The cognitive scientist, Laurie Santos, who teaches Yale’s most popular course. Psychology and the Good Life, a.k.a. The Happiness Course, is taking a leave to avoid burnout, theNew York Times reports. I sympathize: she is teaching more than 500 students, plus a podcast, plus media interviews, plus all those science journal articles to read before they are made obsolete by the next batch. . .
She’s entitled to take a break!
I wonder, though, whether part of the trouble is that she has herself fallen into The Happiness Trap.
The question “Am I really happy?” soon turns into the question “Why am I not more happy?” Then that becomes “Why am I so unhappy?” The more you think about happiness the less happy you are likely to be
That’s the Happiness Trap. Maybe Prof. Santos got caught in it.
Is there a way to get out of the trap once it snaps shut? After all, we all want to be happy, don’t we?
Ask Aristotle, who got us into it in the first place by structuring his Nicomachean Ethics around the idea that all human goods, health, wealth, pleasure, are merely means to a greater good, happiness. He holds the patent on the trap. But don’t stop there. Look again at the famous first sentence of his Metaphysics: “It’s our nature to crave knowledge.” That‘s a free translation of πάντες ἄνθρωποι τοῦ εἰδέναι ὀρέγονται φύσει but no matter how you translate it, the message is clear, Go for knowledge, big time.
Follow that line of thought and you may find that happiness is a by-product -- not the goal itself, but something extra, that results when someone focuses on some other goal.
What goal? Maybe anything that isn’t totally self-interested. Metaphysics, if you’re brainy enough; if you’re just one of us ordinary hedgehogs, maybe it’s try to love your neighbor as yourself. You may never succeed but you might wiggle out of the Happiness Trap.
She’s entitled to take a break!
I wonder, though, whether part of the trouble is that she has herself fallen into The Happiness Trap.
The question “Am I really happy?” soon turns into the question “Why am I not more happy?” Then that becomes “Why am I so unhappy?” The more you think about happiness the less happy you are likely to be
That’s the Happiness Trap. Maybe Prof. Santos got caught in it.
Is there a way to get out of the trap once it snaps shut? After all, we all want to be happy, don’t we?
Ask Aristotle, who got us into it in the first place by structuring his Nicomachean Ethics around the idea that all human goods, health, wealth, pleasure, are merely means to a greater good, happiness. He holds the patent on the trap. But don’t stop there. Look again at the famous first sentence of his Metaphysics: “It’s our nature to crave knowledge.” That‘s a free translation of πάντες ἄνθρωποι τοῦ εἰδέναι ὀρέγονται φύσει but no matter how you translate it, the message is clear, Go for knowledge, big time.
Follow that line of thought and you may find that happiness is a by-product -- not the goal itself, but something extra, that results when someone focuses on some other goal.
What goal? Maybe anything that isn’t totally self-interested. Metaphysics, if you’re brainy enough; if you’re just one of us ordinary hedgehogs, maybe it’s try to love your neighbor as yourself. You may never succeed but you might wiggle out of the Happiness Trap.