The Age of Absurdity: Why Modern Life Makes it Hard to Be Happy (2010)

by Michael Foley

  Michael Foley

  The Age of Absurdity

  Why Modern Life Makes it Hard to Be Happy

  2010

  The good news is that the great thinkers from history have proposed the same strategies for happiness and fulfilment. The bad news is that these turn out to be the very things most discouraged by contemporary culture. This knotty dilemma is the subject of The Age of Absurdity – a wry and accessible investigation into how the desirable states of wellbeing and satisfaction are constantly undermined by modern life. Michael Foley examines the elusive condition of happiness common to philosophy, spiritual teachings and contemporary psychology, then shows how these are becoming increasingly difficult to apply in a world of high expectations. The common challenges of earning a living, maintaining a relationship and ageing are becoming battlegrounds of existential angst and self-loathing in a culture that demands conspicuous consumption, high-octane partnerships and perpetual youth. In conclusion, rather than denouncing and rejecting the age, Foley presents an entertaining strategy of not just accepting but embracing today's world – finding happiness in its absurdity.

  PART I

  The Problems

  1

  The Absurdity of Happiness

  So I go to a wall of bookshelves, extending from floor to ceiling, with books jammed in sideways along the top of each shelf, and I think, Not a single book I want to read. Then I proceed to the ragged towers of a CD collection that, despite its size and discriminating embrace of classical, jazz, world and adult-oriented rock, does not contain one piece of music worth playing. Obviously stimulation will have to be sought elsewhere. I consult Time Out London Eating & Drinking – possibly the most compendious and varied collection of restaurant reviews in the world, with substantial chapters on each of twenty-two major regional and national cuisines – and flip irritably through the pages, scowling at the lack of even one exciting new place to eat. The answer must be to look further ahead, to the unadulterated bliss of a holiday abroad. But the websites provoke only disbelief and outrage. Why isn’t there a reasonably priced apartment in the atmospheric old town, a few minutes’ walk from the sea on one side and from major transport links on the other, with a barbecue-equipped roof terrace and views over the lively, bustling, colourful market? Would anyone even consider less?

  And now I catch a glimpse of my face in the mirror – a raging gargoyle corroded by acid rain. How can this have happened to a 1960s flower child? Especially one who has yet to enjoy fully the sexual variety promised to the flower children? Not to mention all the new stuff. Can anyone nowadays be said to have lived life to the full without experiencing group sex, bondage and a pre-op transsexual?

  This is crazy, of course. But who, in the Western world, has not been deranged by a toxic cocktail of dissatisfaction, restlessness, desire and resentment? Who has not yearned to be younger, richer, more talented, more respected, more celebrated and, above all, more sexually attractive? Who has not felt entitled to more, and aggrieved when more was not forthcoming? It is possible that a starving African farmer has less sense of injustice than a middle-aged Western male who has never been fellated.

  Of course many also become aware that demanding everything is absurd. Then the questions arise. How did such inordinate expectation come about? What is the alternative? If there is an alternative how can it be achieved? Do the best minds of past and present offer any useful advice? Is there a consensus in what they say? If so, what is it and how does it apply to living in the twenty-first century? These are the questions addressed by this book – but there are no simple answers.

  Even defining the goal is difficult. The alternative to discontented craziness is contented sanity – happiness. But this word presents all kinds of problems. Many, including myself, can hardly bear to utter a word so contaminated by the excesses of happy-clappiness and self-help. It immediately brings to mind beatific grins, tambourines, orange robes and T-shirts saying, ‘Today is the first day of the rest of your life’ (the poet Derek Mahon made this a couplet with the line, ‘Tell that to your liver; tell that to your ex-wife’1). We are too knowing, too sophisticated, too ironical, too wised up, too post-everything for a corny old term like happiness. The word ‘happiness’ would draw an equally derisive snort from a philosopher, a novelist, a poet and a cab driver, though all of these would no doubt secretly want the experience. Many may claim that life stinks – but no one wants to feel like shit.

  Alternative terms are even less satisfactory. The academic community has proposed ‘Subjective Well-Being’, which reduces to an impressive acronym, SWB, but is lifeless jargon. More recently populists have suggested ‘Wellness’, which sounds like an obscure English coastal town (stony beach, but charming despite that).

  It will have to be embarrassing old ‘happiness’. And, not only is the word agony to use, it is impossible to define. The Oxford English Dictionary shockingly offers a misapprehension corrected over two thousand years ago by Socrates: ‘good fortune or luck; success; prosperity’. More scrupulous attempts to define the concept get lost in infinite ramification. The Buddhist kingdom of Bhutan in the Himalayas set up a Gross National Happiness Commission and one of the Commission’s first tasks was to define what it was created to promote. So far it has identified four pillars, nine domains and seventy-two indicators. But the country is still no better than others at resisting lamentable trends. As a spokesperson glumly conceded, ‘In the last century a young person asked to identify a hero would have invariably chosen the king – but now it is the rap artist 50 Cent.’2

  And useful testimony on happiness in practice is as difficult to find as convincing theory. Unlike its opposite, depression, happiness is averse to self-definition. The misery memoir is a well-established genre – but there is no equivalent for happiness (in fact a happy childhood is a crippling handicap for a writer). It seems that only the painful experiences are a source of inspiration.

