mind and on the other hand, there is the definition that assumes happiness to be 'a life that goes well for the person leading it'. 

These two definitions lead to four common theories of happiness: hedonism, the life satisfaction theory, the emotional state view and hybrid theories that combine both the life satisfaction theory with pleasure, or/and the emotional state view. The hedonists state that happiness is like a scale that balances pleasant experiences in someone's life over unpleasant ones. The second theory focuses on life satisfaction, which they define as ‘having a favorable attitude towards one’s life as a whole’. The emotional state view is a play on hedonism, where the weights on the scale are replaced by  one’s emotional condition or wellbeing. 

Because most of the resources I will use to contextualise this essay use the life-satisfaction theory, I will sustain the definition of happiness as put forward by the life-satisfaction theory in the rest of this text: having a favorable attitude towards one’s life as a whole. 

I am a 24-year old woman, born and raised in The Netherlands, which is a Western country. I am currently living and receiving education in Finland, which is also a Western country. I never knew hunger, nor was I ever unsafe in my childhood. I was raised with the thought that I was born to pursue happiness. I write this essay from my perspective which I acknowledge as being a 21st century white Western female perspective (not specifically in that order).

So-called ‘happiness philosopher’ Ruut Veenhoven states that “happiness is conceived here as the degree to which an individual judges the overall quality of his life favourably. In other words: how well he likes the life he leads. As such, happiness can also be called 'life-satisfaction'. When this evaluation of life crystallizes into a stable view, we can speak of happiness as an 'attitude' towards one's life”. So, when we talk about a person's life-satisfaction, it is strongly related to the way we measure it since life-satisfaction is a personal judgement. Jan Cornelis Ott states in his paper Happiness, Economics and Public Policy: A Critique that there are three methods to measure happiness: “They can analyse the behaviour and the decisions of citizens to find out what they want, in other words: they can try to identify their ‘‘revealed preferences’’. This is common practice in economics. (2) They can analyse the ‘‘stated preferences’’ of people as they express them explicitly in inquiries, referenda, polls and elections. (3) They can analyse the conditions that make people happy by comparing the conditions of people at different levels of happiness.” The second way is called ‘self-reported happiness’ and is, among others, investigated annually by World Values Surveys by asking two questions: “Taking all things together, would you say you are happy, rather happy, not very happy, not at all happy.” And: “All things considered, how satisfied are you with your life as a whole these days?”. Since life-satisfaction theory is based on an individual's own judgement, it would be plausible that self-reported happiness would lend itself best to measuring happiness in this sense. “Self-reported happiness is about the appreciation of life as a whole, based on the ex-post evaluation of many different positive and negative events and conditions. Reporting such happiness requires some cognitive reflection and is therefore influenced by complicated mechanisms, like social comparison.” 

Economists Helen Johns and Paul Ormerod criticise this method because, in their opinion, it is insensitive to developments. In their critique, they refer to developments like Gross National Product, public expenditure, life-expectancy, violent crime, income inequality and gender equality. The insensitiveness of these developments towards the self-reported happiness of life satisfaction points to an insensitive measurement of happiness, according to Johns and Ormerod. Impliciet beweren de economen dus dat ons geluk afhankelijk zou moeten zijn van deze factoren. ‘Important developments’ that should have a positive effect on the level of happiness in a nation - such as, less poverty and better education - also have their downside, according to feminist writer and independent scholar Sara Ahmed: “Indeed, the act of noticing limitations can actually make life seem more rather than less limited. If the world does not allow you to embrace the possibilities that are opened up by education, then you become even more aware of the injustice of such limitations. Opening up the world, or expanding one’s horizons, can thus mean becoming more conscious of just how much there is to be unhappy about.”

I am a 24-year old woman, born and raised in The Netherlands, which is a Western country. I am currently living and receiving education in Finland, which is also a Western country. I never knew hunger, nor was I ever unsafe in my childhood. I was raised with the thought that I was born to pursue happiness. I write this essay from my perspective which I acknowledge as being a 21st century white Western female perspective (not specifically in that order).

The apparent influence of ‘important developments’ would indicate that our happiness is subjected to these external factors. In his research Is Happiness Relative?, Ruut Veenhoven examines the influence of various factors on our level of happiness. The theory of the relativity of happiness holds that 'happiness does not depend on objective good, but rather on subjective comparison'. In order to perceive ourselves to be happy, to be satisfied with our lives, we have to compare our lives. Throughout his essay, we can discover a few grounds on which we could compare happiness, including earlier living conditions, what one wants, what other people have and what one needs. Or for that matter: our life at one point in the past, our dream-life, somebody else’s life and basic needs to stay alive. Ruut Veenhoven puts forward three postulates on which the theory is based: happiness results from comparison; standards of comparison adjust; and standards of comparison are arbitrary constructs. 

If we, however, relate the relativity of happiness to self-reported happiness, we could argue that it is essentially already relative. Johns' and Ormerod's critique of self-reported happiness depends on the relativity of life circumstances as well as "important developments". Ott argues that self-reported happiness is based on, among other things, social comparison. Can we say that the relativity, which is conditional for self-reported happiness, proves the relativity of happiness in the sense of life-satisfaction? This would mean that self-reported happiness based on the life-satisfaction theory depends on the theory of relativity of happiness and therefore on comparison.

I am a 24-year old woman, born and raised in The Netherlands, which is a Western country. I am currently living and receiving education in Finland, which is also a Western country. I never knew hunger, nor was I ever unsafe in my childhood. I was raised with the thought that I was born to pursue happiness. I write this essay from my perspective which I acknowledge as being a 21st century white Western female perspective (not specifically in that order).

