Retrospectacle: A Neuroscience Blog

Would you rather have a completely happy life, or a meaningful life? And are the two mutually exclusive? The topics, as well as recent neuroscience research, is addressed in a fascinating podcast over at Governomics. The podcast is here, with the transcript here.

As mentioned in the podcast, Aristotle had certain ideas of what ideal happiness was:

[He]...thought that eudaimonia was the ultimate goal of all purposeful striving. Greek for "happiness," the word eudaimonia comes from"eu" (meaning "good" or "well being") and "daimon" (meaning "spirit"). For Aristotle, "well being," or "happiness" in the objective and general sense, is human excellence. Pointing out that society's rich aren't necessarily its happiest or most excellent, Aristotle reasoned that true happiness isn't just material wealth and physical pleasure. In his Nicomachean Ethics, he suggests a set of moral virtues that he believes are better correlated with eudaimonia.

The podcast goes on to suggest (as per the TV show 'Heros') that a life which is happy and a life which has meaning is mutually exclusive, since being happy is living in the moment and purposefulness is thinking of the past and future. While this dichotomy makes some sense at first glance, what it suggests is rather unsettling: that people who chose to use their lives to make a difference cannot be happy. I wager that this point is meant to be a thought-provoking simplicity rather than to be taken at face value, but I'll bite.

I would hope, as would most idealists, that the people who feel spurred on to use their life in a meaningful way can ONLY feel happiness when this is the case. Certainly, that is true for me. That is not to say that any other life that I might have chosen wouldn't have been meaningful, but I believed that my interests and abilities led me to be best suited to make a difference in science. However, acknowledging this while taking a job as a model or parking attendant would have left me unfufilled and unhappy, despite whatever charms those lives would have held. I think this works in reverse too: that many people who do "live in the moment" find that moment pretty unsatisfactory. Those who can't plan for the future can't maximize their interests IN that future, so how could one be guaranteed happiness from one moment to the next?

Perhaps, if happiness is only comfort and pleasure, we should all live fast, die young, be selfish and shallow, take lots of risks as well as advantage of everyone we know. We'd be pretty successful at making everyone around us miserable at least.