What Is Happiness

What Is Happiness

In traditional Chinese Confucian culture, the meaning of the “whole” far outweighs that of the “individual.” For the individual, life is more often about obeying the norms of the whole and existing as one part of it. Throughout the Confucian system, the individual and individuality are continuously downplayed, while norms and rules are emphasized, with ethics and morality serving as tools to maintain the order of society as a whole. Within that framework, there is no real interpretation of love for the individual. What exists instead is a grand love: love for the nation, for the world, for humanity. The small, intimate love between two people would easily be treated as something suspect or even heretical. Likewise, there is no real interpretation of individual happiness. The highest state of happiness is said to be to “follow one’s heart without overstepping the rules,” or to “worry before all under heaven worries, and rejoice only after all under heaven rejoices.” But there is hardly any heartfelt discussion that simply asks: “Are you happy?”

This has led to a situation in which, even today, Chinese still feels ill-suited to expressing emotion. “I love you” can of course carry deep feeling, but somehow—perhaps this is only my illusion—it still sounds less natural and intimate than “I love you” rendered jokingly as “ai lao hu you” (a very age-revealing old pun...). Perhaps Chinese people have gradually become more used to expressing affection to their partners, but when it comes to parents and children, it still feels difficult to naturally say “I love you,” let alone offer a warm hug.

Respect for individuality comes from the modern West. For a very long time, respecting the individual may not have seemed helpful to maintaining social order. But perhaps that was only because individual awakening had not yet matured enough to influence social institutions as a whole. As The Crowd suggests, groups are often simple and crude. Individual personality cannot transform collective consciousness overnight. And yet I believe this is ultimately the necessary path for humanity’s awakening as a whole: only by respecting individuals can we foster individual awakening, and only when most people within a social structure are awakened can society make the greatest possible progress—instead of leaving most people in a state of confusion, drifting with the crowd and echoing whatever others say. At the very least, for each person, to be born and treated with respect is itself a kind of happiness. At the very least, being able to discuss individual happiness is itself a kind of progress. Of course, hollow nonsense like CCTV going around asking “Are you happy?” does not count. After all, living in the world portrayed by the evening state news is only a distant and unattainable ideal.

So then, what does it take to be happy? I think one early version of the “Chinese Dream” might be captured by the line: “With riches of a hundred thousand strings of cash, riding a crane down to Yangzhou.” That certainly counts as one dream of happiness—but for most people, it can only remain a dream. After all, not everyone can endlessly delight in music, chess, calligraphy, painting, poetry, wine, and flowers. Most people in this world still have to deal with the everyday necessities of firewood, rice, oil, salt, soy sauce, vinegar, and tea. And besides, even if one really could be laden with wealth and ride a crane down to Yangzhou—would that make one a winner in life, and therefore happy? It still does not seem entirely so. In the end, the Chinese conception of happiness tends to ignore the inner feelings of the individual and instead reduce happiness to external conditions. But true happiness may be more like the written word itself: only one’s own heart can truly know its gains and losses. Precisely because of this, traditional Chinese thinking never really imagined turning “happiness” into a field of study.

Western thinking is different. Leaving aside which mode of thought is better, there is something deeply admirable about the Western impulse to follow a question all the way through: to investigate everything to the bottom, to quantify whatever can be quantified, and to search for relationships and causes. True, this has also led at times to false reversals and mistaken ideas about causality. But objectively speaking, it has helped push the world forward, uncovering more and more of what was previously unknown. Take the Harvard project that spent decades investigating who really gets to be the ultimate winner in life, and from that tried to summarize the key to a happy life for the individual. Whether or not one agrees with its final conclusions, the process alone is already enough to inspire admiration. At the very least, there are people who, in order to study what happiness really is and to offer useful guidance to others, are willing to devote their entire lives to the question.

“Life is so short, we have no time for quarrels, apologies, heartache, or score-settling. There is only time for love, and even that passes in an instant.” — Mark Twain