The Age of Absurdity: Why Modern Life Makes it Hard to Be Happy (2010)

Michael Foley

The Age of Absurdity

Why Modern Life Makes it Hard to Be Happy

2010

The good news is that the great thinkers from history have proposed the same strategies for happiness and fulfilment. The bad news is that these turn out to be the very things most discouraged by contemporary culture. This knotty dilemma is the subject of The Age of Absurdity – a wry and accessible investigation into how the desirable states of wellbeing and satisfaction are constantly undermined by modern life. Michael Foley examines the elusive condition of happiness common to philosophy, spiritual teachings and contemporary psychology, then shows how these are becoming increasingly difficult to apply in a world of high expectations. The common challenges of earning a living, maintaining a relationship and ageing are becoming battlegrounds of existential angst and self-loathing in a culture that demands conspicuous consumption, high-octane partnerships and perpetual youth. In conclusion, rather than denouncing and rejecting the age, Foley presents an entertaining strategy of not just accepting but embracing today's world – finding happiness in its absurdity.

The Problems

The Absurdity of Happiness

S
o I go to a wall of bookshelves, extending from floor to ceiling, with books jammed in sideways along the top of each shelf, and I think, Not a single book I want to read. Then I proceed to the ragged towers of a CD collection that, despite its size and discriminating embrace of classical, jazz, world and adult-oriented rock, does not contain one piece of music worth playing. Obviously stimulation will have to be sought elsewhere. I consult
Time Out London Eating & Drinking
– possibly the most compendious and varied collection of restaurant reviews in the world, with substantial chapters on each of twenty-two major regional and national cuisines – and flip irritably through the pages, scowling at the lack of even
one
exciting new place to eat. The answer must be to look further ahead, to the unadulterated bliss of a holiday abroad. But the websites provoke only disbelief and outrage. Why isn’t there a reasonably priced apartment in the atmospheric old town, a few minutes’ walk from the sea on one side and from major transport links on the other, with a barbecue-equipped roof terrace and views over the lively, bustling, colourful market? Would anyone even
consider
less?

And now I catch a glimpse of my face in the mirror – a raging gargoyle corroded by acid rain. How can this have happened to a 1960
s
flower child? Especially one who has yet to enjoy fully the sexual variety promised to the flower children? Not to mention all the new stuff. Can anyone nowadays be said to have lived life to the full without experiencing group sex, bondage and a pre-op transsexual?

This is crazy, of course. But who, in the Western world, has not been deranged by a toxic cocktail of dissatisfaction, restlessness, desire and resentment? Who has not yearned to be younger, richer, more talented, more respected, more celebrated and, above all, more sexually attractive? Who has not felt entitled to more, and aggrieved when more was not forthcoming? It is possible that a starving African farmer has less sense of injustice than a middle-aged Western male who has never been fellated.

Of course many also become aware that demanding everything is absurd. Then the questions arise. How did such inordinate expectation come about? What is the alternative? If there is an alternative how can it be achieved? Do the best minds of past and present offer any useful advice? Is there a consensus in what they say? If so, what is it and how does it apply to living in the twenty-first century? These are the questions addressed by this book – but there are no simple answers.

Even defining the goal is difficult. The alternative to discontented craziness is contented sanity – happiness. But this word presents all kinds of problems. Many, including myself, can hardly bear to utter a word so contaminated by the excesses of happy-clappiness and self-help. It immediately brings to mind beatific grins, tambourines, orange robes and T-shirts saying, ‘Today is the first day of the rest of your life’ (the poet Derek Mahon made this a couplet with the line, ‘Tell that to your liver; tell that to your ex-wife’
1
). We are too knowing, too sophisticated, too ironical, too wised up, too post-everything for a corny old term like happiness. The word ‘happiness’ would draw an equally derisive snort from a philosopher, a novelist, a poet and a cab driver, though all of these would no doubt secretly want the experience. Many may claim that life stinks – but no one wants to
feel
like shit.

Alternative terms are even less satisfactory. The academic community has proposed ‘Subjective Well-Being’, which reduces to an impressive acronym, SWB, but is lifeless jargon. More recently populists have suggested ‘Wellness’, which sounds like an obscure English coastal town (stony beach, but charming despite that).

It will have to be embarrassing old ‘happiness’. And, not only is the word agony to use, it is impossible to define. The Oxford English Dictionary shockingly offers a misapprehension corrected over two thousand years ago by Socrates: ‘good fortune or luck; success; prosperity’. More scrupulous attempts to define the concept get lost in infinite ramification. The Buddhist kingdom of Bhutan in the Himalayas set up a Gross National Happiness Commission and one of the Commission’s first tasks was to define what it was created to promote. So far it has identified four pillars, nine domains and seventy-two indicators. But the country is still no better than others at resisting lamentable trends. As a spokesperson glumly conceded, ‘In the last century a young person asked to identify a hero would have invariably chosen the king – but now it is the rap artist 50 Cent.’
2

And useful testimony on happiness in practice is as difficult to find as convincing theory. Unlike its opposite, depression, happiness is averse to self-definition. The misery memoir is a well-established genre – but there is no equivalent for happiness (in fact a happy childhood is a crippling handicap for a writer). It seems that only the painful experiences are a source of inspiration.

Perhaps a condition of being happy is an unwillingness to analyse the state, because any attempt at definition will kill it. Perhaps it is not even possible to be
consciously
happy. Perhaps it may be recognized only retrospectively, after it is lost. Jean-Jacques Rousseau first elaborated this view: ‘The happy life of the golden age was always a state foreign to the human race, either because it went unrecognised when humans could have enjoyed it or because it had been lost when humans could have known it.’
3
In other words, if you have it, you can’t be aware of it and, if you’re aware of it, you can’t have it.

