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Happiness

Hedonic Treadmills in the Vale of Tears

Michael Gracey looks at how philosophers have pursued happiness.

Thomas Jefferson (1743-1826), whose theology was Unitarian, edited an abridged version of the New Testament that stripped the gospels of their supernatural elements and Jesus of his divinity. Jefferson had no use for the traditional church acceptance of the miraculous, which he thought was designed to confuse the flock and herd it toward an unquestioning faith.

While Jefferson didn’t quite do to his God what he’d done to his king, and while he didn’t exactly reduce God to the remote deist ‘clock-maker’ we sometimes hear about, he did develop a circumscribed view of providence. The guy who told Americans they had a God-given right to pursue happiness thought that while humans’ natural endowment had made us free, it also made us responsible for creating happiness out of the resources we saw before us. If we’re going to find bliss in this lifetime, we’ll have to work for it.

So central was the general concern about happiness around the time, that contemporary Utilitarians such as Jeremy Bentham (1748-1832) made it the touchstone of their ethics. However, the Utilitarian belief that “it is the greatest happiness of the greatest number that is the measure of right and wrong” (An Introduction to the Principles of Morals and Legislation, 1789) doesn’t adequately account for individual rights. For instance, my son could perform his own ‘felicific calculus’ (add up the probable consequences of actions to see what produces the greatest happiness), and conclude that the overall happiness of our family would be improved if he ate all the bacon instead of dividing it among us, his sisters’ complaints notwithstanding.

Yet even if the necessary qualifiers were added to curb selfish egos, Bentham’s approach made no distinction between kinds of pleasure. Another utilitarian, John Stuart Mill (1806-73), argued that some forms of pleasure are more worthy than others: “It is better to be a human being dissatisfied than a pig satisfied; better a Socrates dissatisfied than a fool satisfied” (On Liberty, 1859). But even if we do distinguish one kind of pleasure from another, the failure to distinguish pleasure from happiness can land us on a slippery slope, or perhaps a ‘hedonic treadmill’, pursuing more and more delights that leave us less and less content.

As Darrin McMahon notes in Happiness, a History (2006), Mill thought that the “unbalanced influence of the commercial spirit” exacerbated this danger. Thomas Carlyle (1795-1881) agreed, noting that important values were undermined by the rules of the marketplace, which bred a hostility that threatened our souls. What Mill and Carlyle couldn’t have anticipated was how modern technology would intensify the forces of discontentment by exposing us to an ever-growing list of things we can have, spinning the treadmill faster and faster until we look like George Jetson chasing Astro. Luxuries become needs, and our loss of them can feel like deprivation.

More threatening still is that some of this technology changes our wiring. Social media can alter our neural pathways to such a degree that the brain scans of heavy users resemble those of drug addicts. The new cyberlord giveth, and it taketh away – granting us a shot of melatonin for engaging in its ordained behaviors, but thus gradually removing our ability to find fulfillment or ease, the more durable components of happiness. This is partly because of the body’s tendency to maintain homeostasis, or biological balance: we might get temporary highs, but the nervous system’s compensations for them creates lower lows. We end up chasing more and more rewards in the virtual world just to maintain the same unhappy state of mind, a pursuit that makes us less and less at home in the real world as we neglect our work, our relationships, and our souls. Ultimately, we can wind up feeling isolated, anxious, and depressed. It’s addiction indeed.

Illustration © Jaime Raposo 2025. To see more of his art, please visit jaimeraposo.com

Happiness in Practice

What Jefferson neglected to tell us was that focusing directly on chasing our bliss might keep us from ever attaining it. This paradox became evident even to Mill, whose moral philosophy aimed at maximizing happiness. Just as we must look away from the sun, the source of the world’s vital power, Mill eventually saw the wisdom in turning our gaze from what he thought was our ultimate objective. Happiness, he argued, “was only to be obtained by not making it the direct end” (On Liberty). Instead, we ought to focus on secondary goals: “the happiness of others… the improvement of mankind… some art or pursuit. Aiming thus at something else, [we] find happiness along the way.”

Although their political sensibilities were very different (and Carlyle’s unkind comments about Mill’s wife would eventually end their friendship), Carlyle shared Mill’s inclination to turn our focus away from ourselves, so he ended up with a compatible list of concerns, which McMahon summarizes as “Community, meaningful labor, and an experience of God.” Never having nourished a religious sensibility, Mill was more interested in aesthetic sublimity than divinity (subsitute ‘an experience of great art’), but otherwise they were on the same page. In both formulations, however, the framework of concerns seems more descriptive than normative, they indicate what happy people tend to actually do rather than prescribing what people aspiring to happiness ought to do. The lingering question is how we ought to carry ourselves as we attend to our sources of happiness, however we conceive them.

One answer is from Aristotelean virtue ethics, which focuses on the habits behind peoples’ actions. In the virtue ethicist view, virtuous people constantly apply reason to make choices that avoid the extremes of excess or deficiency. This habit of aiming for an Aristotelean Golden Mean creates a balanced disposition that allows the practitioner to respond appropriately in a variety of situations. Add a little luck, and you have a recipe for a happy life.

