E-Book, Englisch, 320 Seiten
Fabian Beyond Happy
1. Auflage 2025
ISBN: 978-1-83501-051-8
Verlag: Bedford Square Publishers
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: 6 - ePub Watermark
How to Rethink Happiness and Find Fulfilment
E-Book, Englisch, 320 Seiten
ISBN: 978-1-83501-051-8
Verlag: Bedford Square Publishers
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: 6 - ePub Watermark
Dr Mark Fabian is Assistant Professor of Public Policy at the University of Warwick, and an Affiliate Fellow at the Bennett Institute for Public Policy at the University of Cambridge. He is a dynamic and pioneering academic with considerable teaching and public-speaking experience. Beyond Happy will be his debut book for a general readership; his academic book, A Theory of Subjective Wellbeing, was published in 2022 by OUP.
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Introduction
Salvation is for the feeble, that’s what I think. I don’t want salvation. I want life, all of life, the miserable as well as the superb.
Tom Robbins,
The popularity of self-help books speaks to a common malaise in our society. Many people feel that their lives could be better – more pleasant, fulfilling or valuable, or have more meaning or purpose. Or perhaps life isn’t making sense to them, and that’s a bother. Everything seems a bit chaotic or stressful or mundane. Even more broadly, they might feel like society has lost its common purpose and isn’t providing a clear path towards wellbeing for everybody. What should they do with their lives? And why?
I had similar thoughts in my adolescence, which triggered a depressive episode that lasted several years. This was out of character for me, as until then I had generally been happy-go-lucky and upbeat. My depression wasn’t chemical in origin; it was philosophical. As I became more politically minded, I began to see the world as run not by enlightened heroes, but by venal and corrupt individuals only kept in check by fragile institutions. This coincided with some painful first forays into love, making me question my self-worth. There soon followed the looming requirement that I graduate from high school and enter the ‘real world’, meaning that I had to figure out what I was going to do with my life, which also meant answering some rather fundamental questions. I wanted to do something good. I wanted to be good. But what even is ‘good’?
Different people and cultures have been fumbling with the answer to that question for millennia, but the search has become increasingly pronounced in the West since the decline of religion from the late nineteenth century. Our culture used to tell us what to do. Religion especially, with its clear rules about right and wrong and its ritualistic practices, ordered our lives. But our contemporary culture is committed to the idea of finding your own path, following your heart and doing what you think is right. This may be wonderfully liberating, but it’s also difficult and puzzling, because then the answers to all life’s big questions are up to you. As the character Dmitri pondered in Fyodor Dostoevsky’s 1879 novel : ‘but what will become of men then? Without God and immortal life, all things are permitted – and they can do what they like?’
Down the rabbit hole I went, and my search for answers led me to enrol in a philosophy degree. As a student, I read voraciously – although usually not my course’s set texts. Instead, I plundered the collection of great literature sold on the cheap by a second-hand bookseller who came to campus once a week. My reading ranged from the ancient Roman Stoic philosopher Marcus Aurelius to the twentieth-century psychoanalyst and Holocaust survivor Viktor Frankl, and across to thinkers in the liberal tradition like Adam Smith, with a smattering of the Chinese Zhuangzi, the Buddha and other writings that introduced me to different cultural perspectives. They were college years well spent, I’d say, despite my dumpster fire of an academic record.
Yet the more I researched, the more frustrated I became with the often very long and arcane books I was reading. They rarely seemed to provide more than one piece of life’s giant jigsaw puzzle. Putting it all together, I realised, was going to be an arduous task. There was plenty to read about what not to do (Shakespeare was particularly good about that), but stories that I could relate to, of slowly putting a life together one piece at a time, were scarce.