And happiness tends to be thought of as a permanent state, when it may be only occasionally achievable. The philosopher Hannah Arendt has argued that the human condition is a cycle of exhaustion and renewal, so that going up is possible only after going down and attempts to remain permanently up will fail: ‘There is no lasting happiness outside the prescribed cycle of painful exhaustion and pleasurable regeneration, and whatever throws this cycle out of balance – poverty and misery where exhaustion is followed by wretchedness instead of regeneration, or great riches and an entirely effortless life where boredom takes the place of exhaustion…ruins the elemental happiness that comes from being alive.’
4

And the happiness state, when examined more closely, turns out to be not a point but a range, with contentment at the bottom and exaltation at the top.

Alternatively, happiness is not a state but a process, a continuous striving. Aristotle defined it as an activity. Marcus Aurelius, an earthier Roman, likened it to wrestling. Or maybe it is both a state
and
a process. The ancient Greek term,
eudaimonia
, captures something of both interpretations and translates roughly as
flourishing
. This is an appealing idea: to be happy is to
flourish
. (And Eudaimonics would be an impressive title for Happiness Studies – there’s nothing like a Greek word for intellectual theft.)

Then again, there is the assumption that only one version of happiness is achieved by the fortunate few. But, given our bizarre uniqueness, it is unlikely that even any two happy people are experiencing exactly the same phenomenon. There are probably as many forms of happiness as there are of depression.

As for how to attain this indefinable thing…The United States Declaration of Independence has that famous phrase, ‘the pursuit of happiness’. But many believe that happiness may not be pursued, that it is an accidental consequence of doing something else – an insight possibly first expressed by John Stuart Mill in the nineteenth century: ‘Those only are happy…who have their minds fixed on some object other than their own happiness…

Aiming thus at something else, they find happiness by the way…The only chance is to treat, not happiness, but some end external to it, as the purpose of life.’
5

Hence another question – what is the ‘something else’, the ‘end external? Living well? Virtue? Wisdom? These are as difficult to define as happiness itself. One of the problems in thinking about happiness is that every line of thought leads off into some vast area of contention with a contradictory literature going back centuries. Arendt said that virtuous acts are, by definition, not meant to be seen. So, a double whammy: goodness is invisible and happiness is mute.

And goodness has the same access problem. It is not possible to be good by trying to be good. This is also true of many other desiderata – originality for instance. It is not possible to be original by trying to be original – those who attempt this in the arts will be merely avant-garde. Originality is the product of an impulse so intense and overwhelming that it bursts the conventions and produces something new – again more by accident than design. Also attainable only indirectly are wisdom and authority, perhaps even humour and love. Is there a General Theory of Desiderata in this?

Only the surrogates of happiness yield to pursuit – success, fame, status, affluence, fun, cheerfulness – though it is possible that the lowest level of the happiness range, contentment, is directly achievable. Gustave Flaubert thought so: ‘Happiness is not attainable though tranquillity is’
6
, which sounds more like an admission of defeat and surrender. But, as a literary man rather than a philosopher, Flaubert was a bit inconsistent and did leave open a narrow window of opportunity: ‘Stupidity, selfishness and good health are the three prerequisites of happiness, though if stupidity is lacking the others are useless.’
7

In fact, these quotes are from Flaubert’s good days. Essentially he subscribed, like many others before and since, to a form of Manicheism, the belief that man is a fallen creature who can
never
find happiness.

Then there is the view that the pursuit of happiness is itself the main cause of unhappiness, that the pursuit is intrinsically self-defeating. Immanuel Kant put it like this: ‘We find that the more a cultivated reason devotes itself to the aim of enjoying life and happiness, the further does man get away from true contentment.’
8

So the absurdity of happiness is that it is embarrassing to discuss or even mention, impossible to define or measure, may not be achievable at all – or, at best, only intermittently and unconsciously – and may even turn into its opposite if directly pursued, but that it frequently turns up unexpectedly in the course of pursuing something else. There is no tease more infuriating.

Besides, hasn’t every thinker since Socrates pondered all this and left the world not much wiser? Questions seem to breed only more questions. Agonizing leads only to bewilderment and frustration. Or to banalities – watch less television and smile more at strangers. It is tempting to forget the whole thing and simply fall back on the couch with a remote control in one hand and a beer in the other.

But there is a compelling reason to develop a personal strategy for living. Rejecting issues, which often feels liberating, is actually enslavement. Those who do not produce their own solution must be using someone else’s. As Nietzsche warned: ‘he who cannot obey himself will be commanded’.
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Worse, the someone else who commands is likely to be the average contemporary, and the solution a weak mixture of contemporary recommendations and anathemas. This has a parallel in writing. Many would-be novelists and poets read only their contemporaries and often not even these, justifying this laziness as a bold bid for freedom from influence. But this attempt to escape specific influence results in unconscious surrender to the worst kind of general influence – current popular taste.

Of course there is the phenomenon of the happy brute, whose instincts and talents perfectly match the demands of the age but are not inhibited by sensitivity or scruple, and who is therefore hugely successful and happy to enjoy the approbation and spoils – the palaces, courtiers, servants and seraglio. In earlier eras this would have been a warrior. Now it is more likely to be an entrepreneur. One of capitalism’s most successful confidence tricks is its promotion of the illusion that anyone can make millions. But there is room at the top for only a few and few have the aptitude to claim a place.