The Happy Life: The Search for Contentment in the Modern World

Quarterly Essay #41

by David Malouf

In the first Quarterly Essay for 2011, David Malouf returns to one of the most fundamental questions and gives it a modern twist: what makes for a happy life?

With grace and profundity, Malouf discusses new and old ways to talk about contentment and the self. In considering the happy life – what it is, and what makes it possible – David Malouf returns to the “highest wisdom” of the classics, looks at how, thanks to Thomas Jefferson’s way with words, happiness became a “right”, and examines joy in the flesh as depicted by Rubens and Rembrandt. In a world become ever larger and impersonal, he finds happiness in an unlikely place. This is an essay to savour and reflect upon by one of Australia’s greatest novelists.

Genres: Nonfiction, Philosophy, Essays, Self Help, Australia, Psychology

95 pages, Paperback

First published March 1, 2011

About the author

David Malouf is a celebrated Australian poet, novelist, librettist, playwright, and essayist whose work has garnered international acclaim. Known for his lyrical prose and explorations of identity, memory, and place, Malouf began his literary career in poetry before gaining recognition for his fiction. His 1990 novel The Great World won the Miles Franklin Award and several other major prizes, while Remembering Babylon (1993) earned a Booker Prize nomination and multiple international honors.
Malouf has taught at universities in Australia and the UK, delivered the prestigious Boyer Lectures, and written libretti for acclaimed operas. Born in Brisbane to a Lebanese father and a mother of Sephardi Jewish heritage, he draws on both Australian and European influences in his work. He is widely regarded as one of Australia's most important literary voices and has been recognized with numerous awards, including the Neustadt International Prize for Literature and the Australia Council Award for Lifetime Achievement in Literature.

Reviews

[Gerhard · Rating 4 out of 5]

This refreshingly slim volume, at about 100 pages, is like a cool drink of water on a hot day: energising. More of an essay than an actual book, and then neither a self-help manual nor a philosophical text, David Malouf's wide-arranging examination of the 'good' (materially sufficient) versus the 'happy' (inner contentment) is bracing and entertaining. He examines various examples of the good / happy scale to illustrate the slippery concept of contentment -- an increasingly elusive state in our media-saturated modern world. Interestingly, rather than ranting against our technology-driven society, Malouf proposes that this will invariably accelerate human evolution, and hence is not a bad thing in and of itself ... But will it make us happy? I particularly enjoyed his thoughts on the meaning of happiness in the context of the Declaration of Independence, and the discussion of sensuality and pleasure in the paintings of Rubens. By no means the final word on its subject, this still leaves one with a lot to ponder.

[Sai · Rating 2 out of 5]

David Malouf is unnecessarily verbose. He cannot seem to write a sentence without interjecting 20 other ideas in the middle. Besides his writing style, the book title is also very misleading. He talks more about art, poetry, and other tangential points than he does about happiness.

The only chapter that is really worth reading is the last chapter. Malouf seems to hold it together long enough to finally get his point across.

[Nez · Rating 2 out of 5]

Not worth the effort really.

[Laura Rittenhouse · Rating 3 out of 5]

This essay by David Malouf attempts to discuss happiness; what it means today (perhaps the lack of empty time?) compared to what it meant in the days of Plato (time for being still and alone, living internally and contemplatively), how its use in the US Declaration of Independence should be interpreted (life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness are hardly something that can be tested in a court of law) and why, as a species, humans continue to struggle and lose their grasp on happiness even when it appears we should be deliriously happy living in a secure word with healthy bodies and full bellies.

This essay covered much more than I expected and, to be honest, it left me behind through great swathes of its exploration. Bits of it interested me and even grabbed me. Some of it was quite thought provoking. But quite a lot of it just rambled along waxing philosophical and didn’t draw me in and make me go “ah ha”. Perhaps I was asking too much but I wanted more conclusions and less examination.

A fascinating topic that, even after 55 pages, feels unanswered. Maybe that's the point.

[RM · Rating 1 out of 5]

Amazing how reading an essay about the pursuit of happiness can lead one so far away from it.

