Say No to Happiness: CBC Ideas

[Music] I'm Paul Kennedy. Welcome to Ideas. Aristotle claimed happiness was the ultimate purpose of life. Mathematician and philosopher Blaise Pascal believed that all men seek happiness. The poet Alexander Pope enthused, "Oh happiness, our being's end and aim," praising the virtue of happiness is both timeless and timely. Go to your local bookstore, and you'll find shelves packed with titles like The Art of Happiness, Authentic Happiness, The How of Happiness, The Happiness Advantage, to name just a few. Newspapers and popular magazines regularly publish scientific studies touting the benefits of happiness. Happy people enjoy a greater capacity for intimacy in relationships. Happiness increases your physical, mental, and emotional health. Happiness makes you more creative. With all that happiness has going for it, who doesn't want more of it? As one expert in the science of happiness put it, it is the Holy Grail of life; everyone wants happiness.

CBC producer Frank Faulk isn't so sure. In this hour of Ideas, Frank questions our culture's obsession with happiness and wonders if it's time to cool our hot pursuit of it. Here's his documentary: Say No to [Music] Happiness.

Let me make one thing perfectly clear: I am not, not, nor have I ever been a Cragan, at least not a committed one. I like feeling good. I try to maintain an optimistic outlook, preferring to walk on the sunny side of the street. But am I a happy person? To quote the English poet William Blake, "Joy and woe are woven fine." I can tell you that's more of a mantra for me than "Don't worry, be happy." But to be fair, having done some looking into this whole business around happiness, I know that no one is suggesting that striving for happiness is about ignoring the woes of life and being cheerful 24/7.

What I do know is that what is meant by happiness is rather elusive. Sure, Aristotle talked about the importance of happiness, but what he meant by happiness had to do with living a life of virtue, achieving the golden mean, a life lived in balance—something like what a surfer achieves when catching the perfect wave. The fact is, philosophers, theologians, and scientists have failed to come up with a definition of happiness that will make everyone, well, [Music] happy.

Well, it's absolutely true that happiness is a very elusive concept. I started my career as a lawyer, and I spent a semester arguing about the definition of a contract. Happiness is even harder to pin down. There's something like 15 academic definitions of happiness. Gretchen Rubin is the author of the bestseller The Happiness Project, in which she details her year of trying to achieve greater happiness in her life. For me, coming to it as a lay person, the looseness of the term happiness wasn't a problem, and in fact was sort of an advantage because it could encompass a lot of different things. Different people might emphasize different qualities within happiness. For some people, it's more about peace, and for some people, meaning, some, satisfaction, some, serenity, some mindfulness. People emphasize different aspects of it, and I realized I didn't have to agree with everyone else. What was really important for me was not to arrive at some perfect definition of happiness, but really to say to myself, "Well, how could I be happier? Whatever it is to be happy, what can I do to be happier next week, next month?"

So I sort of took the dodge of Justice Potter Stewart, who said of obscenity, "I know it when I see it," and I decided that for me, I knew what it meant to be happier, and I didn't really have to get all tangled up in the precise definitions that are required if you're going to do certain kinds of examinations of the subject.

Gretchen got the idea to devote a year to being happier while stuck on a bus in the pouring rain. Not exactly a situation that inspires positive moods. As it turns out, it afforded her one of those rare moments for self-reflection in which she wondered, "What do I want from life anyway?" And what Gretchen realized she wanted was to be happier. Not that she was unhappy; she had a good marriage, two small children she adored, and was completing a book on John F. Kennedy.

What I meant by wanting to be happier was that I felt that I needed to appreciate my life more. I felt like time was passing so [Music] quickly, and I wanted to grab onto it. I wanted to appreciate it; I didn't want to take it for granted. I have a phrase that I often say to myself: "The days are long, but the years are [Music] short." I wanted to ask more of myself; I wanted to be a better mother. I wanted to be a better wife. I wanted to be a better friend. I wanted to be a better writer. I wanted to be a better citizen. I wanted to expect more from myself.

I thought about the qualities that I wanted, and it's... yeah, I wanted to feel more creative and more light-hearted and more calm and more patient, have more forbearance, be less judgmental, less naggy. I wanted to bring my life more into harmony with my values, and it's funny, I don't think I really understood that very well at the beginning. That was one of the major, major things that I learned as I went on; that was what was so important was that my life reflected my values, my temperament, my interests; that I could only build a happy life on the foundation of my own nature.

