Happiness Is Not Pie
I've been sitting inside a pile of books on moral philosophy for the last month or two, sorting through what I think and how I feel - and why - about what makes for a good life. More so, I am trying to pick apart what makes for a good life after life has gone wrong in some way, or just when the life you thought you were going to have has disappeared and now you have to figure out what happens next.
In those moments, we have a lot of choices we can make. But perhaps one of the first is: what sort of happiness do we want to pursue?
Will it be the hedonistic happiness of revelling in experience and pleasure? Will it be the meaning centred happiness, where we decide to strive for something, to make the world better in some way? Or, will it be the kind of false happiness that is like imagining that happiness is pie, that there's only so much to go around, and that by making others unhappy, we will be happier?
Something else altogether? My in-progress book, Life After, is strictly speaking only for those interested in a meaning centred happiness, but sometimes my reading list sends my brain off on side quests of wonder.
This is one of them.
I've been thinking a lot lately about what makes people behave badly towards others. As I read, I keep finding myself scribbling margin notes about news stories or opinion pieces I've recently come across, but also people and incidents of what I see as morally repugnant behaviour, that they clearly would not see that way.
In the last four or so years, I have had my faith in humanity stressed and then broken, through repeated interactions with people who seem to be actively picking that third kind of happiness, the happiness as limited supply sort. Where they would prefer for others to be unhappy so that they can have more of the happiness pie. There's a viciousness to people who make themselves feel bigger or superior by trying to take others lower, to those people who are happiest when others are not.
I am fundamentally a "rising tide lifts all boats" person when it comes to happiness and life in general. In the last four years, I have realised with some amount of horror how much that is not necessarily a default feature of humanity.
I suppose what I have found interesting in thinking through various people's actions that I've watched, both close up and from afar, is the extent to which people clearly convince themselves that they are not, in fact, vicious people. That either people deserve their ire, that they are not responsible for themselves or their growth, that the world owes them or that the ends justify the means whatever they are.
Aristotle is useful here in that he sees vicious people as those whose vice corrupts their perception of the good itself, so they go after bad ends while seeing them as good ones. (Nicomachean Ethics, VI. 12). He then gets more useful again when laying out that while most vices have corresponding virtues, there are some for which there is no good midpoint, no virtue associated with it at all: spitefulness, shamelessness and envy being key amongst them. (Nicomachean Ethics, II. 6). Later he describes spiteful people as those so far from being pained by another's misfortune that they take pleasure in it. (Nicomachean Ethics, II. 7).
They find, to a certain extent, their happiness in it.
In living my life in the last four years, I have essentially been accidentally collecting case studies of human behaviour. It was these thoughts from Nicomachean Ethics that made me realise the connection across the behaviour I've seen: spite, definitely, also likely some shamelessness about that spite, and perhaps in some cases some envy.
Why did I only start noticing that people are not necessarily fundamentally good about four years ago? Because four years ago, I fell in love – with someone who was in love with me. For the first time in my life, I have felt supported and safe. For the first time in my life, I could point to an adult and say: I am absolutely worth something to this person here. I matter. And, even more so, he has worked to make sure that I learn that I am worthy of his love. I always was worth something, I just didn’t have someone to remind me of it.
The flip side has been that I've been far more able to see vicious people for what they are, and to stop making excuses for their behaviour or pretending that I have any part in their decisions to be morally bad people. Nor can we change or influence anyone who does not want to be changed or influenced.
Here are five case studies, drawn from people who have passed through my life or the lives of people around me, with names and identifying details changed. What I have not changed is the shape of what they did.
Case study 1: Liz is visiting a family friend she doesn’t particularly like and accidentally runs over part of a decorative fence at the end of their driveway. She video calls her dad to show him the fence, who confirms it will have to be replaced. Liz laughs at the idea she would or could be held responsible for the fence. She never tells the family friend about the damage or that she's caused it. She also makes no effort to fix the damage. She later tells her partner about it, framed as a funny story.
Case study 2: Eleanor lies to her brother-in-law, telling him that another family member was arrested in high school for assaulting someone quite brutally so that the brother-in-law will ban that family member from having a relationship with his children or being allowed at wider family events. Nothing of the sort ever happened, and Eleanor plainly brags that she is happy to lie to ruin that family member's reputation because of her moral superiority. She similarly perjures herself in court in a separate matter, on the basis that she should get to be the moral arbiter in her wider family.