[Rob Leacock · Rating 1 out of 5]

David Malouf should stick to fiction. Trying to describe the anatomy of happiness is a little like dissecting a joke until the reader laughs. Not engaging, not philosophically novel or revealing. An assembly of unthreaded quotations from other writers on the subject of what makes for happiness.

[Rueben · Rating 1 out of 5]

Complete waffle.

[Márcio · Rating 3 out of 5]

Embora a concepção da capa leve o leitor desavidado a pensar que o livro pode ser um manual acerca desse estado do ser, na verdade se trata de um pequeno ensaio em que o autor procura traçar o seu conceito atráves da história.

E o ensaio deixa muito a desejar, visto que aponta temas, começa a desenvolvê-los, mas não dá prosseguimento, restando um texto que apesar de bem escrito, permanece pobre em argumentos. Além do que parece confundir o que seja a felicidade.

As 3 estrelas são muito mais para os textos que complementam o livro, chamados de "Reações" e que, de fato, iluminam o tema.

[Pascale · Rating 1 out of 5]

A trite little book, rehashing well-known facts about the differences between the Greek and the Christian traditions, with a bit of amateur art history slap bang in the middle. None of what he says is wrong (as far as I can tell), but it yields no new insights or food for thought.

[carelessdestiny · Rating 1 out of 5]

It's strange how uninformative this tiny book is. It consists of sweeping generalisations that seem to have a no point beside the fact that artists over the ages have described moments of happiness. It's a kind of waste of time.

[Sarah Cupitt · Rating 5 out of 5]

Suppose you want a book that makes you question everything about your life’s purpose, what you want, and why - this is it. I’ve never had so many notes and takeaways from a book. For example, Malouf tells us not how to live if we want to be happy but why happiness still eludes so many of us now that the “chief sources of human unhappiness ... have largely been removed from our lives.” Although this personal take on happiness deals fascinatingly and, at times, brilliantly with the causes of happiness, the essay declines to consider its effects - or, if you will, its costs - which are complex, unforgiving and immense.

We need to free ourselves to magnify our sense of our humanity- to be more intensely, consciously, inventively, adventurously human (“ourselves,” if you like) - and to take pleasure in what grows out of this. Malouf’s essay is an elegant and humane corrective to vulgar utilitarianism. As Malouf observes, the trouble with trying to measure happiness is two-fold. First, we cannot measure happiness as such but only certain proxies for it, such as income, education or health. Second, in dealing only with general and quantifiable factors, statistical representations of happiness fail to account for how happiness is singular and subjective.