Gretchen realized that if she was going to tackle a project of this size, she needed a plan. So she created a chart. The chart was divided into the 12 months of the year. Each month had a theme; for example, the theme for January was "Boost Energy", February, "Remember Love", March, "Aim Higher", and so on. For each month, she made a list of daily resolutions. So under June's theme of "Make Time for Friendship," her resolutions were: "Remember birthdays, be generous, don't gossip, make new friends." Every night, Gretchen would put a checkmark by a resolution indicating that she had managed to keep it that day. Having a chart helped Gretchen to achieve her monthly goals.

But seven months into her project, the pursuit of happiness got stalled. "I hit a low point in my happiness project where I felt like I was making no progress. I was tired of my way of thinking. I wasn't tired of the subject of happiness, which I have never failed to find fascinating, but I was tired of my way of thinking about it. You know, just like every time you go to buy clothes, you buy the same black sweater that you always bought before. I just felt like my thoughts were stuck in a groove. I felt that I was backsliding in all the usual ways.

And one of the things is when you think a lot about how you want to be better, it makes you much more aware of what you're doing wrong. So for example, I didn't think I gossiped very much, but when I decided that I was going to stop altogether, I realized how often I did. So I was much more aware of all the things that I was doing that I knew were contrary to my happiness, but I was doing anyway.

One of the things that came from my happiness project is I just have this long bag of things that I do to try to get through it. So it's things like go to bed early, a friend, go outside in the sunlight, get some exercise, do a good deed for someone else. One of the best ways to self-medicate. I did all these things, and eventually, I came out of it, but I think it's natural to just go through these periods where you just feel blue. And that wasn't for any particular reason. But then, of course, naturally, we all have periods where, for a very specific reason, we're feeling very unhappy.

So I think one of the things about a happiness project is sometimes it's not possible to be happy. It's just not realistic that you're just not in a happy time of life; you're not happy. But I think what I learned was there's things that you can do to try to be as happy as you can be under the circumstances, and that kind of gives you the armor that you need to deal with a difficult situation.

Like any smart person planning a long trip, Gretchen did lots of research and preparation for her year-long journey. Many of the ideas she used to help her deal with the difficult times came from the emerging science of positive psychology. Positive psychology is really about the scientific understanding of what makes a life most worth living, what are the conditions that lead to that, and then, most importantly, what are the strategies that we can use to help people move a little bit closer between where they presently are and where ideally they'd like to be?

Todd Caston is an associate professor of psychology at George Mason University in Virginia, an author of Designing Positive Psychology, a book on the science of well-being. He is also a self-described provocateur in the field of positive psychology. "The more that you actually take a gauge of how happy you are or assess how happy you are, or think about, reflect on, 'Am I happy right now?' The more that you do that, the less happy you become. And it becomes quickly— we're talking about four times a day— you think about 'Am I happy?,' you're less likely— you actually show decrements in your happiness.

And the reason for that is we're leaving the present moment. No longer are we in the present, and being open and receptive; we're constantly deciding if what I'm feeling and thinking about now fits with being happy. There's a lot of well-meaning people who are studying happiness but are not skeptical. I don't take things at face value; I'm a scientist. I want, where's the data? Where's the evidence? Mindfulness— there's this cultural obsession about taking this philosophical and ancient teachings about mindfulness, which is fantastic. But then the question is, is it always adaptive to be [Music] mindful? And the answer to most absolute statements is no.

It's very resource-intensive to be mindful. To focus with great, profound awareness and attention consumes energy. If you think about emergency medical technicians going on the scene for some crime scene or someone that's bloodied and has maybe, you know, hours to potentially live and needs to be brought to a hospital, there's research to show that being mindless and reflexively using your skills to get the job done right then and there is more adaptive than being mindful. So being a provocateur is about bending over backwards to disprove ideas, to find out the truth and unravel some of the mysteries of human nature as opposed to blindly accepting things on faith because they fit with what I'd like things to look like.

What concerns me with the current obsession with happiness is that under the rubric of happiness, all sorts of things that aren't really related are often discussed. So for example, there are claims that happy people are healthier. Actually, the research doesn't precisely indicate that. What it indicates is that people who have less negative emotion are healthier. And we don't exactly know the direction of causality. I mean, negative emotion is a dimension in and of itself, and people who are high in negative emotion tend to be depressed and anxious, and depression is associated with increased production of a stress hormone, cortisol, and that seems to have very negative consequences over time.

