Happiness vs. pleasure: what's the difference?
Given that the wish to be happy is universal, you’d think that happiness would be a core subject at school, and that we’d all be pretty expert on happiness and its causes. But the truth is, most people are somewhat hazy about it. The title of a recent book by Daniel Gilbert, Prof of Psychology at Harvard University, says it all: ‘Stumbling on Happiness.’ In the book – which I recommend highly – Prof Gilbert explains the pitfalls into which we stumble in our pursuit of happiness.
Part of the reason for the collective confusion about happiness may be as simple as the word itself. ‘It makes me happy to reach out to those in need,’ we may say. We may just as easily say, ‘They had my favourite cake so I was very happy.’ But the happiness we are talking about in each case is quite different.
The ancient Greeks had two different words for happiness: hedonia and eudemonia. In brief, hedonia (from which we derive hedonism) is what we take from the world to be happy. We might call it pleasure. Eudemonia is what we give to the world to give us happiness. This is the more profound sense of well-being. How do the two kinds of happiness differ?
With this understanding, it’s easy to see how so many of us get into trouble in the pursuit of happiness. Money (beyond a fairly low threshold), toys, and status are common routes to ‘happiness,’ but what these things actually deliver is pleasure. And, as we can see pleasure is short lived, unreliable and subject to circumstance.
If it’s happiness we’re after, the well-being of others is a surer way forward – the basis of the Dalai Lama’s frequent encouragement for us to be ‘wisely selfish.’
This is a subject I explore in much more detail in my book Why Mindfulness is Better than Chocolate.
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