The Happiness Machine

Our mental health crisis is philosophical, not psychological

Now they would have all the time they would ever need to look long and close at the world, feel the sun move like a fiery wind across the sky.

-Ray Bradbury, Dandelion Wine

Mental health is a contemporary obsession. But as with almost all contemporary obsessions, we are scared of discussing it in philosophical terms - and much less spiritual or theological. This, I think, is partly because we have a strong sense that doing so would lead us to some painful realisations.

In the novel Dandelion Wine (1957), there is a short and prescient vignette that serves as a useful starting point for such a project. A minor character, overhearing a conversation by chance, is inspired to build a ‘happiness machine’. Devoting his life to the project, he increasingly alienates his long-suffering wife and children, and in the end produces an abomination: a bright orange capsule which the subject enters in order to be exposed to an endless stream of pleasurable sensations, moods, images, and sounds. The creator, Leo, is immensely proud and feels as though he has revolutionised the human experience. His wife, Lena, knows otherwise. He has created a recipe for a peculiar mixture of both boredom and sorrow:

‘[T]wo things you did you never should have. You made quick things go slow and stay around. You brought things far away to our back yard where they don’t belong, where they just tell you, “No, you’ll never travel, Lena Auffmann, Paris you’ll never see! Rome you’ll never visit.” But I always knew that, so why tell me?’

On the one hand, the happiness machine denudes pleasure of its very pleasurableness by forcing it to linger where it should be fleeting; it makes it banal. On the other, though, it confronts us with the coldest of all human realisations - that, while our imaginations know almost no limit, our lives and resources are very limited indeed. By providing the user with an endless stream of wonders, it simply torments her with the infinity of unrealisable potential. There is no end to possibility, but there is very much an end to life.

Lena also foresaw the grim irony that would reside at the heart of the happiness machine: in giving the user a taste of so many different kinds of happiness, it would compel her to visit it again and again, like a junkie, and thus rob her of the small amount of time she had in which to realise anything like happiness in the real world. ‘I only know so long as this thing is here I’ll want to come out…and against [my] judgement sit in it and look at those places so far away…’ The result would be that she would end up ‘no fit family’ for anyone.

Ray Bradbury could not have foreseen the advent of the smartphone as we know it today, but we all of us instantly recognise the phenomenon Lena was describing. We walk about all day with little happiness machines in our pockets, and so we now know that the pitfalls are exactly as she predicted. We each of us float on a sea of potential, never to be realised; meanwhile the greatest and rarest of pleasures have been rendered mundane to us by sheer overfamiliarity. Sex and relationships are of course the apogee of this phenomenon. Porn strips the former of pleasure; Tinder destroys the ability to forge genuine connections because it is always there to promise an infinity of alternatives at the swipe of a thumb. But it’s also true of music, film, literature; awash in possibility, we have lost the capacity to properly appreciate what is before our eyes and ears. Thirty seconds into a song, our thumbs already itch to skip us to the next. We all know this. But miserably we stumble on, returning again and again ‘against our judgement’ to the orange capsule. Next time you’re at a park or play area or shopping precinct, take a glance at the parents stumbling around glued to their happiness machines, their young kids long ago having given up much hope of getting mum or dad’s attention. ‘No fit family’ for anyone indeed.

As is our wont, we tend to think of this as a problem with a technical solution of one kind or another, either in the realm of psychiatry (medicalising overuse of smart phones as an ‘addiction’), law (legal limits on screen time) or technology itself (‘monk mode’ apps and the like). All of these tools may have their uses. But in a famous passage from The Unbearable Lightness of Being (1984), Milan Kundera shows us that it is really more properly understood as a philosophical, and perhaps even spiritual, crisis. And this means that we have to think about the solution in a very different way - not as a series of quick fixes but as a fundamental reconceptualisation of our relationship to ‘being’ itself.

At the very beginning of the novel, Kundera’s narrator posits a problem. Since Nietzsche’s myth of eternal return is indeed a myth, and since we live only one life, we never know what to do at any given moment. There is no previous life for us to refer back to and identify mistakes, and no future life in which to choose different paths. We are like actors going onto the stage of life cold, and the result is that ‘we can never know what to want’, because we have nothing to compare our life to. We never know what would have happened if we had done something else.