It impairs your immune system and makes you more susceptible to obesity and depression and cancer and heart disease. But technically, that's a negative emotion issue. Jordan Peterson is a clinical psychologist and teaches at the University of Toronto. He lectures on topics such as the nature of self-deception, the role of neuroscience in human behavior, the quest for meaning and purpose in life. The claim is often made that happy people are more creative, and the evidence for that, again, is very weak. There are a few studies that indicate that if you put people in a state of positive mood, they can think in a more creative manner briefly, but the bulk of the personality evidence suggests that creative people are somewhat disagreeable and that they're high in a trait called openness.

Openness is a measure of fluidity of thought and it appears to be fundamentally unrelated to happiness. It might be objected, I suppose, that the right response to negative situations is to consider how they might be made better, and I would agree with that. But the problem is that making things better and being happy are not the same thing unless you decide by definition that they're the same thing, in which case I don't believe that you're speaking within the scientific realm because you're not allowed to put vastly differing phenomena in the same box and call them the same. If you're a scientist, you can do that in normal conversation.

So for example, if someone suffering from a terrible illness, you might determine that aiding them would be an appropriate thing to do, and you might also consider that that would make you feel better. But to call that the pursuit of happiness is merely to be very unclear about the distinction between compassion and joy. Given the state of psychological science at this point, there's absolutely no excuse for failing to make that distinction. But you see, I've dodged that by saying my happiness project is my happiness.

And so the fact that there might be multiple definitions or sub-topics within happiness that are somehow separable, I think that you get further in terms of thinking about how to be happier if you just throw it all into one big basket rather than trying to tease out the difference between compassion and happiness.

Well, of course, a big question in a happiness project, if you're setting out to be happier, is: How are you going to know if you're happier? How are you going to measure yourself? And I have a friend who's a scientist, and he was very, very focused on this. His idea was that I should have my husband score me every morning and night on a 1 to 10 scale. And I said, "Look, that would definitely not add to the happiness of my household because there is just no way my husband is going to be sitting around scoring me morning and night."

And I didn't even really think that that was a very productive exercise to do. I just didn't approach it very scientifically. I said to myself, "I want to be happier, whatever that means, whatever the looseness of the term happiness and happier mean. And if I think I'm happier, I am happier." Having come to the end of it, and having continued to live with the consequences of it, because I continue to do all my resolutions and many, many more resolutions, my happiness project is really something that I think I'll do for the rest of my life.

It's just indisputable to me, and I think anybody who's around me would say that I'm absolutely happier. The atmosphere of my household is more light-hearted and more calm. It seems like we have more time, but it's not like we're doing anything less; it feels more rich but also more simple. I don't have a chart that shows me ticking upward; I don't have vials of blood showing how my hormone levels have changed. But I definitely feel confident saying that I did make myself happier.

[Music] Gretchen's quest for happiness inspired and continues to inspire others to create their own happiness projects, which explains why her book has been on bestseller lists since first hitting the market in 2019. Gretchen's most important piece of advice for those wanting to follow her example is this: Regardless of how you might define happiness for yourself, making happiness the primary goal in your life is going to help you achieve it.

There's a long tradition of people arguing that you shouldn't aim directly at happiness and that happiness is something that's a byproduct of a life well-lived or a life directed at other aims and that you should— and if you aim at being happy, you sort of will thwart yourself or trip over your own feet or somehow be pursuing the wrong goals that won't bring you to a happy life. In my own experience, I really think that you're much more likely to hit a target if you aim at it. I found for myself that when I said to myself, "Am I happy? How could I be happier?" I almost instantly did become happier just because asking myself that question made me appreciate more of what elements of happiness I already did have in my life— things that I was taking for granted or being distracted from.

It also helped me see places where I could make changes that were not hard. It's funny— happiness has sort of a surprisingly bad reputation, and I got a lot of criticism from people when I was saying that I was doing a happiness project, that I was trying to make myself happier. I was talking to a journalist who clearly thought that this was a very, very selfish, complacent, spoiled, bratty undertaking, and he was somebody who spent a lot of time doing kind of foreign reporting, so he was very aware of the suffering of the world. He really felt like this was very morally questionable for me to do.