Up until l this point, I agree with the sources I have read. It was difficult in its comprehensiveness, but I related to it. Then I came across Sara Ahmed’s writings. She claimed happiness is a privilege. But self-care can be warfare, in her words. Something shifted in my head. Return to the intro if you don’t know why. 

If happiness is relative, and therefore based on comparison, it is a privilege - or at least it is when we perceive happiness to be something positive, something one would pursue or aspire to be. To recognise our own happiness is to be happy because “happiness is conceived here as the degree to which an individual judges the overall quality of his life favourably.” To assess the quality of our lives as positive, we are forced to fall back on “social comparison” according to Ott,meaning that somebody always has to be worse off than us. Happiness for everybody is impossible because the happiness of one requires the unhappiness of another. “From the perspective of privilege theory, it is as if the undeservedly privileged are stealing the happiness of those who are more deserving, or at least no less deserving, than they.”

In the conclusion of her book Living a Feminist Life, Ahmed examines the contradicting words of her idol Audre Lorde. Lorde describes in some of her texts how “the duty to care for one’s self is often written as a duty to care for one’s own happiness”, while in others she claims that the pursuit of one's individual happiness is the same as turning a blind eye to injustice: ‘Was I really fighting the spread of radiation, racism, womanslaughter, chemical invasion of our food, pollution of our environment, and the abuse and psychic destruction of our young, merely to avoid dealing with my first and greatest responsibility to be happy?’ Ahmed attempts to discover the actual meaning of Lorde’s texts: ‘those who do not have to struggle for their own survival can very easily and rather quickly dismiss those who attend to their own survival as being self-indulgent. They do not need to attend to themselves; the world does it for them. (...) For those who have to insist they matter to matter, self-care is warfare.’ 

Veenhoven further concludes that there are certain preconditions for being happy: “People cannot be happy in chronic hunger, danger and isolation: not even if they have never known better and if their neighbours are worse off. To the extent that happiness depends on need-gratification it is not relative.” The unhindered pursuit of one's own happiness is a consequence of privilege. A life in which you can pursue happiness is a life of privilege because it does not inherently require involvement in the battle against injustice or the remedying of poor life circumstances. 

I am a 24-year old woman, born and raised in The Netherlands, which is a Western country. I am currently living and receiving education in Finland, which is also a Western country. I never knew hunger, nor was I ever unsafe in my childhood. I was raised with the thought that I was born to pursue happiness. I write this essay from my perspective which I acknowledge as being a 21st century white Western female perspective (not specifically in that order).

Although happiness is often seen as a positive phenomenon, Ahmed shows us that it also has a downside. “I thus offer a different reading of happiness, not simply by offering different readings of its intellectual history but by considering those who are banished from it or who enter this history only as troublemakers, wretches, strangers, dissenters, killers of joy,” writes Ahmed. In her essay Killing Joy: Feminism and the History of Happiness she elaborates on this downside using feminist theories of happiness that focus on unhappiness. 

Feminists are the ones she considers to be banished from the table of happiness. She states that they are “an affect alien, estranged by happiness”. She declared that feminists kill the joy and thereby the happiness of others by disturbing long-stand fantasies that happiness can be found in certain places. “Feminists, by declaring themselves feminists, are already read as destroying something that is thought of by others not only as being good but as the cause of happiness. The feminist killjoy spoils the happiness of others.” Feminists are the ones that point out the sexist jokes made by uncle John during family dinner, they are the ones demanding equal rights that leads to less power to the powerful and they are the ones that dismanteling the fantasy of the happy housewife by revealing the illusion of happiness that erases the sings of labor. 

The path we have taken started with a strongly framed notion of happiness that is driven by our own judgement of life-satisfaction. This in turn leads to a relative concept of happiness whereby we need social comparison to experience our own happiness and thus become dependent from that. What emerges is an unequal and dependent concept of happiness whereby the happiness of one person equals the unhappiness of another. Ahmed then points us to the value of unhappiness. 

“I am not suggesting that our unhappiness is necessary. I would say that unhappiness is always possible, which makes the necessity of happiness an exclusion not just of unhappiness but of possibility. If we rethink happiness as possibility, if we lighten the load of happiness, then we can open things up.” By discarding happiness as being the greatest good or one’s life goal, Ahmed puts forward a different approach  to not pursue happiness.  And instead, acknowledging the good in unhappiness and the bad in happiness, people can pursue happiness in a new way. 

At the start of this essay, I pointed out the necessity to use a common definition of the word 'happiness'.  With the life-satisfaction theory as my starting point, this essay has acquired a clear perspective on happiness and inevitably guided my thinking. Our thinking on happiness depends on our definition of it, and thus on the conditions we attribute to it. Maybe, by reconsidering the framework from which we started, we can redefine what it means to pursue happiness. Would a different definition of happiness guide us towards a more inclusive and self-sufficient pursuit of happiness?

Ahmed, S. (2010). Killing Joy: Feminism and the History of Happiness. Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society, 35(3), 571–594. https://doi.org/10.1086/648513

Ahmed, S. (2019). Living a Feminist Life. Zubaan.

Haybron, Dan, "Happiness", The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Summer 2020 Edition), Edward N. Zalta (ed.), https://plato.stanford.edu/archives/sum2020/entries/happiness/

Ott, J. C. (2008). Happiness, Economics and Public Policy: A Critique. Journal of Happiness Studies, 11(1), 125–130. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10902-008-9125-2

​​Veenhoven, R. (1991). Is happiness relative? Social Indicators Research, 24(1), 1–34. https://doi.org/10.1007/bf00292648

Zahi Zalloua. (2018). The Politics of Undeserved Happiness. symplokē, 26(1–2), 371. https://doi.org/10.5250/symploke.26.1-2.0371