What Are We Pursuing?

What should our starting point be in considering questions of happiness and purpose?

There’s no way to get where you’re going if you only have a vague idea of your destination. Simply wandering around with no end goal in mind might bring you to some interesting places, but it’s no way to find a particular thing you’re looking for.

This metaphor applies well to any attempt to ask broad philosophical questions. There might be good reason to simply wander, but if we don’t have a goal in mind, there’s no guarantee that we’ll find the important answers we’re looking for.

For some, it might seem a bit intimidating to look at a question so deep and complex as the question of happiness. Some might simply want quick practical solutions. Maybe a simple mindset change or a new daily habit could be all the difference in the world. And if these huge problems that touch upon your entire life can be solved with something as simple as a few minutes of daily reflection or just thinking about your life in a more positive light, why go any further?

But of course, these problems aren’t always solved so easily. For some, maybe these small changes can have cascading effects and put a much greater portion of their life in order. For others, they may find that these solutions don’t quite live up to what they offer. No mindset change nor simple habit can solve the wider sense of purposelessness they’re dealing with.

Most often, this is because these quick practical solutions are just bandages on symptoms instead of real approaches to the underlying problem. They are responding to legitimate problems, but it’s rare that this sort of solution gets to the source.

Worst of all, in trying to find these quick and direct answers, we often lose sight of what question we’re even asking. These solutions are trying to explain how to overcome unhappiness or purposelessness, but there are only broad-strokes answers about where this unhappiness comes from or why people need a sense of purpose to be happy.

If we want a lasting solution to these problems, it’s not enough to just go out and start looking for any sort of answer that might deliver what we want. We need some patience—we need to take a moment to think about just what sort of question we’re even asking and what sort of answer we’re after.

Our starting point should be clear: We have to find what it is that we’re after in looking for happiness. If we don’t know what it is that we’re looking for, then there’s no way forward—we’re just stuck running in circles. We certainly have an intuitive idea of most of the things we’re looking for here—ideas like purpose, happiness, or fulfillment—but do we have a full idea of what they are and what causes them?

You might wonder why we need this deeper understanding of these ideas. If we have a basic understanding of what each of these means, is it not enough to just accept that intuitive idea and move on to practical considerations?

Although we do have this basic understanding, it’s clear that too often, people are stuck believing false ideas about happiness. It’s common for people to have ideas of happiness that reduce it to nothing more than pleasure-seeking or something purely subjective that cannot be understood. A good solution to these problems should respond to these false ideas that are often themselves a cause of unhappiness.

Beyond that, it simply makes no sense to try to solve a problem you don’t fully understand. Before launching a rocket ship, you need to understand gravity—we have to know what’s holding us back if we want to move forward.

Our first question, then, should be a simple definitional one: What is happiness? If we can answer this, we’ll have an excellent foundation to consider the more practical questions of how to lead a happy life.

For happiness, it seems that there are two ways of trying to build understanding: An objective approach and a subjective approach. Both of these encompass a broad group of methods and beliefs, but it seems that these two categories are broad enough for every method of answering this question to be categorized into one or the other.

Objective methods, to put it simply, try to understand something from the outside. The goal of an objective method is to find an understanding that’s true for everyone—if we were to approach happiness looking for an objective understanding, then our goal would be to find a single definition of happiness that’s true for everyone in all cases.

What would an objective method look like? Simple examples of objective inquiries include methods like science and logic—methods that deliver truths that are the same in all cases.

Objective knowledge certainly seems desirable. Having a definition of happiness that is always true for everybody—this seems like exactly what we’re after. But at the same time, it should be clear that something like happiness is not very easily understood by objective means. Despite many attempts by science to explain feelings of happiness and contentment on a chemical or biological level, modern research has shown that our scientific understanding of happiness is, at best, lacking. Logic, too, doesn’t seem capable of this sort of knowledge regarding happiness. It seems that an objective understanding of happiness is always going to be lacking.

With this in mind, we may want to turn to a more subjective understanding of happiness, preferring to base our understanding of happiness off of individual experience and feelings. Instead of looking at happiness from the outside, we look at it from the inside and try to use that perspective to find an understanding.

But this approach is not without its own problems. We’re faced with the possibility that we may not be able to say anything that’s true for everyone about happiness—in fact, we may be able to say nothing other than what’s true for ourselves, since we can’t actually see others’ experiences of happiness ourselves. In the end, it seems that there’s nothing that the subjective perspective can say except that something is true for one person.

So, we’re faced with a problem: Neither approach, neither the objective nor the subjective, seems to be capable of finding the sort of truth that we’re looking for. What’s the right approach, then? How can we reach through and find real answers?

Both sides have a point: We do want an understanding of happiness that’s objective—something more than just personal opinion or whatever you want to make it—but it’s also clear that a real understanding of happiness must be personal and rooted in experience. There’s no way to explain what happiness is without talking about the experience of feeling happy or what it’s like to be unhappy. No simply objective understanding of happiness can explain this—any objective definition of happiness must come back to personal experience of happiness if we want it to be a real understanding.

If we don’t just take a single approach but instead use both of these methods, the path to an understanding becomes much clearer. Objective knowledge can illuminate and interpret subjective experience: When we see something through one pair of eyes, we can look back at the objective understanding of happiness we’ve developed and interpret that personal experience in light of these ideas. With this in mind, we can build an understanding of happiness that is both personal and objective—true for everyone and true to ourselves.

So, a real understanding of happiness must have two parts: An objective component that comes from reason and a subjective component that comes from experience. We can’t ignore either side of this equation—if we try to be exclusively objective, we risk having no idea of what happiness looks like for us as humans, but if we go too far towards the subjective, we risk leaving happiness as nothing more than whatever we say it is.

With this in mind, the first step in finding a solution to this problem is clear: We need to find out what happiness and purpose are, we need to try to define them in an objective sense, and we need to look at human experience of both to understand how they are really encountered in everyday life.

Now, there’s another question we have to answer before we solve these questions: What sort of method should we use to try to find an answer? There are a thousand different ways people have tried to come up with definitions for these concepts—everything from science to religion to anthropology—and they often seem to arrive at contradictory answers. What should our approach be, then? What sort of tool should we use?

In our next article, we’ll talk about the different methods we could use to approach this question. We’ll talk about their advantages and disadvantages. Ultimately, we hope to find an approach that offers a complete understanding of happiness and the human person—if we want to find what we’re after, we can’t settle for anything less.

-Patrick Koroly