I was very, naturally, taken back by that, but I had done a lot of thinking about it because it is something that you worry about when you're thinking about happiness. I did say to myself, "Is this very selfish? Is it morally inappropriate to be thinking about happiness when there's so much suffering in the world?" I'd been thinking about it sort of, but it wasn't until he really gave me that withering look of disgust that I really focused on what I thought about the pursuit of happiness. Did I feel like this was laudable?

What I found is that, in my experience, people who are happy in their own lives, they have the emotional wherewithal to turn outward and to think about the pain of the world. They're more able to intervene effectively because when we're unhappy, we tend to be isolated and defensive and preoccupied with our own problems. So it's not the case that happiness makes people complacent or self-satisfied or preoccupied with their own pleasure. In fact, happiness kind of energizes people to turn outward.

Professor Todd Caston focusing on happiness, trying to improve people's happiness, writing books about happiness—this is a big money-making industry. And while I'm critical of it, I recognize that this opens the doors for people to think about how they can improve their lives, their relationships, and the way that they're operating in this world, which might be suboptimal. So, Gretchen Rubin, who's a good friend of mine, she's dealing with how to create optimal conditions for human beings, and she's focusing on multiple pathways of getting there; she's focusing on multiple ways of setting goals, meeting your goals, deriving benefits just from devoting effort, much less whether you even achieve your goals.

I think this is important to get the dialogue going. And so it ends up being that happiness is the gateway for having people think about ways that they can intentionally improve their own lives and the lives of other people. It's a great thing, but what ends up happening is this nebulous wastebasket term where happiness is pretty much everything that's good in life.

If we focus on happiness as a synonym for the good life or a synonym for a well-lived life, we miss out on so many facets, so many nuances of what it means to be human. It beats full capacity: creativity, spirituality, meaning and purpose in life, compassion, self-compassion, a sense of accomplishment, a sense of belonging, a sense of autonomy. These things are not synonymous with happiness, and there are plenty of happy people that are not creative, that are not spiritual, that are not mindful. So using a wastebasket term to capture all of the beauties and complexities of human behavior is extremely problematic, and it trivializes just how amazing and how complicated it is to navigate our social [Music] world.

I've said that some people will tell you that the purpose of life is to be happy, and those people are idiots. It was a bit of a rough statement, but what I meant by that is actually inspired by a statement by Alexander Solzhenitsyn, who was the great critic of the Soviet prison system. He commented that happiness is something that's done in by the first harsh blow that reality deals you, and I believe this to be the case.

There are many circumstances in life where happiness is not only the wrong response but also where the expectation of happiness as a response will put you, the person attempting to be happy, in absolutely the wrong psychological state to be prepared for what must be done. People are, so to speak, to experience a very wide range of motivational and emotional states that only bear a tenuous relationship to one another. The reason for that is that the environment that human beings inhabit is so complex that our adaptation depends on a variety of very finely differentiated responses.

There is a time to be compassionate, and there's a time to be aggressive, and there's a time to be in pain, and there's a time to be anxious, and there's a time to be joyous and a time to be satisfied. The healthy and well-adapted person has a very wide range of finely differentiated responses which cannot be boiled down to a single dimension— say happiness versus unhappiness. Life is not that simple, and if it was, we'd only have one emotional system.

Happiness all it is is it's a barometer. It's Dr. Phil 101: Dr. Phil always asks, "How are things working for you?" And if you say things are working well, that's pretty much what we mean by happiness. Happiness does not propel us forward; so it's very weird to make this the objective of your life.

What I mean by that is, while I love being a father, I will tell you point blank, with my wife listening, that it has not improved my happiness. Meaning and purpose in life have shot through the roof. I was much happier as a 30-year-old, having a lot of time with friends, and a lot of time to travel, and a lot of time to basically do whatever the hell that I wanted to. So in terms of my happiness, it's detracted from it.

Are there moments of the most profound pleasure, of the most profound spirituality, that I would die for? These sacred vessels that I have in my life? Absolutely. But that's not happiness. That spirituality, to me, is striving for the sacred, and the sacred are things that you would be willing to die for. Would I die for a sense of satisfaction in my life? No. Would I be willing to take the bullet for my kids? Absolutely.

