Unhappy? Walk towards these 3 beacons, says philosophy | Jonny Thomson

- This Big Think interview segment  is sponsored by BetterHelp, an online platform that makes  therapy accessible and affordable. Visit betterhelp. com/bigthink  for 10% off your first month.

- There's certain paths, there's certain ways  to happiness, which feel right and are right, but there are so many different paths  with their different sirens' calls, which attract us. And I think we  don't realize we're on the wrong path often until it's too late and  we find the going really difficult. - [Narrator] Why is happiness elusive?

- I think it's so elusive because the term itself  is so laden, and there's very different, there's lots of different ways of understanding the term  happiness. So my 4-year-old son at the moment, for example, is learning how to read emotions  in kindergarten, and, as they teach them how to recognize sadness and anger and happiness,  and of course the happy photo is someone with a beaming smile. And, of course, that's what you  do for a 4-year-old child; you teach them to read the basics of emotions.

But the problem is when  we grow up, we don't really lose that image of happiness. We associate happiness as being this  beaming smile with a selfie on social media. But I think happiness is not a smiling face, it's  more a smiling soul.

And I think we don't really like religious terms as much these days, but I  think that expression, smiling soul, is probably the closest we can come to understanding what  happiness really is. And, in fact, Aristotle, when he uses the word eudaimonia, that translates  literally as good spirit. So I think the idea of a laughing or a smiling soul is really important  to happiness.

But why do we find it confusing? Why is it hard to understand? I think Daoism offers  a really good analogy here.

So Daoism is about the Dao, which is the way, which is this kind of  mystical kind of fundamental force which underpins everything. And an analogy that some Daoists  use is that imagine life as like a dense, thorny forest, and in the middle of this forest, is a  well-paved superhighway, and it's easy to walk along that path. It's even fun to walk along that  path.

But there are other paths. But these paths go through swamps. They go through thorns.

They go  up and down hills. And they are difficult. And I think happiness is a little bit like that.

There's  certain paths, there's certain ways to happiness, which feel right and are right, but there are  so many different paths with their different sirens' calls which attract us. And I think  we don't realize we're on the wrong path often until it's too late and we find the going really  difficult. So if we imagine happiness as being on the right path, if we follow the Daoist metaphor,  then the question we've got to ask ourselves is, "If we are unhappy, what's going on there?

" And  the question then is about finding the right path again. If we return back to this kind of heat map  analogy, there are certain lights which emerge in the history of philosophy and theology as well,  which are meant to act as beacons or guides with which we can walk towards. So if we are unhappy,  then we should work towards these lights, and I've identified three lights or what I like to call  pillars of happiness.

And if we are unhappy, we should walk back towards these. So if we're trying  to find our way back to the path, and we're trying to follow these lights, we have to know what those  lights are. And the first pillar, or light number one, is the idea that happiness is not measured  by pleasure.

So the ancient Greeks had a lot of different words for happiness, and one of them  is hedonia. And hedonia is what we might want to call simple pleasure. It's eating a Michelin  Star steak, but it's also binging on the KFC bucket.

It's a big night out with some friends,  but it's also drinking a herbal tea on the sofa. It's quite easy to measure, and it's quite easy  to understand because it's an emotional affect; it's pleasure. This idea is essential to Buddhism. 

So Buddhists tend to define pleasure as being a desire satisfied. So I want a drink of water,  and so I reach for the water, and I drink it, and that gives me a pleasure. But the problem of  course, is that this is an unwinnable game.

Every day we have millions and millions of desires,  and it's like a game of impossible whack-a-mole, and there's no possible way we can satisfy them  all. Even if we had all of the time in the world and all of the money of Elon Musk, there's no  way we can satisfy all of our desires. So if we're to make sense of that word happiness, if  we're to be happy at all, it has to be found outside of this notion of pleasure.

And what's  interesting is, about 2,000 years ago in a very different tradition in Protestant Denmark, Soren  Kierkegaard was making the same point. Kierkegaard wrote a book called "The Seducer's Diary,"  which is found in his work "Either/Or. " And, in there, we meet a character called Johannes who  is this aesthete who's living the life of Riley.

They're like a first-year university student going  out drinking and womanizing and having the time of their life. But the problem is, as we read the  book, we realize that his life is pretty shallow, and Johannes gets bored. When I teach Kierkegaard,  I tend to describe him as similar to a vampire in one of those vampire movies.

There's a common  trope where the vampire who's been living for hundreds of years is just bored of existence.  They've drunk all of the drinks they can drink. They've done all the drugs they can do.

They've  slept with all of the people they can possibly sleep with. And they're lying on their sofa in  this kind of listless state of dissatisfaction, and they're just bored of life. And so they  often turn to increasingly brutal and disturbing things to keep the entertainment going.

But the  idea is that if we want to have more in life, if we want to be truly happy, we have to step  beyond pleasure. We have to step beyond hedonia. Finding a pathway to happiness can be really  difficult if you're struggling with your mental well-being, especially this time of year as  anxiety peaks in the late springtime.

As the weather improves, there's this strange pressure to  be more social. Weddings, graduations, vacations, it's like the world suddenly expects you to be out  there enjoying life. And when you look at social media, it's just an endless stream of vacation  photos and people living their best lives.

This can create this profound feeling of  inadequacy or fear of missing out. Our sponsor, BetterHelp, connects  you with a licensed therapist who can provide support when you need it most. It's fascinating, the majority of BetterHelp members actually seek support specifically for anxiety.

And about 69% of them report improved anxiety symptoms after just six weeks of therapy. If something is interfering with your happiness today, why not go to betterhelp. com/bigthink and fill out their questionnaire?

They'll match with a therapist who can help you work through these challenges. Using that link will also get  you 10% off your first month of therapy and help support our content. Because ultimately, understanding our minds is just as important as  understanding our universe.

- [Narrator] Want to support the channel? Join the Big Think Members Community where you  get access to videos early, ad free.