However, while Aristotle thought that people lacking virtue could not expect to be happy, he was less definitive about the prospects for the virtuous as he looked at the suffering that strikes virtuous people in spite of their balanced dispositions. For example, Aristotle thought that some losses create opportunities to practice virtues, and thereby increase long-term contentment, but in other situations the pain is so overwhelming that there’s no way to make up for it. No matter how much I love my daughters, nothing could compensate them for the loss of their first father, who died when they were toddlers, who looked like them, and looks lovingly out at them in pictures taken at the beach or at their first birthday parties. I’m glad neither daughter let their loss define their life, but having this part of their identity shorn from them has required them to be that much more thoughtful about how they form the rest of it.

The Stoics vs. The Romantics

Whereas Aristotle suspected that being happy requires good fortune in addition to virtue, the Stoics thought that virtue alone is a sufficient condition for happiness, and otherwise one must accept what came along by cultivating a dispassionate serenity towards the events of life. Since they saw nature itself as rational, passions (or feelings, as we now call them) that conflict with reason were bound to disturb their emotional homeostasis. So in the pursuit of calm – the mark of wise people – the Stoics guarded themselves vigilantly against impulses that might throw them off balance, impulses that many of us now associate with being human, and so inalienable. In the present day, people often extol the passions as the very things that give life flavor; but in doing so they may neglect the important distinction between the zeal that energizes us and the emotional upheavals that divert or disorient us. Our enthusiasm need not derail us, but uncontrolled passion in the Stoics’ sense of the term does so by definition.

In response to the danger of irrational impulses and responses, the Stoics constantly returned to the idea that awareness is the great corrective. According to the Stoic emperor Marcus Aurelius, “You have power over your mind – not outside events. Realize this and you will find strength” (Meditations). Epictetus, another Stoic, this time from slave stock, agreed that unfortunate events do less harm to people than the judgments they form about them. If we’re wise enough to let go of our hopes and “wish for everything to happen as it actually will”, we will find something akin to peace. Even as we face our mortality, we needn’t rage against the dying of the light.

Nowadays, we might be less inclined to equate happiness with peace, partly because of the influence of the Romantics, who rehabilitated our image of the passions by holding out the hope that they point the way to our happiest selves. The Romantic poet John Keats (1795-1821), suggested that happiness was beside the point. While the Enlightenment thinkers preceding him believed they could eliminate the sources of suffering by applying reason, and the Stoics of old thought the reasonable thing was to soften the world’s impact with a chosen frame of mind, Keats knew first-hand that the problem of pain was sometimes intractable for the people experiencing it. After watching both his mother and brother die of tuberculosis, he faced his own mortality at the hands of the same disease. Precisely when the Christian worldview might have been most appealing, he became explicitly critical of it, calling it a “circumscribed little notion” and scoffing at the idea that “we are to be redeemed by a certain arbitrary interposition of God and taken to Heaven.” The Christian God he knew was cruel in allotting pain, and arbitrary in freeing us from it. But Keats refused to see the world as a vale of tears, and preferred to view this tragic cosmos as a “vale of soul-making”: a place for building our ‘ bildung’, or greater consciousness; a place where we forge a spirit in the smithy of our pain. Our intelligences, which are “sparks of divinity”, pass through a suffering world and become souls with identity. His ‘world of pains’ functions as a school where “the heart feels and suffers in a thousand diverse ways” in order for a person to learn and eventually grow. Keats saw this as a “grander system of salvation than the Christian religion” because it both hopes to give meaning to suffering and leaves our agency intact, even if our suffering has the power to leave us in tatters in the short run.

Lessons in Happiness

As a teacher, I’m drawn to Keats’ ‘school of pain’ metaphor; and as an aging father, I want to believe I’ve come to understand something along the way that I can pass onto my kids – though I’m hard-pressed to assemble the fragments of what I’ve learned. I do think it’s wise not to pursue happiness too directly, so I’m glad my girls knew this instinctively, by-passing more lucrative options after college to engage in work that let them feed other people or teach them or refine their craft. I’ll encourage my kids to enjoy their enthusiasms while watching out for the passions that might throw them off balance or land them on a hedonic treadmill. On the other hand, if they become too passive, I’ll caution them about waiting for deliverance to a happy life. Rather, it’s what they do in this world that constitutes them.

Hopefully, if they avoid extremes and focus on something outside themselves – including, at times, each other – they’ll be surprised by the joy that creeps in as they attend to penultimate concerns. They’re bound to endure some pain, too; but trained by the suffering they’ve already known and the fears they grew by, they will, I hope, become souls with identities – the kind that endure all things and that infuses them with a calm that passes my poor power to express.

If they succeed in this, I’ll look at them and sigh, then I’ll try to do what they did, and think ‘my children have taught me well’.

Michael Gracey teaches English at Pingree School in South Hamilton, Massachusetts, and lives with his family in Newburyport.