Happiness responsibility

Excerpted from BEYOND ORDER: 12 More Rules for Life by Jordan B. Peterson

IF HAPPINESS COMES TO YOU, WELCOME IT WITH GRATITUDE. — JORDAN B. PETERSON

People want to be happy, and no wonder. I have longed deeply, many times, for the return of happiness — hoping for its current presence — and I am certainly not alone in that. However, I do not believe you should pursue happiness. If you do so, you will run right into the iteration problem, because “happy” is a right-now thing. If you place people in situations where they are feeling a lot of positive emotion, they get present-focused and impulsive. This means “make hay while the sun shines” — take your opportunities while things are good and act now. But now is by no means everything, and unfortunately, everything must be considered, at least insofar as you are able. In consequence, it is unlikely that whatever optimizes your life across time is happiness. I am not denying its desirability, by the way. If happiness comes to you, welcome it with gratitude and open arms (but be careful, because it does make you impetuous).

What might serve as a more sophisticated alternative to happiness? Imagine it is living in accordance with the sense of responsibility, because that sets things right in the future. Imagine, as well, that you must act reliably, honestly, nobly, and in relationship to a higher good, in order to manifest the sense of responsibility properly. The higher good would be the simultaneous optimization of your function and the function of the people around you, across time, as we have discussed previously. That is the highest good. Imagine that you make that aim conscious, that you articulate that aim as an explicit goal. Then a question arises: “What is the consequence of that psychologically?”

First, consider that most of the positive emotion people experience does not come from attaining something. There is the simple pleasure (more accurately, the satisfaction) that comes from having a good meal when hungry, and there is the more complex but similar satisfaction that is associated with accomplishing something difficult and worthwhile. Imagine, for example, that you graduate from grade 12. Graduation Day marks the event. It is a celebration. But the next day that is over, and you immediately face a new set of problems ( just as you are hungry again only a few hours after a satisfying meal). You are no longer king of the high school: you are bottom dog in the workforce, or a freshman at a post-secondary institution. You are in the position of Sisyphus. You strove and struggled to push your boulder to the pinnacle, and you find yourself, instead, at the foot of the mountain.

There is a near-instantaneous transformation that comes as a consequence of attainment. Like impulsive pleasure, attainment will produce positive emotion. But, also like pleasure, attainment is unreliable. Another question thus emerges: “What is a truly reliable source of positive emotion?” The answer is that people experience positive emotion in relationship to the pursuit of a valuable goal. Imagine you have a goal. You aim at something. You develop a strategy in relationship to that aim, and then you implement it. And then, as you implement the strategy, you observe that it is working. That is what produces the most reliable positive emotion. Imagine over time that the attitudes and actions that manage this most effectively (in a competition that is very Darwinian) come, eventually, to dominate over all others. Imagine that is true psychologically and socially, simultaneously. Imagine that this occurs in your own life, but also across the centuries, as everyone interacts and talks and raises a particular mode of being to primary status.

This implies something crucial: no happiness in the absence of responsibility. No valuable and valued goal, no positive emotion. You might object, “Well, what exactly constitutes a valid goal?” Imagine that you are pursuing something pleasurable, but short term and trivial. The wise part of you will be comparing that pursuit to the possible goal of acting in the best interest of your community of future selves and your community of other people. Perhaps you are unwilling to allow yourself to realize that wisdom: You do not wish to bear the responsibility — not in place of an immediate, impulsive focus on pleasure. You are fooling yourself, however, especially at the deeper levels of your being, if you believe such avoidance will prove successful. The wise and ancient parts of you, seriously concerned with your survival, are neither easy to deceive nor to set aside. But you take aim at a trivial goal anyway, and develop a rather shallow strategy to attain it, only to find it is not satisfying because you do not care enough. It does not matter to you — not deeply. Furthermore, the fact that you are not pursuing the goal you should rightly be pursuing means that you are feeling guilty, ashamed, and lesser at the same time.

This is not a helpful strategy. It is not going to work. I have never met anyone who was satisfied when they knew they were not doing everything they should be doing. We are temporally aware creatures: We know that we are continually and inescapably playing an iterated game from which we cannot easily hide. No matter how much we wish to discount the future completely, it is part of the price we paid for being acutely self-conscious and able to conceptualize ourselves across the entire span of our lives. We are stuck with it. There is no escaping from the future — and when you are stuck with something and there is no escaping from it, the right attitude is to turn around voluntarily and confront it. That works. And so, instead of your short-term impulsive goal, you lay out a much larger-scale goal, which is to act properly in relationship to the long term for everyone.