Making happiness the focal point of your life trivializes your experiences because in order to regard anything as truly important, you also have to regard its loss as truly meaningful. And that means that to open yourself up to experiences of deep meaning also simultaneously means that you have to open yourself up to the possibility of deep hurt and sorrow. You do that anytime, for example, that you make a relationship profound— you put your emotions on the line, and that has to be real or the relationship can't be real.

To hope that that sort of risk could be obliterated by the indulgence in a simplistic form of happiness is to shrink, I think, in cowardice from the demands that real human existence places on people. This is Ideas in Canada on CBC Radio 1, across North America on Sirius Satellite Radio Channel 159, and around the world on cbc.ca. I'm Paul Kennedy, and you're listening to CBC producer Frank Faulk's Say No to Happiness.

The renowned psychiatrist and concentration camp survivor Viktor Frankl wrote, "What man actually needs is not a tensionless state but rather the striving and struggle for a worthwhile goal, a freely chosen task." There is much wisdom in the words of Nietzsche: "He who has a why to live for can bear almost any how." We now return to Frank's documentary, Say No to Happiness.

At every moment, we're surrounded by what we know and can understand, but outside of that, we're surrounded by all the things that we do not know and cannot understand, and that can manifest themselves at any moment. So we're like small islands of tentative certainty in a massive sea of uncertainty and ignorance. That's our existential condition. It's really our environment; even from a scientific perspective, it's the environment that we've emerged into and have adapted to, and we have to take that into account when we deal with our lives. Because that's the truest nature of our life: it's order in the midst of infinite chaos.

The human problem is how to make sense out of the constant interplay between that tentative order and that infinite chaos. Jordan Peterson is a professor of psychology at the University of Toronto. He is also the author of Maps of Meaning: The Architecture of Belief. His book explores how religious and mythological stories shed light on our existential predicament and, in turn, can provide a sense of meaning and purpose.

In the Old Testament, in Genesis, it's one of the most profound ideas ever expressed: The Old Testament God in Genesis generates order out of chaos, and upon doing so declares, "Man and woman are made in my image." What does he mean by that? Well, he dignifies the human soul with that statement. But the attribution of dignity is based on a psychological and ontological reality, and that reality is that what the individual consciousness confronts is equivalent, in some sense, to the chaos that God originally turned into order at the beginning of time.

In that, what you confront moment to moment is the potential of being. That's what consciousness does: it takes unformed potential and makes it manifest. Each human being has the choice about which direction that potential will manifest itself in, but not about whether or not that manifestation will take place, because it takes place no matter what.

That's why the moral obligation of existence is incumbent on our being. Existence implies coexistence; to be is to be involved with the life of others. We delude ourselves if we think that we're simply innocent bystanders in life. Being is never neutral. What we do matters. You can be a creator of things positive, or you can be a creator of things negative, or you can be a creator who abdicates their responsibility.

But in all three situations, you are participating in the process that turns chaos into order, and there is no escaping that. When the high school kids that shot up Columbine wrote about their philosophy, the most telling aspect of their philosophy was their judgment of existence. You can read this on the net; their conclusion at the great age of 19 was that the tragedy of existence was such that being itself was corrupt, that because people suffered and because the world was a dangerous and terrible place, being itself should be eradicated.

This is a very common judgment; it's far more common than people think. Once you forgo the luxury of deciding, in a sense, to hell with everything, that everything is so corrupt that it's unredeemable, once you forgo that luxury, then it becomes incumbent on you to try to work for the betterment of being, and that requires faith. The reason it requires faith is because, A, you don't know if being can be bettered, and B, you don't know if you're the creature to do it.

But the peculiar thing is, is that you will never find out if being can be bettered or if you're the creature to do it until you assume that it can be bettered and that you are the creature to do it. Critics of religious thinking believe that what faith means is the willingness to suspend rational judgment and swallow any old thing, no matter how absurd. That's not what faith means at all.

What faith means is the willingness to put yourself on the line in pursuit of those things that you find deeply meaningful. That's why so many great philosophers, such as Søren Kierkegaard, emphasize above all the role that faith [Music] plays. I'm a clinical psychologist; I have an active practice; I have 20 clients, and I see them weekly. I'm a professor of psychology at the University of Toronto, and so it might be surprising that I use religious language, but it's not surprising because as soon as you start to talk about the deepest meanings of life, the language that is most appropriate is immediately religious.