During my exploratory period, the scientific study of wellbeing was still in its infancy, and much of the research that I came across was too limited to be of practical use. Science tends to restrict itself to narrow questions that can be answered with precision. For example, rather than asking, ‘How can you live well in old age?’, science will instead ask something like, ‘How do different perceptions of aging in midlife predict stress levels in retirement?’ Over a long period, this can achieve remarkable things. But I didn’t have time to wait, and what was available was rather meagre. In particular, most of the studies were about happiness, not wellbeing. This was because, as I discovered later, the pioneering American psychologist Ed Diener worried (correctly) that his colleagues wouldn’t take him seriously if he said he studied ‘happiness’. Instead, he chose the more technical sounding term ‘subjective wellbeing’, and most of the research into wellbeing that followed built on Diener’s narrow definition.1
There are, however, crucial distinctions between happiness and wellbeing. Happiness is about our mood and emotional state. We smile when we are happy; it’s hard not to smile when we’re happy. Wellbeing is broader. It is about whether your life is going well. It includes happiness, certainly, and the broader notion of ‘hedonic satisfaction’, which is considering your life to be pleasant. But wellbeing also includes the very broad notion of ‘existential satisfaction’ – how fulfilling your life is, and how valuable, which includes deeper concepts like purpose and righteousness. People who have an abundance of wellbeing don’t necessarily smile all the time, nor are they always in a good mood. You don’t always smile while you’re pursuing your hobby, but that hobby is a critical part of your wellbeing. I’m an avid rock climber, and find rock climbing integral to my wellbeing, but when I’m climbing I don’t stop and think ‘I’m so happy’, because I’d fall.
In fact, happiness and wellbeing are often in conflict. If you pursue happiness exclusively, you will neglect your wellbeing because you will flee from the pain that is involved in self-renovation. Setbacks and slogs are an unavoidable part of achieving worthwhile things, and the personal sacrifices that are required to make the world a better place. For this reason, few expressions irritate me more than ‘I just want to be happy’, despite this sentiment being written into the culture of many countries at an institutional level (such as the ‘unalienable Rights’ in the US Declaration of Independence to ‘Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness’).
Ultimately, the pursuit of happiness often ends in boredom. The things that make for a full life, like being involved in a community, seeing the world, family life, intimate relationships, career success and memorable experiences in general, typically involve a mix of emotions. If you seek only the pleasant ones, you’ll end up with tranquillity, not happiness. Maybe that’s genuinely what you want. No judgement. But I want a bit more. I want all of life. And, given that you’re reading this book, I suspect you do too.
The result of my seeking has been an academic career studying wellbeing and, in turn, a book published by Oxford University Press, called (If you want to cross-reference anything I say here, I recommend you look there. It’s a very long and thorough book – the reference list alone is more than 15,000 words). Having searched in vain for a single, consistent theory of wellbeing, that book was my attempt to produce the theory myself. It was the result of fifteen years of research that I started late in high school, and that I continue in my present-day academic work.
I’m proud of , but it’s a very academic book. It is written for a scholarly audience that is fastidiously careful about what can be claimed on the basis of our current scientific evidence. The book dwells on complexities of measurement, tricky problems in the philosophy of science and pedantic issues in ethical philosophy that aren’t of much interest to most people. It doesn’t say as much as I’d like about how wellbeing works, or how to get more of it, or people’s ‘lived experience’ of their own wellbeing, because these are ‘applied’ questions that many academics and philosophers think should only come after the academic work is done.
So I wrote this book too – a popular version of my theory of wellbeing. In fact, this is the book I’ve always wanted to write: a sort of one-stop shop for readers interested in their wellbeing, but who don’t have the time or inclination to wade through hundreds of pages by the Danish philosopher Søren Kierkegaard, or spend four years studying remedial mathematics just to understand the statistical evidence for why earning more money doesn’t necessarily make you happier. This book’s purpose is to capture in a single volume the most important insights from over two millennia of scholarly and philosophical work on wellbeing, and explain how you can achieve it.
Be warned though, wellbeing is tough, complicated and time-consuming. There is no silver bullet or mental trick to attain it. Instead, there are dozens of practices that are required to achieve the good life. Wellbeing is something you must practise to get better at, and like most skills it takes a long time and many failures to master. Most self-help books strike me as broadly deceptive about this fact. Single, simple ideas that can be effectively summarised in a page are given entire volumes and marketed as ‘the science of happiness’ or some such nonsense....