  Perhaps a condition of being happy is an unwillingness to analyse the state, because any attempt at definition will kill it. Perhaps it is not even possible to be consciously happy. Perhaps it may be recognized only retrospectively, after it is lost. Jean-Jacques Rousseau first elaborated this view: ‘The happy life of the golden age was always a state foreign to the human race, either because it went unrecognised when humans could have enjoyed it or because it had been lost when humans could have known it.’3 In other words, if you have it, you can’t be aware of it and, if you’re aware of it, you can’t have it.

  And happiness tends to be thought of as a permanent state, when it may be only occasionally achievable. The philosopher Hannah Arendt has argued that the human condition is a cycle of exhaustion and renewal, so that going up is possible only after going down and attempts to remain permanently up will fail: ‘There is no lasting happiness outside the prescribed cycle of painful exhaustion and pleasurable regeneration, and whatever throws this cycle out of balance – poverty and misery where exhaustion is followed by wretchedness instead of regeneration, or great riches and an entirely effortless life where boredom takes the place of exhaustion…ruins the elemental happiness that comes from being alive.’4

  And the happiness state, when examined more closely, turns out to be not a point but a range, with contentment at the bottom and exaltation at the top.

  Alternatively, happiness is not a state but a process, a continuous striving. Aristotle defined it as an activity. Marcus Aurelius, an earthier Roman, likened it to wrestling. Or maybe it is both a state and a process. The ancient Greek term, eudaimonia, captures something of both inter
pretations and translates roughly as flourishing. This is an appealing idea: to be happy is to flourish. (And Eudaimonics would be an impressive title for Happiness Studies – there’s nothing like a Greek word for intellectual theft.)

  Then again, there is the assumption that only one version of happiness is achieved by the fortunate few. But, given our bizarre uniqueness, it is unlikely that even any two happy people are experiencing exactly the same phenomenon. There are probably as many forms of happiness as there are of depression.

  As for how to attain this indefinable thing…The United States Declaration of Independence has that famous phrase, ‘the pursuit of happiness’. But many believe that happiness may not be pursued, that it is an accidental consequence of doing something else – an insight possibly first expressed by John Stuart Mill in the nineteenth century: ‘Those only are happy…who have their minds fixed on some object other than their own happiness…

  Aiming thus at something else, they find happiness by the way…The only chance is to treat, not happiness, but some end external to it, as the purpose of life.’5

  Hence another question – what is the ‘something else’, the ‘end external? Living well? Virtue? Wisdom? These are as difficult to define as happiness itself. One of the problems in thinking about happiness is that every line of thought leads off into some vast area of contention with a contradictory literature going back centuries. Arendt said that virtuous acts are, by definition, not meant to be seen. So, a double whammy: goodness is invisible and happiness is mute.

  And goodness has the same access problem. It is not possible to be good by trying to be good. This is also true of many other desiderata – originality for instance. It is not possible to be original by trying to be original – those who attempt this in the arts will be merely avant-garde. Originality is the product of an impulse so intense and overwhelming that it bursts the conventions and produces something new – again more by accident than design. Also attainable only indirectly are wisdom and authority, perhaps even humour and love. Is there a General Theory of Desiderata in this?

  Only the surrogates of happiness yield to pursuit – success, fame, status, affluence, fun, cheerfulness – though it is possible that the lowest level of the happiness range, contentment, is directly achievable. Gustave Flaubert thought so: ‘Happiness is not attainable though tranquillity is’6, which sounds more like an admission of defeat and surrender. But, as a literary man rather than a philosopher, Flaubert was a bit inconsistent and did leave open a narrow window of opportunity: ‘Stupidity, selfishness and good health are the three prerequisites of happiness, though if stupidity is lacking the others are useless.’7

  In fact, these quotes are from Flaubert’s good days. Essentially he subscribed, like many others before and since, to a form of Manicheism, the belief that man is a fallen creature who can never find happiness.

  Then there is the view that the pursuit of happiness is itself the main cause of unhappiness, that the pursuit is intrinsically self-defeating. Immanuel Kant put it like this: ‘We find that the more a cultivated reason devotes itself to the aim of enjoying life and happiness, the further does man get away from true contentment.’8

  So the absurdity of happiness is that it is embarrassing to discuss or even mention, impossible to define or measure, may not be achievable at all – or, at best, only intermittently and unconsciously – and may even turn into its opposite if directly pursued, but that it frequently turns up unexpectedly in the course of pursuing something else. There is no tease more infuriating.

  Besides, hasn’t every thinker since Socrates pondered all this and left the world not much wiser? Questions seem to breed only more questions. Agonizing leads only to bewilderment and frustration. Or to banalities – watch less television and smile more at strangers. It is tempting to forget the whole thing and simply fall back on the couch with a remote control in one hand and a beer in the other.