The reason for that is that religion is precisely that element of human existence that deals with the most profound elements of human being. I believe that the reason for this is this: in some sense, human existence is so contradictory that it's, in a manner, technically impossible. We're limited creatures and we face unlimited catastrophe, in that everything we know will disappear and everyone we love will die. So that makes existence, human existence, in a sense, existentially impossible.

But the religious impulse combats that in a sense because the religious impulse opens up to the human being the possibility that there is sufficient absolute within to serve as an antidote to the absolute without. The notion that it's necessary to have an individual relationship with the absolute— with God, for example— is a statement of the fact that we are, in fact, adapted to the nature of reality. If we draw on everything that is within ourselves without fear, then we can develop the sorts of personalities that are powerful enough to confront the horrible absolute and to consider that justifiable and worthwhile.

I want to put in a good word coming from the Jewish tradition, a good word for happiness. It's striking to me that the very first word in the first verse of the first chapter of the Book of Psalms is a word that is probably best translated as happy. So it says in Psalms, "Happy is the one who does not stand in the way of the wicked or walk with sinners or sit in the company of mockers, but whose delight is in the law of the Lord." In God's law does he meditate day and night. Happiness is, I think, not a bad thing; it's certainly better than its opposite.

But clearly, it is inadequate as a goal for our lives. If that's all that we can aspire to, then our lives do become trivial; then they become insignificant. The happiest creature in the world, I think, is a lizard sitting in the sun. And if all we want to be are lizards sitting in the sun, it won't work for us because we have an awareness that lizards don't have. We have an awareness that there is something greater than ourselves, greater than our material corporeal being, that there is the infinite.

Dan Polish is the author of Talking About God: Exploring the Meaning of Religious Life with Kierkegaard, Tillich, and Heschel. In his book, Polish explores how each of these thinkers understands the human encounter with the infinite. The Danish Christian philosopher Søren Kierkegaard coined the term angst or anxiety to describe our experience as limited beings overwhelmed by the infinite. Paul Tillich, a Christian theologian, talked about the courage to be in the face of our existential predicament. The Jewish theologian Martin Buber talked about the importance of holding ourselves open to the unconditional mystery that we encounter in every sphere of our life.

Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel spoke of knowing life has ultimate meaning, though we can never fully comprehend that meaning, only sense it. All of them could be characterized as existentialist thinkers, by which I mean that they, like other existentialists, recognize that, as Shakespeare said, "There's more in Heaven and Earth than there is in your philosophy." They don't focus on creating theories; they know that the mind can go only so far. So they don't start with theory; they start with human experience.

Religiously, that means that they are less interested in talking about what God is than they are in talking about how we human beings respond to God, rather than trying to define that which they recognize ultimately is beyond the capacity for human beings to either define or even understand. Unless we find a way of living constructively with the infinite or living in the infinite— unless we find the courage to have faith in that which we cannot begin to understand or begin to articulate— then we are going to suffer what Kierkegaard called anxiety.

Kierkegaard, by all accounts, was not a happy fellow. He suffered a major romantic disappointment as a young man and eventually retreated into a solitary life of study and writing. When it came to achieving happiness in this life, he didn't believe it was possible. The best we can do is aspire to diminish the angst that defines human existence. As for the other three who lived in the 20th century that I've written about— Heschel, Buber, Tillich— all three of them knew a great deal of suffering in their lives. So that the idea of happiness being something paramount, I think, would look ridiculous to them.

All three of them were forced to leave Germany and Europe when it fell under Nazi domination. Heschel, of course, came to the United States before the full horrors of the Nazi reality acted itself out in Europe. He was living in Cincinnati, Ohio when he got word that his whole family had been exterminated. [Music] My guess is that anybody whose life is shaped as his was by that experience would really not take the notion of happiness as the goal of life very seriously.

In his book on the prophets, he says, "The world is dark and human agony is [Music] excruciating." This is not the writings of somebody who could understand human life in terms of what we're calling happiness. [Music]

Here it's something strange that I've observed with my students. When I state the proposition to them clearly that life is suffering and that the purpose of life is not happiness, they actually experience that as a great relief. The reason I believe that they experience it as a great relief is they already know it. You know, even if they wouldn't necessarily articulate that, their experience has taught them that life is complex and tragic and difficult.

