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"I often tease my cat Harley for her lack of ambition. As far as I can tell, she’s content to eat, sleep, and collect belly scratches. 'Damnit, Harley. You’re sixteen and what have you achieved?' ” |
"Most people [have a] superficial conception of happiness. But happiness is deep. It is a reverential attitude toward your life. It is a hard-won, enduring form of joy that can only be achieved through the realisation of your values, including very abstract values like reason, purpose, and self-esteem.
"Given how superficial the conventional understanding of happiness is, it’s no surprise that the conventional understanding of how to achieve happiness is equally superficial. Tony Robbins’ website lists 17 ways to feel happier, and while much of the advice isn’t awful, claiming that happiness is primarily a matter of spending more time outdoors, listening to upbeat music, and journaling is like saying that a successful marriage is made by buying your partner flowers.
"What Robbins and almost everyone else ignores is the role of morality in achieving happiness. And to the extent they don’t ignore it, they promote the anti-happiness morality of altruism. 'Remember,' Robbins tells us, 'the secret to living is giving.' I get it. It rhymes. But just because the words fit, don’t make ‘em legit.
"Even many Effective Egoists, however, don’t appreciate the full implications of a pro-self morality for happiness. There is what I call a hidden art of happiness, which is easy to miss yet indispensable to understand and practice if you want to live a life that you love. ...
"Your life is a sacred value, but you have to work to make it sacred by living up to a pro-life morality—and you have to work to experience it as sacred by practicing the hidden art of happiness: the art of making your abstract values concrete and real—and of bringing out out the abstract meaning of the concrete.
"I have explained again and again how the biggest barrier to people adopting the morality of Effective Egoism is their embarrassingly primitive notion of self-interest—a notion nurtured so successfully by altruism’s propagandists. They equate self-interest with empty narcissism and equate the pursuit of happiness with accumulating meaningless pleasures.
"Few people have the first clue what self-interest means. And who would tell them, when even the motivational speakers and licensed psychologists who make careers out telling you how to be happy are unable to conceive of the heart and soul of seeking joy?
"The core of self-interest, its actual heart and soul, is conceiving of a vision of who you want to be and the world you want live in, and bringing that into reality. ...
"That is the hidden art of happiness. It is the art of devoting your days and your thoughts to your highest values and aspirations—to your vision of the life you want to create, and do create with each day that you author."~ Don Watkins, from his post 'The Hidden Art of Happiness'
5 comments:
I partly agree in that the path to happiness is seldom found entirely in taking concrete actions such as those suggested by Tony Robbins. Yet it’s also seldom found in abstract goals such as searching for your inner vision, and denying action till you’ve found it. That’s not necessarily what the author is advocating, but it’s often the way advice like this is interpreted.
More often the path to happiness is found from taking action first and then refining from that your vision, and further action. Not waiting for an abstract vision that inspires you before taking action. Action needs to come first, even if it’s terribly uncertain, and from that comes increasing certainty of what your next action should be.
I've long thought that any time people talk about self-interest they need to show some explicit differences between that and selfishness.
That's because the altruism folk actually "win" their arguments in public as much by conflating the self-interest and selfishness as by going on about giving and kindness and so forth.
Sp PC, do you have any source recommended that tackles that difference in basic terms that can be used in everyday life?
@Tom: It's a fact that most honest people live their own lives with implicit self-interest at least, else they wouldn't survive and do as well as they do.
But that's not what's popularly equated as selfishness — which is more like the empty narcissists our culture calls “selfish.”
Ayn Rand called the example of those empty narcissists 'selfishness without a self.'
Don Watkins writes about it here: https://www.earthlyidealism.com/p/the-only-argument-against-egoism
I just read this substack article the other day and thought back to this whole debate and what it means for our political and civil society, Know Your Enemy, where he looks at British conservative political philosopher Oakeshott:
Unless you are an unusually decisive person there will have been at least one episode in your life when you have agonised about such a choice. And though you probably didn’t think about it this way at the time, there would no doubt have been a small part (perhaps a big part) of you that actually would have quite liked to not have to make the decision at all – or, better yet, have some higher power make it on your behalf.
And we likewise also I think have all had moments in our lives when we have been stressed, depressed, bereaved, or just very tired, and have wanted to withdraw from the cold, hard world and retreat, literally or metaphorically, back under the bed covers.
...
Here, Oakeshott’s prognosis was bleak: modernity was one long, sad tale in which the propensity to adopt the perspective of the individual manqué was growing ever stronger among Western populations. The desire to engage with life as an autonomous, responsible, self-governing agent was diminishing; it was being replaced by an obsession with security and an acceptance of ‘servility’ as the price to pay for safety.
And if there are politicians out there who tell people that if they vote a certain way they won’t have to make as many decisions in life, because the politicians will make those for the voter, then the ‘individual manqués’ will naturally go for it and the pressure will grow on the individualists to increasingly just throw in the towel on their decisions as well – or at least a lot of them.
Say hello to the British Labour Party and New Zealand Labour and every other Left-wing party in the West - with our modern "right-wing" parties not far behind them.
@ Tom: In our relationships with others, it's in our interests to find win-win outcomes. It's only the dishonest or incompetent who attempt to shortcut reality and get what they want from others without it. They always fail in the long run though. You're correct that this is often what people call "selfish" but it confuses the issue by implying that acting this way is in our self-interest, when in reality it's not. I can only presume that anyone honest who uses the term "selfish" to describe self-sabotaging behavior lacks a good understanding of what is in their interests and what is not.
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