Favourite quotes:
- We must undo those powerful bonds, and from this day forth we may love this and that, but be wedded only to ourselves. That is to say, let the rest be ours, but not joined and glued so firmly to us that it cannot be detached without taking our skin along with it, and tearing away a piece of us. The greatest thing in the world is to know how to belong to yourself.
- Whatever our place in society, we see it as our right to enjoy. We judge a society, and the state that is based upon it, by how free and happy its people are, and the extent to which its institutions provide for that possibility . . . “the greatest happiness for the greatest number” - has become essential to any serious political platform.
- In an age of iPhones, Twitter and 24-hour news, it seems that constant unrest is now itself becoming a cure for our “existential state of anxiety.” We could simply blame the Americans (I am only half-joking).
- But we have no formal schools, such as the Greeks and Romans had, for training their elite in personal and social discipline; in care of the self - its preservation, that is, against vulnerability to externals, against loss of self-containment and self-sufficiency, loss of control.
- Originally “happiness” meant something entirely material and objective, nothing at all to do with feeling.
- Related to other words with the same stem, such as “happen,” “happening,” “happenstance,” “mishap,” “hapless,” it meant the state of being in good standing in the world of accident and event; of being lucky, favoured by the gods and therefore pleased with what life has brought you, and it is in this earlier sense of being well-used by society and the world that happiness appears in the works of social philosophers . . . the two forms in which we experience “happiness” - as good luck and as the pleasure we take in it - gave rise to two separate and very different meanings of the word. And just as the opposite to good luck may be various forms of ill-fortune, such as indigence, ill-health, failure etc., so too there are negative states of psychological being: discontent, dissatisfaction, anxiety, nervous unrest, stress, melancholia, depression etc.
- Freedom from social evils is one thing, and would go some way towards making people happier, but only in the material sense and to the extent that it would relieve them of some of the conditions for unhappiness. But Happiness, as Jefferson sets it here beside such absolute terms as Liberty and Life, seems to suggest more than this. Something larger and more uplifting, closer perhaps, among “the harmonizing sentiments of the day,” to Schiller’s Freude in the “Ode to Joy.”
- It is that this is a new form of “being” in which the Ego is by-passed not in the old way, by contemplation in the Greek and Roman sense of internal argument, or in the Eastern way through meditation - both of which require and make a virtue of silence - but through an overload that is the equivalent, in mental activity, of those extreme forms of physical activity that are a feature of some sports. We know that the high levels of endorphins released by intensive physical exercise produce euphoria. Perhaps the exercise of the brain, when it is involved in dealing with rapid stimulus and response, as in video games or in the sort of attention we call upon when we are multi-asking, creates in us a similar rush of wellbeing, of exhilaration, elation; an awareness of intense personal presence, in a fast-moving and richly crowded world that we are intensely in tune with, and where a new form of “happiness” may be found.
- The frank expression of sexual happiness in a poem, in words, is one thing. Painting and the depiction of sensual joy in paint - despite Horace’s famous phrase that links poetry and painting as sister arts thing quite other.
- What they mean is that the good life as previous generations might have conceived it has been attained. Medical science ensures that fewer children die in infancy, that most infectious diseases have been brought under control and the worst of them - smallpox, plague, TB, polio - have in most parts of the world been eliminated; that except for a few areas in Africa famine is no longer known among us; that in advanced societies like our own we are cared for by the state from cradle to grave.
- We do complain, of course, but our complaints are trivial, mostly ritual. Our politicians lack vision, interest rates are too high, the pace of modern living is too hectic; the young have no sense of duty, family values are in decline. The good life, it seems, is not enough.
- We are still, somehow, unsatisfied, and this dissatisfaction, however vaguely conceived, is deeply felt. If pressed, our friends or neighbours will probably tell us that what they are suffering from is “stress”; a sense, again vaguely conceived, that in the world about them, as they feel it and as it touches their lives, all is not well. They do not, in the end, feel secure or safe. This dissatisfaction, this lack of a final assurance of safety, is our later version of what the Protagoras identified as “unrest.”
- Freed at last of the identification of sensual pleasure with shame or sin, the body sees itself as being made for enjoyment but also for display. It is an advertisement, both to others and to ourselves, of otherwise an vague and unimaginable self, a product of make-up and makeover, of disciplined care, that is to be seen now as a moral as well as a physical achieve- ment.