The problem with the public portrayal of the ideal state of humanness as happiness is that it makes all of these young people feel ashamed of their own suffering. They feel that if they're suffering, and if they find their life tragic in its essence, that that means that there's something wrong with them. Instantly, that makes it impossible for them to communicate anything real about their own tragedy.

One of the great spiritual geniuses of all humanity was the Buddha. The Buddha came to an understanding that he can talk about human life in terms of four noble truths. The first of the noble truths is that all of life is Dukkha, which we can translate as suffering. The Buddha is teaching us that the essence of the human experience is to suffer. Suffering is not some unfortunate thing that disrupts an otherwise perfect existence or that suffering is an accident that may befall some people. The Buddha is teaching that suffering is at the heart of being human.

So it appears to me that the price we pay for being is suffering. Then the issue there—and I believe that this is what the greater religious traditions of the world have been attempting to elucidate—is that the purpose of life, given that, is to identify and follow a mode of being that makes life justifiable, even given the radical necessity of suffering. If you're constantly in a state of placidity, satisfaction, and happiness, then nothing is going to affect you deeply enough— not your own suffering, not the suffering of other people, not injustice, not the horrors of the world. Nothing is going to affect you deeply enough so that you'll become deep.

Life without depth is, by definition, shallow and meaningless. And there's a problem associated with that because life is tragic, and because life involves suffering, if your philosophy is shallow and meaningless, when you suffer, you'll become resentful and hostile and self-critical, and then you'll become cruel and destructive. So not only is there a necessity for your own mental health to forthrightly confront the deepest questions of life, but if you don't, then you remain a danger to yourself, and maybe more importantly, to others.

The suffering that we experience is something that we can use. There's that well-known image of the grain of sand that finds its way into the shell of an oyster, and out of that discomfort, the oyster fashions the pearl. The angst that Kierkegaard talks about can become the inspiration for us to live in ways that transcend simple selfishness, simple egocentricity, simple focusing on ourselves. Reinhold Niebuhr, who was actually a very close friend of Heschel, said that "Life has no meaning except in terms of responsibility."

I'm sure he would shake his head [Music] absolutely. One of Heschel's earliest books is called The Image of God in This World. Humanity, human beings, are God's image in this world. Our goal in life is very clear: to be in this world what we would want God to be in this world. [Music]

For us, through our actions and our behaviors and our engagements, to manifest God in the world— to be radically discontent with the things that exist in this world; to be radically discontent with the social evils that we see around us; to do what we can to right them— because we are God's own self, as it were, in this world, which Heschel would say means we finally become the most [Applause] human.

I've gotten very interested in the psychology of morality because we often push it aside to just religious teachings, religious ideas, when we're making moral decisions on a daily basis. It makes me think of exemplars of people that have profound meaning and purpose in life but are probably average to below average in happiness. Martin Luther King happens to be a real great example of this.

Todd Caston is an associate professor of psychology at George Mason University in Virginia. He is the author of Designing Positive Psychology, a book on the science of well-being. Professor Peterson regularly gives talks and workshops on how to live a worthwhile and meaningful life. This is someone, in context, who had extreme righteous indignation. This is just a manifestation of anger at the mistreatment of other fellow human beings: the lack of equality and fairness.

These are fundamental moral principles, and his life was devoted to this. If you're talking about pursuing goals that are outside the parameters of happiness, look to Martin Luther King. The idea of absorbing the blows, the hatred, the prejudice, the discrimination from other people to make a point that these behaviors are not indicative of what a good society is built on.

Martin Luther King is not the only person; he just happens to be a public exemplar. You have people in schools right here in D.C., where I'm sitting right now, who are devoting themselves to inner-city kids. You've got teachers that are creating a safe space for them— a place where they can actually learn and grow and become moral outstanding citizens.

We're talking about people that are taking time away from their own happiness to do something that really matters. But that leads to a sense of morality, meaning, and purpose in life. They just don't fit on the same spectrum.

Now, there are multiple pathways to living a good life, and I think a better approach than having happiness as the ultimate endpoint is to do things you care about. We're not talking about happiness; we're talking about engagement. We're talking about meaningful pursuits.

Nothing can drive you to find the deepest meanings of life without first realizing the absolute fragility of life because there's nothing that's sufficiently terrifying as the realization of that absolute fragility. It's necessary to be profoundly terrified before you can be motivated to seek out those things that are of the highest value.