  But there is a compelling reason to develop a personal strategy for living. Rejecting issues, which often feels liberating, is actually enslavement. Those who do not produce their own solution must be using someone else’s. As Nietzsche warned: ‘he who cannot obey himself will be commanded’.9 Worse, the someone else who commands is likely to be the average contemporary, and the solution a weak mixture of contemporary recommendations and anathemas. This has a parallel in writing. Many would-be novelists and poets read only their contemporaries and often not even these, justifying this laziness as a bold bid for freedom from influence. But this attempt to escape specific influence results in unconscious surrender to the worst kind of general influence – current popular taste.

  Of course there is the phenomenon of the happy brute, whose instincts and talents perfectly match the demands of the age but are not inhibited by sensitivity or scruple, and who is therefore hugely successful and happy to enjoy the approbation and spoils – the palaces, courtiers, servants and seraglio. In earlier eras this would have been a warrior. Now it is more likely to be an entrepreneur. One of capitalism’s most successful confidence tricks is its promotion of the illusion that anyone can make millions. But there is room at the top for only a few and few have the aptitude to claim a place.

  There is also the happy fantasist who lives blissfully on illusions. And is this not a convenient and harmless way of feeling good? The problem is that life takes a malicious pleasure in shattering illusions and this experience is more painful and costly than dispelling illusions or preventing them from developing in the first place. Illusions can become immune to reality only by turning into full-blown delusions. You really have to believe you are Napoleon. So, once again, it comes back to understanding the world and the self and how these interact.

  Nature abhors a vacuum – and nowhere more than in the human mind. For our understanding of how the mind can be colonized we should thank Karl Marx and Sigmund Freud, thinkers revered in the twentieth century and often reviled in the twenty-first. But their great central insights remain valid and relevant: Marx showed how much of what we assume to be independent thought is actually imposed by society; Freud how much actually arises from the unconscious. So there is intense and relentless pressure from both directions – without and within – and the result may well be no independent thought at all.

  However, there is no hope of escaping entirely – or even largely – from either pressure. To live in the world but outside of its prejudices is an impossible ideal. As we live in the age so the age lives in us. And ages are as narcissistic as the people who belong to them: each believes itself to be unassailably superior and demands to be loved more than the others. These demands are usually met. We tend to prize our own age as we prize our native country – it has to be good if it produced us.

  The current age has been hugely successful at inspiring fealty – and a key factor may be its ability to promote the illusion that fulfilment is not only possible but easy, even inevitable. Regular economic crises expose this illusion – but usually only to some people, for a short period, and in a limited way. There is a questioning of the mechanics of the system but not its underlying assumption that, if there is unlimited personal freedom and infinite choice, then anyone can be anything and have anything. No thought or effort is necessary. Only want and ye shall become and possess – this is the message propagated covertly by advertising and overtly by the self-help industry. And the age’s ideal is the ‘bubbly personality’, its symbol the smiley face and its mantra ‘Have a nice day’. But there is a fundamental axiom: you do not have to pretend to be what you are. So it should come as no surprise that the bubbly, smiley age of nice days is increasingly dosing itself with antidepressants. The brightly smiling depressive seems to be a phenomenon of the times. Depression memoirist, Sally Brampton, says of herself and a fellow sufferer, ‘We both know that each of us is capable of smiling and talking cheerfully while at the same time planning our own deaths.’10 Now those too far out are both waving and drowning. And, if everyone is presenting a bubbly personality, it appears
as though there must indeed be automatic, universal fulfilment. So the depressive cannot understand what has gone wrong and feels atrociously isolated among the smiley faces, perhaps not even aware of also presenting a bright smile.

  This is an example of what Erich Fromm identified as a new phenomenon in modern society – ’ anonymous authority’11 – a cultural pressure all the more effective for being invisible and sourceless and therefore difficult to detect and resist. Like Satan, authority has realized that the smart move is to convince everyone you no longer exist.

  And anonymous authority is becoming even more anonymous and therefore even more insidious and difficult to counteract. In Western society there is no longer any overt repression. Most of the old taboos have faded away. On prime-time television a serious, distinguished-looking older woman, a doctor, sits at the centre of a semicircle of earnest, attentive young women, holding in her lap what appears to be some sort of anatomical model. Is this an Advanced Midwifery seminar? No – a masterclass in delivering a blowjob, described with breezy familiarity as a ‘BJ’. ‘But it always gives me jaw ache,’ complains one of the young women. The doctor explains soothingly that the secret is taking the strain with the right hand, which she demonstrates on the model. Meanwhile the left hand should be expertly engaged with the often-forgotten testicles: ‘I call them the stepchildren because they’re always neglected.’

  As for overt authority, the last vestiges have disappeared, with presidents and prime ministers discussing their family pets and favourite football teams on the sofas of chat shows, religious leaders playing the bongo drums and doing parachute jumps for charity (‘Archbishop in 12,000 feet leap of faith’) and managers publishing in the company newsletter photographs of themselves passed out at the Christmas party with trousers down and anal cleavage packed with cream cheese. So where is the problem? Where is the coercion? Everyone is cool now. Even God has been obliged to attend anger management classes for wrath. Anything goes, provided of course that it does not denigrate women or those of a different race, religion or sexual orientation and causes no damage to the environment or suffering to animals.