- Failure now, either of image or performance, is the new shame: a source for some of new forms of humiliatic misery.
- Most of the conditions that might have made us “miserable have been legislated for and ameliorated. But the externals that govern our lives seem more alien and impersonal in their new form than in the old.
- One consequence of the Epimetheus version of our condition is that history is forever unfinished, forever in process; endless because our needs are endless. Technology until now has always met those needs and solved whatever problems it may have created along the way; that is what technology is for. But will it always do so?
- The Earth was local crops and seasons, a kitchen garden that each day produced bread for the table, and olives and greens; it was dawn and sunset and age-old weather rhymes: red sky at night, shepherd’s delight, red sky at morning, shepherd’s warning.
- But happiness is singular; each case speaks only for itself. It is also subjective. It belongs to the world of what is felt, what cannot be presented or numbered on a scale because it cannot be seen. It belongs to life as it is perceived from within by a single and singular woman or man, and we have only to consider for a moment how inconsistent, how contradictory and perverse any one of us can be, to see how difficult it is to enter another man’s feelings, especially about himself, and how impossible it might be, in the confusion and mess in there, for even the man himself to say, “I am happy.”
- These days we can travel around the globe at hundreds of kilometres an hour and project ourselves into space at several times that speed; but in some part of ourselves we are still bone-heavy creatures tied to the gravitational pull of the Earth, lumbering along as our great-grandfathers did, and the hundreds of generations before them, at four hundred paces an hour, and tiring.
- But like a good many writers, even this far into the twenty-first century, I find that the pace at which I work in longhand - at which my arm, my hand moves in the act of writing - has what is for me a “natural” relationship to the speed at which my mind works and I do not want to let go of a relationship that seems to be peculiarly mine. Writing by hand slows the thought process, allowing thinking to think again, mid-thought, and leaving open the possibility of second thoughts.
- The fact is, a man can be happy in even the most miserable conditions if the world he is in, and has to deal with, still has what he feels to be “human” dimensions; is still proportionate to what his body can recognise and encompass.
- What he achieves, briefly, intermittently, is moments of self-fulfilment, something different and more accessible, more democratic we might call it, than self-containment. But he achieves it only at moments.
- What most alarms us in our contemporary world, what unsettles and scares us, is the extent to which the forces that shape our lives are no longer personal - they know nothing of us; and to the extent that we know nothing of them - cannot put a face to them, cannot find in them anything we recognise as human we cannot deal with them. We feel like small, powerless creatures in the coils of an invisible monster, vast but insubstantial, that cannot be grasped or wrestled with.
- Yet none of those things makes any of us truly happy people. And there’s the rub: pleasurable moments (like Ivan Denisovich’s when he looked back over his “undarkened” day) do not make us happy people. It is being profoundly, rootedly happy - living a happy life - as opposed to merely content or fleetingly euphoric, that presents more of a problem. For that sort of happiness some other kind of awareness, underlying all our days, is needed.
- Most importantly, the devout belief here is that a better appearance delivers not just happiness but a new self. In the ubiquitous human makeover programs, a new self emerges from the old like a butterfly from a chrysalis.
- Now the shift towards self-admiration means being famous is considered a kind of new right. Perhaps even an obligation. Youngsters in the West increasingly declare being famous as their most important goal in life. In one study, US college students felt that having high self-esteem, feeling good about oneself, was more important than any other value: good grades, friendship, love and even sex. This narcissism is given endless means of expression through reality TV and social networking.
- Only rarely do we remember that surveys regularly indicate that Australia remains one of the best places in the world in which to live and that we have little cause for complaint. The UNDP’s Human Development Index of 2010, for example, placed us second behind Norway as the most developed country in the world.
- Malouf seems much more alive to the barrier to happiness as it was in Freud’s time, when the central problem was sexual repression. Yet the hysterias born. of sexual inhibition have long since given way to quite different problems, disorders of the self such as narcissism. Love is turned inward; for all too many there is no Other.
- Our relentless pursuit of happiness, and our overweening sense of entitlement to it, is taking us all straight over the cliff. Happiness, in other words, is costing us the earth. That’s funny, right?