This, Kundera’s narrator goes on, makes our existence ‘unbearably light’. Since we only live one life, we always have ‘mitigating circumstances’ for when we make an apparently bad choice. We can always fall back on the same defence: we couldn’t know what the outcome of the choice would be in advance. The result is that no bad choice can be condemned, and from there it is a short step to saying that we have no real responsibility for our conduct. We couldn’t know how things would turn out, so how can we be at fault? In a short paragraph, Kundera then summarises modernity’s nihilism in a nutshell: ‘Einmal ist keinmal…What happens but once, says the German adage, might as well not have happened at all. If we have only one life to live, we might as well not have lived at all.’

Kundera’s narrator is of course, an unreliable one, and the novel is (spoiler alert) a complete refutation of this nihilistic conception of life. Tomas, the central character, begins as a womaniser who abandoned an infant son and who gleefully embraces a meaningless job because it affords complete lack of responsibility and the opportunity to meet women for casual sex. But in the course of events, he is pinned down by the very heaviness of genuine being that the narrator starts the book by repudiating. Love, family, and community come to get him. And in the end he implicitly comes to understand that life can only be properly understood as a commitment to commitment itself. Living only one life as we do, the only route to happiness is to embed oneself in the very responsibility of being - to take on responsibility for its own sake.

This realisation also comes to Leo Auffmann, constructor of the happiness machine in Dandelion Wine. Having been reminded by Lena repeatedly that the point of life is not happiness defined by sensation (‘If that machine is like you say, has it got an answer to making babies in it somewhere? Can that machine make seventy-year-old people twenty? Also, how does death look when you hide in there with all that happiness?’), he finally reaches ‘quiet acceptance’ when gazing through the living room window at his wife and children:

Every hand, every head, every mouth made a big or little motion. You could hear their far-away voices under glass. You could hear someone singing in a high sweet voice. You could smell bread baking, too, and you knew it was real bread that would soon be covered with real butter. Everything was there and it was working.

This is in some sense the stuff of cliche: the adventurer-dreamer learns that real happiness was found at home. But seeing things in those terms is to miss the point, which is that ‘happiness’ itself is not a condition or state of mind, but rather a commitment. Lena is quite clear about this: as she points out, happiness understood as contentment, delight or joy is something that only makes sense to cows, babies and old people in second childhood. Happiness properly understood is the embracing of a project of being: a continual and undending engagement in one’s situation and relationships - what Leo finally realises is not the construction of a ‘machine’ but rather a ‘tinkering’ with the very circumstances in which one finds oneself embedded.

The problem we face is not really then psychological in the sense that it is the result of there being something wrong with our brains (perhaps because they have been somehow hijacked by technology). The problem is the way in which we think about being itself: like Tomas, we construe it as unbearably light - an ephemeral, transient, and ultimately meaningless state, filled with unending possibility, but with nothing in particular to recommend one possibility over another except insofar as it seems pleasurable in the moment. Our technology perhaps inculcates this in us, but the problem, as Kundera shows us, is deeper rooted. We were already used to thinking of ‘being’ in this way. And we have got the technology we deserve, accordingly.

Why then has this happened? In one respect, the answer should be obvious, for all that we are desprately unwilling to confront it. Our societies are now so thoroughly secular that we have utterly lost sight of secularism’s import, with the result that we have by and large abandoned the project of reconciling the death of God with the need for an awareness of eternity. The issue in other words is not secularisation as such, but the refusal to engage with its consequences and think through its implications. What happens in the human psyche, in other words, when for the first time in history the great majority in a society have become convinced by implication that life - aside from whatever momentary pleasures it gives us - ‘might as well not have been lived at all’?

The short answer is that society then comprises an awful lot of Leo Auffmanns and Tomases. The more complete answer awaits discovery unless we find a way to properly grapple with being. It is also, then, worth reflecting on aspects of this crisis that are best described as spiritual - and you can take your pick as to whether you want to engage with that word literally or metaphorically. In On Evil (2011), the Christian socialist Terry Eagleton describes evil as, fundamentally, a rejection of being as such: a desire to transcend the physical, the real, the temporal and indeed the moral, and to ascend into a realm of infinite expression of the purest will. And this very often means, in fact, hatred for being itself, expressed in the most extreme and violent ways. It follows that goodness inheres in the very engagement in being per se - in loving the physical, the real, the temporal and the moral - and in sublimating one’s will to the purpose of doing what is best for those around oneself. To be good in other words means to reconcile one’s own will to limitation on the grounds firstly that there are other human beings with wills of their own, and secondly that there exists natural or objective right (i.e., better and worse ways to live) which is discoverable by reason - or revelation. It means to confront, accept, and embrace the weight of being. It is an open question whether people in a secularised society are able to do this; we will in the fullness of time, I suppose, find out.