Happiness is a very subjective thing as all feelings are up to the interpretation of the individual. Many different people define their happiness as different things. Greek philosopher Aristotle once said that, “Happiness is a state of activity.” This is seen all around the world today as everyone is always looking to do something. Social media fills time and video games are always an option. People look to cooking, cleaning, walking and working to keep them occupied and to keep them happy. In the worst cases, people commit felonies like rapes, robberies and murders because that’s where they find happiness.
Eleanor Roosevelt, wife of late President Franklin D. Roosevelt, said, “Someone once asked me what I regarded as the three most important requirements for happiness. My answer was: A feeing that you have been honest with yourself and those around you; a feeling that you have done the best you could both in you personal life and in your work; and the ability to love others.” This is a very motherly take on happiness and one that does not ring true for the youth today in the United States.
Just from the two quotes above, it can be assumed that happiness comes in a plethora of different ways and one can even say that the magnitude of the happiness achieved is a variable among all people. Dan Haybron in his article, “Happiness,” for the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy said that philosophers offers two main theories: the life satisfaction theory and hedonism.
According to Haybron, “Life satisfaction theories identify happiness with having a favorable attitude toward one's life as a whole.” This means that the person who follows the life satisfaction theory involves some sort of “global judgment,” as Haybron puts it. They look to the collection of activities, judgments and activities that have made their life and find happiness when those things affirm them in some kind of way, mainly, a feeling that they have lived a good life.
Hedonism in itself means to seek out pleasure. “The hedonist about happiness need not accept the stronger doctrine of welfare hedonism,” Haybron said. “[They] grant the identification of happiness with pleasure… [and] challenge the idea that this should be our primary or sole concern, and often as well the idea that happiness is all that matters for well-being.”
Hedonist believe that pleasure is the only source of true happiness and that happiness is all that matters. That if a person is happy then they would have lived a life full of self-indulgence and pleasure.
In short, hedonism is very self-centered while the life satisfaction theories tend to benefit everyone around the person. From the perspective of many philosophers, hedonism is mostly immoral while the life satisfaction theories are usually moral.
Traces of these ancient theories can even be found in today’s modern theories of happiness. A positive psychologist, Martin Seligman, who is considered a pioneer in his field, has proposed that there are, what he calls, three dimensions of happiness. “[Positive Psycology] takes you through the country side of pleasure and gratification, up into the high country of strength and virtue, and finally to the peaks of lasting fulfillment: meaning and purpose,” said Seligman.
So, based on the quote, the three dimensions of happiness are:
- pleasure and gratification
- embodiment of strengths and virtues
- meaning and purpose
According to Speligman, those three things happen in a specific order, unlike the two previously mentioned theories, the life satisfaction theory and hedonism. It seems as if every person’s happiness starts with hedonism, advances to self-assurance, and ends in a life satisfaction-esque way. Speligman is also an advocate for altruism, the exact opposite of hedonism, as a way to happiness.
So, what makes people happy? Well, happiness is still a very subjective thing despite being studied so much by positive physiologists. Each person decides what makes themselves happy, but understanding why psychopathic murders and rapists enjoy and find pleasure in what they do may be the beginning to prevention. The applied knowledge from positive psychology could lead to a cure of sorts for behavioral correction of criminals. This could lead to better prison systems, decrease in crime rates and even an increase in state budgets due to the lower incarceration rates.