[Sammy · Rating 3 out of 5]

An interesting read although I'm not sure I'd recommend it. Malouf explores the idea of the contrast between self-sufficient happiness, as discussed by everyone from Classic philosophers to the Renaissance, contrasted with how we approach happiness in an era when our basic needs are all met, and the issues facing us are diffuse and global. All done by way of exploring art and philosophy throughout the centuries.

Wonderfully intelligent, but also sometimes verbose and opaque in a way that I'm not sure is useful. Malouf will throw in a quote from "Othello" or a reference to Montaigne, assuming the reader can track all of it, without so much as the endnotes traditional in this series. Disappointing in that manner. Also, some of his thoughts are evidently those of an older person; nothing wrong with that, but when he remarks that many writers still prefer to use pen and paper rather than a computer, I think he is speaking more for his generation (who grew up without such items) than mine. Engaging, however.

[mxd · Rating 3 out of 5]

I really love the way this book prodded at me and sent me off on my own mini-pursuits of the meaning of happiness (cheese, apparently, followed by historically inaccurate but aesthetically pleasing period dramas). I loved the portion in which Malouf talks about the kind of happiness one might have wanted in ye olde days, that which comes from a sense of peace, stillness and quiet.

Malouf makes the observation that today we seem to want the opposite, cramming every still corner with activity, perhaps to try and ignore the ultimate peace, stillness and quiet that is deaaaaath. It was a portion that led me to further grim thought, but one I enjoyed all the same (so one Nicholas Parsons point for that then).

For a light and short read, I think there was a substantial amount of food for thought here. Also, I have a feeling that books on happiness that are too long are only going to end up making you miserable, so, nice little read.

[Alexa Thompson · Rating 3 out of 5]

it was alright. hard to follow, but my own lack of reading in philosophy/history genre attributes to that. didn’t retain much, however, the ending left a good perspective that is reminiscent of viktor e. fowler’s mans search for meaning!

live life within short lapses of recognizable, almost tangible happiness. understand that it’s fleeting and relish on that reality. live a personable life and don’t fuss too much on concerns out of reach.

[Peter Metcalfe · Rating 5 out of 5]

A great dissertation of the achieving of happiness

[Lennox Nicholson · Rating 4 out of 5]

Still looking.

[Carol · Rating 3 out of 5]

Enjoyable read, erudite man, it attempted more than it could deliver. No regrets.

[Mark Bennett · Rating 2 out of 5]

Too deep.

[Alex · Rating 2 out of 5]

Ah; to be revered enough to have my lazy musings sold as philosophy.

[Brenton · Rating 3 out of 5]

The back and forth of competing essays in the correspondence is lovely. This is now another periodical I'm going to have to be reading.

[D · Rating 3 out of 5]

Excellent inquiry into a perennial quest.

Montaigne: The greatest thing in the world is to know how to belong to yourself."

Sir Henry Wotton wrote: Character of a HappyL ife. Wotton, an intimate of John Done at Oxford.

Marquis de Condorcet understood the power of futurity. In 1793, in his Sketch for a Historical Picture of the Progress of the Human Mind, he laid out a theory of "History as Progress." First published after Condorcet's death in 1795, it replaced forever what had till then been an unchallenged orthodoxy: that history was a closed system, a storehouse of exempla; of human character-types, events, movements, that were fixed in number and endlessly repeatable from age to age, so that for every apparently new event or great man or 'change' there was an existing prototype or model. Condorcet's idea of Progress was one of those Copernican moments when a reality, as we had previously taken it to be, was turned on its head.

The classical moralists recommended moderation -- as a guarantee of psychological balance as well as good health - nec nimis (nothing in excess) is the phrase that Horace passed down to us. They did not think of carnal pleasure as sinful or a reason for shame. The body was not holy - a temple as the Church would later call it - to be preserved from unhallowed use; it was meant to be used - that is, enjoyed.

Ovid wrote his Ars Amatoria, a cheeky exercise in youthful exhibitionism and the pursuit of sexual adventure in the big city - when he was nearly 50.

Sexual joy is too overwhelmingly physical to be ignored.

There are parts of the world where sexual energy and its joyful expression were not incompatible with a sense of the sacred or the practice of faith, like India. Sculptured figures rejoice in voluptuous poses and engagements of every kind, monuments to the sacredness of the flesh, and to moments of carnal and spiritual union.

What most alarms us in our contemporary world, what unsettles and scares us, is the extent to which the forces that shape our lives are no longer personal - they know nothing of us; and to the extent that we know nothing of them - cannot put a face to them, cannot find in them anything we recognise as human - we cannot deal with them. We feel like small, powerless creatures in the coils of an invisible monster, vast but insubstantial, that cannot be grasped or wrestled with.

[Lia · Rating 3 out of 5]

No rating for this one.
I like the QE. This is an older one I had not read, I found in my library.
More about art and philosophy rather than happiness as such. Then again. Perhaps they are all the same.
I always find Malouf a challenge to read. I feel he is at times, unnecessarily verbose and convoluted.

