How Can We Find Happiness?
Human happiness is one of the most elusive goals in life. We try to manufacture it with theme park experiences, curated entertainment streams, financial plans, and a host of other ideas that fill our time and consume our lives.
As comedian Louis CK once ranted, “Everything is amazing and nobody is happy.” He was right.
Why is it when so many people are amazingly comfortable that so many are unhappy? A few centuries ago the broad level of material security most of us possess was unimaginable. Even the struggling middle-class lives in veritable mansions compared to the masses of centuries before. Yet we still aren’t happy and, depending on where you live and who you ask, there are signs that we are, in fact, less happy than we were a generation ago.
The Pillars of Creation. Public Domain: https://webbtelescope.org/contents/media/images/2022/052/01GF423GBQSK6ANC89NTFJW8VM
Philosopher J. Budziszewski takes up the ancient question of happiness in his book, How and How Not to Be Happy. This book is in line with his earlier books, Written on the Heart (IVP Academic, 1997) and What he Can’t Not Know (Ignatius, 2003), where he picks of ancient Christian themes and carefully brings them into the present century.
How and How Not to Be Happy is an exercise in asking questions and reasoning through options for the source of happiness with the aim of explaining to a broad audience where true happiness can be found.
Whose Happiness? Which Satisfaction?
The beginning of any meaningful quest requires establishing the proper goal. Budziszewski spends three chapters explaining the current state of happiness, putting the quest in historical context, and offering a definition. He generally affirms Aristotle’s definition that happiness is “living well and doing well,” but he seeks to go beyond that.
He argues, “To be happy in the unqualified sense is the same as to be fulfilled, to flourish, or to thrive––to enjoy complete well-being, to have our complete and final good. Nothing that fails to fulfill us, no condition inimical to our flourishing, no state in which we cannot thrive is rightly called happiness” (21)
That’s quite a lofty goal, which seems impossible to achieve. Yet that is the quest that Budziszewski sets out to complete.
Quest of Questions
Like a good philosopher, Budziszewski’s quest is not framed primarily by empirical data by important questions. In fact, early in the book he notes that he will avoid statistics and surveys that usually quiet our queries with a false confidence in social scientific solutions to ancient interrogatives. This book is a philosophical essay of the old school.
Thus, in part two of the book, Budziszewski asks thirteen carefully crafted questions. He thoughtfully explores whether wealth, health and beauty, fame, glory and praise, love or self-esteem, or even virtue can be the pathway to true happiness. In each case, Budziszewski affirms the goodness of these created things. He recognizes the reason why people long for them and feel—for a little while—satiated by these things. And yet, he is led to conclude that perfect happiness cannot be found in this world. All of those intermediate goods are sign posts pointing toward something else.
To those who are familiar with Budziszewski’s background as a Roman Catholic, this is exactly the pathway we would expect him to take. Though he progresses carefully and thoughtfully through the book, the endpoint is always anticipated. He breaks the fourth wall (as it were) periodically to ask the reader to be patient in the journey toward the discovery of perfect happiness. Of course, the Christian is going to find ultimate fulfillment in Christian sources and the Christian God. That’s what Christian’s do and is just the way Christians have been raised.
But Budziszewski’s biography gives credence that this book is more than an extended evangelistic tract. His intellectual journey began on the left. In fact, he was so far to the left that he quit school a couple of years in to learn a trade (welding) and become part of the proletariat. Eventually, he worked his way toward Christianity, becoming a Roman Catholic in 2004. This is not an example of the cradle-Catholic pondering his navel, hoping to affirm other believers. Rather, How and How Not to Be Happy is, perhaps, a tracing of some of the same questions Budziszewski had to wrestle with and which he’s seen generations of college students consider.
Patient Fulfillment
For some Christian readers, the sheer number of questions and the punctilious patience that Budziszewski demonstrates to answer them will make us want to skip to the end. But the process is important. We can’t simply say, “1, 2, skip a few, 100,” as the cheaters did in hide-and-seek. Rather, there is fulfillment in considering the options, even as we arrive at the conclusion that something beyond this world is needed to fulfill us.
In the end, Budziszewski argues that happiness if found in union with the God of the universe. Yet this is still a hard thing to reason to, which explains the slow process the book takes to get there. Though Budziszewski relies primarily on human reason to get close to his conclusion, he affirms the need for revelation for humans to discover the full picture of the God of the universe.
According to Budziszewski, Christianity is unique in that it “claims that information exceeding everything that human reason can discover . . . has actually been disclosed by God Himself, in historical time” (196). We need God to reveal himself to understand him. Thankfully he has in the world, through Scripture, and also through his incarnation.
Finding our happiness in God is not about getting stuff or achieving a special status. Instead, it is paradoxically about death that ends in renewal. This is the same place C. S. Lewis ends his Mere Christianity. It is the same place the gospel logically concludes. And it is with the knowledge that only by dying can we truly live that Budziszewski closes his book:
Blessed are those who refuse to drug their discontent with futile satisfactions. Supremely happy are those who settle for nothing less than supreme happiness. (205)
God of All Things thus deepens our experience of the world as we study and live. Its short chapters and engaging prose are suitable for a wide audience. The many connections with real, physical object lessons have deepened my appreciation of God’s efforts to ensure that the message of his greatness is available for all.