Every time the new year rolls around, I am fascinated anew by our species-wide obsession with personal happiness. As we change calendars the prophets of personal fulfilment emerge, like clockwork, to sell us their new and improved four fundamental principles or six basic steps to lasting contentment. But while I like being happy as much as the next person, I am unlikely to pick up, say, a copy of Oprah Winfrey and Arthur C Brook’s Build the Life you Want: The Art and Science of Getting Happier come January. That’s because I am convinced that the pursuit of happiness is a terrible mistake.
Happiness, of course, is understood differently by different people and across cultures and epochs, but in most of its iterations it taps into an infantile wish we all share: to satisfy our most important desires for a lasting period of time. Considered philosophically, there are at least two problems with this. First, the wish is internally incoherent, which means it is impossible to fulfil in the real world. Chasing happiness is futile. Second, trying to organise our lives around the pursuit of happiness makes it much harder to do the one thing that does lie within our control: living a morally good life.
Let’s start with the incoherence problem. Our lives are driven by endless, restless, often conflicting, sometimes inscrutable desires: to be better people, to prosper (whatever that might mean), to be 10 pounds skinnier but also to eat the cake. We want trivial things, such as a perfectly poured latte or to nab that parking spot, as well as noble ones like peace in Gaza, or an end to deforestation. The diverse, changeable nature of desire in a world that is indifferent to our wants and ruled by chance means that lasting, perpetual satisfaction is not a genuine possibility for us. And yet, strangely enough, that’s just what the idea of happiness is! What seems like a concrete, achievable aim is nothing but a phantom, an empty placeholder, doomed to forever disappear over the next horizon.
The second problem is that in seeking happiness—as though it were some definite state we could reliably achieve—we cannot but delude ourselves about our own powers, pretending to an omnipotence and omniscience we lack. Consider that the real-world effects of our actions are unpredictable and ultimately beyond our control. Take the skilled, well-meaning doctor who inadvertently speeds his patient’s demise, or social media platforms built to unite us that instead stoke division and civil breakdown. In seeking happiness, we trick ourselves into thinking that through just a little bit more of the right kind of effort (or discipline, or cunning) we will finally get, if not everything, then the most important things to go our way. And so we are trapped in an endless cycle of striving, propelled by desire and its inseparable shadow: disappointment and dissatisfaction.
Fortunately, however, we are not doomed forever to chase our tails in this way, since the distinction between a moral life and a happy one is stark. Figuring out what is right may be no easy task, but it is the only one truly worth our effort. To act well is to seek to do what is right without regard for whether this will make us happy. Doing the right thing is often painful. It might even bring misery. Think of the whistleblower who exposes corruption only to be met with social ostracism and the loss of her career, or of the parent who endures degrading working conditions day after day to provide for her children.
Personal suffering, however unfortunate, does nothing to diminish the value of the good that has been done. Doing right is the only thing that has an unchanging, absolute value in this way. Whereas the value of getting what we want is as fickle and evanescent as our wants themselves.
And this is why, come 1st January, rather than plotting new ways to become happier, I instead seek to inoculate myself afresh against the siren call of happiness. Immanuel Kant, one of the greatest philosophical sceptics of the pursuit of happiness, is particularly useful for this purpose. He taught that morality has nothing to do with “how we may make ourselves happy” but rather concerns “how we may make ourselves worthy of happiness”—a separate matter entirely.
And so, to lead a good life, we must go out of our way to ignore personal happiness. For focusing on the satisfaction of our desires—even the most noble ones, such as to be of service—easily corrupts our sense of what is right, tempting us to bend our ethics to serve surreptitiously in our quest for contentment. We end up picking our ethical fights on the basis of the personal desires they gratify—say, for attention, esteem, or belonging to the right tribe—thereby losing track of what our real moral priorities ought to be. Or we grossly underestimate the harms we inflict through our heedless overconsumption because it feels so much better to burn up the planet with an undisturbed conscience.
So, to all those readers tempted to pursue greater happiness in 2025, I say: don’t waste your time. Don’t aim to be happy; aim to do good. From there, the best we can hope is that happiness will take care of itself.