Is Happiness Just Success?
In the last post, I described a thought experiment that helped us think about whether happiness was just pleasure. In today’s post I want modify the thought experiment so that we can focus on whether happiness is success.
Let me proceed…
Imagine that I am a brilliant scientist and I have invited you to participate in one of my laboratory experiments. I escort you into my laboratory and show you all my scientific equipment.
In front of us is my latest experiment, it looks like a telephone booth with a small chair inside. The telephone both is in the center of the laboratory.
I explain to you that the telephone booth is part of a happiness experiment.
The telephone booth contains a device called an Achieve-a-tron that hypnotizes you by using a computer-generated voice. The voice puts the person who sits in the telephone booth into a deep trance. The voice can convince any person that they have achieved all of their life’s desires. For instance,
- If you had wanted to write the great American novel, the Achieve-a-tron would convince you that your book was on the New York Times bestseller’s list.
- If you had wanted to find the perfect mate, the Achieve-a-tron would convince you that you had found your prince charming.
The Achieve-a-tron really works. Any person who sits in the telephone booth with the Achieve-a-tron actually believes that every achievement that they have dreamed has come true. The person experiences feelings of total pride in their apparent accomplishments.
I ask you if you want to participate in my experiment and enter the telephone booth.
Being the ethical scientist that I am, I also tell you that 100% of the people who have previously entered the telephone booth have also chosen never to leave the booth. In fact, I have a warehouse of 20 other telephone booths in the back room filled with people who are on life support systems.
What do you decide to do?
Do you participate in the experiment and experience total pride for the rest of your life? Or do you walk away?
April 22nd, 2007 at 5:23 pm
But you would know it wasn’t real. It would be like a drug, a false sense of courage or wholeness. We are completed by our accomplishments I think, but mainlining a feeling, whether euphoria or pride, if so addictive, would mean I have to subsume myself to the process. I would lose my identity.
A sense of accomplishment, moments in time, all help us feel good – but I think what makes us feel the best is a sense of identity.
Of course, under duress or torture, you do what you have to in order to survive. But even in those situations, the victim develops habits or traits – often licking their lips or rubbing their fingers together – that allows them to remain an individual, and not just a victim. The human touch is soothing, and also that sense of independence, that idea that you are somehow thwarting your captors.
But simply as a normal person, in normal circumstances, I think we are always looking for who we are and trying to keep that together and/or project that image into the world. That makes us happiest of all I think, being self-aware and confident of who we are. I think we are most sad when this image of ourselves is challenged or punished.
And finally, may I add what I think is the most source of joy of all: love. I think if you made a machine that mainlined love, that is the only thing you could offer where people would subsume their identity in droves, in order to experience love constantly. Maybe this would be reckless on their part, because constant love is suffocating – but I’m sure so many wish to be loved that you would get a lot of takers.