Happy: Why More or Less Everything is Absolutely Fine

Perhaps death was not quite the annihilation she had thought. Perhaps it was not so essential that her person or even memories of her person survived. Perhaps the important thing was that her ripples persist, ripples of some act or idea that would help others attain joy and virtue in life, ripples that would fill her with pride and act to counter t

If we are to talk of existing in any sense after we die, then the best we can do is to extend our sense of self – our space-time worm – to continue beyond the grave and incorporate how the atoms of our decomposing bodies feed into continuing life after we have breathed our last. Then we might say we have some sort of continuing existence. But this

Once this makes sense, incidentally, we could go further. We are talking about one timeline, one life. What about the fifth dimension? If we included the fifth dimension, we would have to show other possible timelines for the same person. Instead of drawing a single worm for your life (which shows your journey from birth to death via the stages of

I’m making a psychological point: that we can still view spirituality (in regard to having a sense of meaning, and a conscious dialogue with what lies beneath) as an important internal experience, perhaps more important than ever in this age of addiction and distraction.

Meaning is not to be scoffed at. If we don’t find it in some considered form, we commonly look for it in prescribed forms of spirituality. These tend to insufficiently articulate our yearnings, being either dogmatised (religion) or sentimentalised (‘New Age’ thinking), neither of which serves us or helps us grow.

Why we can’t talk of an afterlife When people talk of souls or the afterlife, they are normally trying to posit a deeper level to existence: that beneath (or above or outside) this world full of things that we can touch and name, there lies a spiritual dimension.

If we change our attitude, the pain of those external factors can disappear. This may sound familiar to modern minds acquainted with the notion of ‘reframing’ a problem as an opportunity, and it is one of the Stoics’ most powerful and prevailing ideas.

Flourishing – Aristotle’s take on happiness – is ‘an activity of the soul in accordance with virtue’.2 Buried therein is another new thought: that there is an aim (or a telos) to human life. The telos is a goal to which human life should point, and one that will bestow goodness upon being reached. Aristotle suggests we are to fulfil what is highest

Our notions of happiness are a product of the age that we live in. I owe much of this chapter’s chronicle to Darrin McMahon, who has detailed in The Pursuit of Happiness a fascinating history of this elusive concept. If you believe you are entitled to be happy, that this is a given for any human being, then read on. This notion of a right to happin