How to be happy? How can Classics contribute to your powers of self-determination?

Anthropology

Sep 18

‘What does it mean to think of happiness as having a history?’ Sara Ahmed asks in a question that frames our final year module ‘How to be Happy?’ at Trinity Classics. Ahmed is paired in our first class with another favourite of mine, Marisol de la Cadena’s paraphrase of Marilyn Strathern: ‘it matters what concepts you use to think concepts.’ A class mantra to which we’ll return.

Taken together, the implication of two recent upsets in Happiness science of the last two years nicely illustrate its importance but also show how all the disciplines implicated in modern Happiness studies — psychology, anthropology, economics, philosophy, cultural studies, and more — are to greater or lesser extent all tacitly in conversation with the Classics.

The first upset is the overturning of the long-established tenet in Happiness studies that levels of subjective contentment over life (taking the hedonic perspective) take the form of a bell curve, with the very young and the very old reporting highest levels of happiness, and the statistically lowest ebb of the life trajectory falling at 47.2 years old.

In the wake of Covid 19, the negative effects of smartphone technology, and the pressures of global instability of all kinds — increasing economic inequity and uncertainty, global conflicts, environmental crisis — young people (under 30) in Western nations now report new lows so that the hedonic bell curve has either flattened or now resembles a ‘double dip’. In particular, measuring their lives against representations of ideals of success on the capitalist model in the midst of this political climate, social media enshrines for the young (those between 11–24 in this recent UK Institute for Public Policy report) a cycle of aspiration and deficiency, displacing real social connections with increasing levels of digital isolation. And the result is a mental health epidemic.

The second upset concerns the equally well-established aphorism that money doesn’t buy happiness. It used to be thought that up to a certain level of income — an income of $75,000 per annum back in 2010 — individual happiness increased as wealth increased but beyond that income which, in the tested demographics secured a self-sustaining security, the perception of happiness (again taking a hedonic view of well-being) does not increase alongside increases in wealth (even if positive life evaluations do seem to rise); in fact, even if wealthier individuals within countries may report higher levels of happiness than the very poor, the wealthiest countries allegedly report the lowest levels of happiness (the so-called and much debated Easterlin paradox). So, there we are: scientific proof that money doesn’t buy happiness.

Only then the happiness scientists observed that (amongst other missing factors complicating this picture) nobody had actually consolidated the data from the high-income earners and the very wealthy, the millionaires and billionaires.

So, comparing the surveyed self-assessments of those earning up to or even over $500,000 per annum and two surveyed samples of high-net worth individuals by wealth (millionaires) from 17 countries, that’s what Matthew Killingsworth (2024) did (developing his earlier work challenging the alleged well-being income plateau in the US). And shock horror, ask the millionaires — and on current data this likely holds true similarly of billionaires — how happy with their lives they feel, and guess what, the answer is pretty happy (and considerably more so than the sampled high-income group)! They’ve shut the entire city of Venice over the weekend to get married and the whole world hates them, so why are they happy? Well, amongst other things, they wanted to shut Venice and they could: extreme wealth secured for them the ultimate, and here flagrantly exercised, power of self-determination.

The power of self-determination, as International Law defines it, is a fundamental human right: and the power of conceptual self-determination is foundational to the enfranchisement of indigenous peoples whose lives are oppressed, denied, or extirpated, by those who profit most from their labour and resources. It is currently in the news in relation to the ongoing genocide in Palestine.

But a power of self-determination is also at stake in the way you think about your happiness. ‘What does it mean to think that happiness has a history’, Ahmed asks? It means recognizing that not all iterations of the human over human history have conceived of themselves as did the Greeks and Romans or the Enlightenment thinkers who from their first virtue ethics sought to create models of governance, or human rights, from their dicta — and further, that ‘happiness’ as we understand it is not the natural optimal condition to which we should aspire, that other possibilities existed (and exist). Exploring those possibilities, in Ahmed’s inspiring manifesto, means doing a genealogy: in her elegant formulation: ‘To wonder about the present by wondering about the how of its arrival.’ And the process of genealogizing inevitably means recognizing that even in a late capitalist system, our basic orientations to the question of optimal well-being derive from Enlightenment readings of Classical ideas that never were the only ones possible.

Irrespective of our wealth now, here lies one important route to the powers of conceptual self-determination that our billionaires so deleteriously enjoy at the expense of others: the simple realization that the life you live is not a necessary one, that the Classical ideas about the person, psychological motives, and the nature of our relation to the world, that have so embedded themselves in the Western tradition as to have become second nature to us — ‘realizing our potential’, psychological egoism, human exceptionalism, even the very concept of ‘a life’ (and there are more) — all have a beginning. The realization that any answer to the question of how best to be, and any theory of the happy human is also first a theory of how to be and the human. And finally, as Jarrett Zigon has argued, the realization that any such ethical theories that operate with absolute concepts (like ‘virtue’ or ‘the good’ of Classical philosophy) or laws and the fundamental presumption of sameness at their core, necessarily elide the complexity and situatedness of the relations that today make our global world of differences (not to mention manifestly fail!)

So what should we learn from Ahmed’s observation that happiness has a history, and how can the Classics take you closer to your powers of self-determination? Minimally, that our concept of happiness and the world it creates around us is contingent, historically particular, itself grounded in concepts that derive from a Classical past, and further, that your aspirations for your life now - and the disquiet they engender - are in seismic ways just another aspect of the Classical tradition you silently ‘carry on’ — and this is what traditio means, a ‘carrying on’— in the dispositions and habits through which you have been taught to live. From this perspective, achieving the power of self-determination means first cultivating the critical self-awareness bound up with recognizing the contingency of your own thought and of the concepts that delimit your thinking. And this means achieving the kind of understanding of how you have learned to relate to the world that affords you the possibility of thinking, being and becoming — which to say, relating — otherwise. (For if there is anything ethical the world demands of us all now, it is this: our relating to it, and to each other, otherwise.) But along with that newfound possibility of relating differently, of thinking and living beyond, it also means acquiring the responsibility to do so. And so, to this extent, quite unlike the nihilistic version exercised by our supremacist billionaires, the powers of self-determination that Classics invites us to cultivate are themselves ultimately an invitation to meet the challenge of living together well.

So how to be happy? Well, more important first is to consider what’s smuggled through into your life in that very question? Because ‘concepts not only drag with them their histories but also volunteer futures.’ And because, on the matter of your — and our — well-being in particular (as well as on everything else in life), as de la Cadena (paraphrasing Strathern) wonderfully put it, it really therefore ‘matters what concepts you use to think concepts.’

How to be happy? How can Classics contribute to your powers of self-determination?

Ancient Pompeians and Modern University Students: On Graffiti, Bathrooms, and Online Forums