As a consequence of considering these ideas for many years, and especially considering the role that evil has played, say, in the 20th century, and also the role that suffering plays in life, I've asked myself deeply what the purpose of life might be. It seems to me that life requires virtue.

Then you might ask, "Well, what do I mean by virtue?" What I mean by virtue is following whatever it is in your life that manifests itself to you as meaningful and right. There are codicils to that. For example, in order to determine clearly what's meaningful and right, you have to stop lying. Because if you lie to yourself or you lie to other people, you blind yourself, and then the things that might appear to you as meaningful are no longer trustworthy because you're using an instrument that you voluntarily damaged to perceive reality, and that will lead you astray.

Virtue requires humility because you have to stop thinking that you know. Humility and honesty are absolute preconditions. Courage as well is necessary because you'll have to learn to come to terms with your own capacity for anxiety, and dread, and aggression, and even your capacity for— well, for terrible acts. To continually set yourself right is to walk down the path of moral virtue.

I would contrast the difference between having happiness as a desirable thing, which is incredibly desirable to be happy. But what I like to talk about is thinking about this as a compass. It would provide a navigator of which direction to go into. It doesn't tell them what direction; it says, "Here's the direction that you're facing." If happiness is your compass to navigate through the complexities and ambiguities of life, it means when something is negative or problematic, that's the wrong direction to move into.

When your values become your compass, it's very different. Let me give you an example. So, one of my fundamental values— I have twin four-year-old girls— is to try to be a good father and instill good values in them, and try to cultivate their strengths. So when I'm faced with conflicts, which we all are faced with, I love writing, I love doing science, I love teaching. I'm in the middle of a great writing session; I've been writing for eight hours. I'm in flow— the words are just spilling out of my brain onto the page.

And I look at the clock and I realize it's almost time for their bedtime. I've got a conflict here. Do I continue with this incredible writing session or do I make sure I see my kids before I go to sleep, read them a story, tuck them in, show them some affection, and maybe come back to this? My writing might not be as good afterward. Knowing that my values are to try and be a good father and instill values in them helps me with the decision and helps me decide, "You know what? I'm going to go home, spend some time with my children, come back to my work."

If happiness is my objective, it leaves me in a much bigger quandary of all these conflicts— of what do I do with the limited amount of time and energy I have in any given day and all these competing things that are fighting for my attention. Meaning and purpose in life and values are a very stable compass.

This is a way to create a life, to feel good about who we are, to have an understanding of what type of person we want to be, and try to close the gap between what we do and what we strive to become. I want to make my personal signature on my work so that I leave the world a little bit better place.

There's an old idea deeply embedded again in Western religious thinking that reality is, in some sense, incomplete, unfinished, or broken. The role of the human being is to complete it, to perfect it, to finish it. The idea that reality is, in some sense, unfinished, and hence it's tragic, and incomplete, and that the role of the human being is, in some sense, to participate in its perfection, is a concept that is so profound that it makes happiness as a concept designed to encapsulate the meaning of life so shallow that it instantly becomes virtually negligible.

We have a hypothesis here that the purpose of conscious being is for those beings who are conscious to transcend their mortal limitations and to work for the perfection of all that exists as a goal that justifies suffering. That's unbeatable, I think, because what it does is broaden and deepen your life in a manner that you might compare to the difference between elevator music and a Beethoven symphony.

It's not that the symphony is in any sense happier than the muzak— in fact quite the contrary— but it's deeper and more profound and richer, and incorporates more and justifies itself more. That's the right metaphor for life—not happiness, but depth and a differentiated quality and profundity to match the profundity of the necessity of suffering.

Today on Ideas: Say No to Happiness, by CBC producer Frank Faulk, you heard interviews with Gretchen Rubin, author of The Happiness Project; Jordan Peterson, professor of psychology at the University of Toronto; Dan Polish, author of Talking About God, exploring the meaning of religious life with Kierkegaard, Buber, and Tillich; and Todd Caston, associate professor of psychology at George Mason University in Virginia.

Our associate producer is Liz Naj; technical production by Dave Field. To find out about upcoming Ideas programs and podcasts, sign up for our weekly online newsletter; just go to our website at cbc.ca/ideas and follow the links. The executive producer of Ideas is Bernie L. and I'm Paul Kennedy. Stay tuned now for the hourly news on CBC Radio 1 and on Sirius Satellite Radio 159.