[Chris Walker · Rating 2 out of 5]

David Malouf seems to suggest in this essay that the happiness experienced by Solzehenitsyn's character, Ivan Denisovich Shukhov after surviving a day in a Gulag labour camp, is somehow admirable. I found this very unsatisfying. Solzehenitsyn certainly shows in that book human beings' remarkable adeptness at becoming accustomed to changed circumstances (what the psychologists call 'hedonic adaptation') and that 'counting one's blessings' is one technique to achieve happiness. But is that all we can aspire to? After an interesting foray into how the Greek philosophers understood happiness and the evolution of the idea of human happiness as a right to be pursued, Malouf seems to lose his way in suggesting how we can achieve the happy life in modern times when the idea of progress in human affairs has been badly shaken. While he dwells on the trend in western nations of our obsession with the body and ponders if the human brain is evolving faster through its exposure to video games and the internet, these ideas don't seem to bring him to any philosophical resting place beyond Shukhov's strategy. By contrast, the author of Hamlet's Blackberry takes counsel from earlier philosophers to suggest a number of strategies for happiness in modern times.

[Manick Govinda · Rating 3 out of 5]

Life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness is indeed a wonderful political aspiration, and I'm a huge believer of Jefferson's marvellous piece of politics as poetry.

This book is a nice easy afternoon read, but I have problems with Malouf's distinction between happiness as experienced through the good life, which can be met by material means, and the happiness which we can somehow attain in the most dreadful of circumstances...he's a little too dismissive of material happiness. However, the other sources of happiness - sexual desire for example, come across wonderfully well through his focus on the pleasures of the body as exemplified in the paintings of Rubens and Rembrandt. The overriding good thing about this book is that we as human beings are constantly striving to seek this elusive state of happiness, and actually we'll never be content and may never reach it...but the journey's worth taking.

[Kent Winward · Rating 4 out of 5]

Malouf's philosophical essay on leading a happy life raises a lot of intriguing questions about what we must do to live a happy life. I was particularly intrigued with the thought that we are in the midst of an evolutionary change in how we relate to the world and his musings on how that impacts our ability to have a happy life. The essay is book-ended with quotes from One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich, making the point that limitations may be an aid to happiness -- a dismaying thought in a world that discourages limitations. I found his appeal to anchoring happiness in the body an intriguing thought as well, particularly since the body is the ultimate human limitation.

[Kevin · Rating 3 out of 5]

Well written prose, interesting analysis of Jefferson's shortening of the Virginian constitution to "Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness" allowed the definition of "happiness" to shift away from freedom of ills to an inner emotion, and equally fun connection between Plato's Protagoras (and its explanation of essential unrest) and Heidegger's techne/craft, but doesn't seem to have a strong center or original thesis (we're less content now because we're distant from, ignorant of, and powerless against the global forces that shape our freedoms; we should revel in the moments we have and not look too far ahead).

[Alan · Rating 4 out of 5]

Essentially, the text explores how understanding happiness in a historical context helps us think about why so many people are not happy today, despite the technological progress we have made.

Happiness is one of the more ambiguous words in our language and the way we think about it reveals a lot about ourselves and our culture. Malouf searches ancient texts and classic paintings to learn different ways people defined happiness and his findings are very interesting.

In the final chapter Malouf helps us look at the way we think about happiness in our own age.

[Wide Eyes, Big Ears! · Rating 4 out of 5]

I quite enjoyed this philosophical and historical exploration of "The Happy Life", though I think Malouf wrongly conflates happiness and contentment. His secondary title: "The search for contentment in the modern world" is far more important to me than feeling happy. Malouf raises more questions than he answers, but I liked his description of humanity as intrinsically restless, and I loved his closing observation that contentment seems to come when we feel we can cope with what's being thrown at us. To me, it's all about accepting what we can't change.

[Jennifer · Rating 4 out of 5]

A lovely little antitode to your First World Problems that draws heavily on history, literature, and art to address the questions of happiness and (among other things) what it actually means to have the right to pursue it. The Happy Life earns my vote for Volume Most Deserving of Appearing as Half of a Boxed Gift Set with Wallace's This is Water.

[Emily · Rating 3 out of 5]

There's a 3-4 page section with a creation story that was worth 5 stars. The rest was only half compelling. A short read, though, and I liked that it an essay of happiness through the centuries instead of the usual self-help style.