Case study 3: Albert demands half of the equity in his ex-partner's house as payment for agreeing to allow his ex-partner to move out of the area with their child. There is a large amount of paperwork to prove that he has no right to the house or its equity, but he still threatens his ex with a costly lawsuit over the house to try to force her to sign half of it over. Eventually, he is advised by a solicitor that he needs to stop saying that he will essentially trade time with his son for half of the house. He retaliates by stonewalling attempts to plan visitation, refuses to allow his son to visit him unless he is paid $750, and then refuses to do family therapy with his son when he requests it. Albert demands repeated family court hearings that he doesn't turn up to. He refuses to apologise to his son for any of it, and his son stops speaking to him. Albert convinces his parents to cancel a long-planned visit with his son and then tells everyone his ex-partner is solely to blame for his son not speaking to him.
Case study 4: Mary realises that it's unfortunately time to put down her cat who has been poorly for a long time. The cat was originally her ex-partner's, but when he left Mary, she purposefully made it nearly impossible for him to take the cat with him. Mary arranges to have the cat put down on her ex-partner's birthday, five days in the future. She claims to mutual friends to have forgotten her ex's birthday, though she also previously arranged for their divorce to go through on Valentine's Day. A few days later, someone reaches out to the ex-partner over the internet to share that Mary had been talking about the specific timing of putting the cat down on his birthday in an internet forum.
Case study 5: John spends a lot of time editing niche Wikipedia articles. He discovers that a family member he isn’t fond of is the subject of a Wikipedia article. The article has already been reviewed and published, having gone through multiple hands. It has a significant and well-cited set of accomplishments. John seeks to have the article taken down and accuses people who worked on it of being the family member who the article is about. He does this without disclosing his connection – and while, in fact, accusing others of having a conflict of interest. In the end, he is called out for conflict of interest and publicly states not that he’s sorry for the intent, but that he should not have overtly tried to have the article taken down but instead should have convinced an editor he’s friendly with to do it behind the scenes for him.
Most of these people will speak at length about how morally superior or righteous they are, particularly over those on the receiving end of their targeted behaviour. What has struck me most in thinking through these case studies: I've never heard any of these people, or people like them, apologise. For anything. Ever.
It turns out Aristotle got there long before I did: he offers a way of distinguishing a lapse of self-restraint from settled viciousness. Someone who merely lacks self-restraint knows better, fails anyway, and is sorry afterwards, while the licentious one "is not characterized by regret, for he abides by his choice." (Nicomachean Ethics, VII. 8). It's not a one-to-one match - he's on a slightly different topic. But the argument follows from the corrupted perception: if your vice has already reshaped what good looks like to you, there is nothing left to be sorry about, or really nothing left that the person is capable of being sorry for.
My new book, Life After, frankly, will not be for everyone, and it’s certainly not for people like those in my case studies. It's for people who want to think through the next steps in life, those who want to build a life of meaning and real connection.
But my experiences with these people, or seeing other people's experience of them, are absolutely informing my thinking as I go. Indeed, I've been turning these case studies over in my head as I read widely. These examples are some of what lands in my margin notes as I try to understand egoism, utilitarianism, virtues, ethics and more. I'm not an academic; philosophy has never been my area of study. But the world views of these people are so completely antithetical to mine, that it has been clarifying to a certain extent to have really good examples of what I regard as modern era unethical and immoral behaviour, seemingly based on spitefulness, shamelessness and envy.
It has led to some big thoughts and questions like: how on earth did I get to be the way I am? Thinking the way I do? Tackling the world and difficulty I have faced the way I do?
I have always had a strong sense of justice, of wanting to help others. When something has gone wrong for me or my family because of a faulty system, often one of my reactions is to recognise that if I am being failed by a system or a process, that other people likely are being failed too. That probably, they’ve been failed worse than I have. Then, I see if there is something that I can change. Sometimes there is. Sometimes there isn't. Sometimes, frankly, I'm a little too tired or overwhelmed to be able to make a difference.
But as I sit with this pile of moral philosophy books, I can't help but want to understand the people who don't see the world the way I do. That's how I ended up with Aristotle in my lap on a sunny end of summer afternoon, trying to better understand the world, but also wondering about the many people who have passed through my life or adjacent to my life who don't see themselves as a work in progress, nor care to make a positive impact on the world outside their own front door. Who just want more of the happiness pie for themselves.
Both I, and my thinking, will always be a work in progress. Writing non-fiction means the story is ever changing – but so am I.
And perhaps it is time to go back to, essentially, ignoring these stories and focus on the matter at hand: how to construct a meaningful, happy life after – when everything changes, and there are choices to be made. When you, like me, believe that a rising tide lifts all boats.
Emily Hunt-Adiletta OBE is a bestselling author and keynote speaker. She is currently working on her second book, Life After.
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