In The Atlantic this month the lead article is What Makes Us Happy?. Using a 72-year-long (and counting) study of a couple hundred young men from the Harvard classes of '42, '43, and '44, the writer purports to answer this question.
But what does the question mean, exactly? From the Declaration on down, happiness seems central to this nation. And while we may think we know a happy person when we see one, he or she may not feel that way about himself or herself. After all, a man with a lovely wife and a fine job has a lot to lose, and anxiety at the precariousness of his good fortune may actually counter it. Meanwhile, there could be someone much lower in all the status measures who feels just fine: he enjoys his prole food and no-account friends, and even the challenges of his 'dead-end' job. Annoyingly, he may actually be happy.
Moreover, there seems a confusion in this article, as in most other discussions of happiness. Is a person accounted happy because he scores high on several measures over a lifetime? That is, is happiness a game where the highest cumulative score wins? One can imagine two old men (check out Salman Rusdie's story In the South in the May 18th New Yorker), one of whom had a "happy" life, and the other not, who become companions. At this point their former lives have fallen away, and who is to say which is the happier. Happiness is what is happening right now.
As far as that goes, in the life-well-lived school of happiness, what is one to say about the soldier who meets his death ecstatically, knowing he is dying heroically for the people and country he loves, at the height of his powers, his life now completely solved? Isn't he better off than the great man who devolves into senility, and sees himself doing it, before death finally takes him?
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