Happiness Is Bullshit Revisited

Why You Don't Actually Want to Be Happy

Photo by Tim Mossholder on Unsplash.

The first post on this blog was called “Happiness Is Bullshit.” It’s one of my most popular posts but also the most controversial. Out of all the things I’ve called bullshit on (e.g., opinions, money, the meaning of life), happiness got the most pushback. Some people were overtly hostile. Others were genuinely baffled. People really struggled to wrap their heads around the idea that nobody wants to be happy.

I get it. I can barely wrap my head around it myself. It’s a deeply counterintuitive idea. But the counterintuitiveness should not be held against it. Lots of true ideas are counterintuitive, from evolution to quantum entanglement to the law of comparative advantage. Our untutored intuitions—the things we can or cannot imagine—are poor guides to reality.

This post is a sequel to / remake of Happiness Is Bullshit. I want to revisit the topic in a more in-depth and rigorous way, because I’m no longer burdened by the desire to kick things off with a bang and attract subscribers. The blog has matured, I’ve got plenty of subscribers, and I can now afford to bore a few people with nuance.

The goal of Happiness Is Bullshit was not merely to show that happiness is bullshit (in the sense of being unattainable), but to give a plausible theory for what happiness is—how it evolved, how it works, what function it serves. I tried to convey the gist of the theory with an analogy: the “getting warmer” signal in a guessing game. The function of happiness is to improve our predictions about how good things are going to be. I described the theory in technical language in a footnote. At last, I can unbury the footnote and put it right here:

The brain computes, using evolved and learned priors, which of various outcomes have the highest expected value (in terms of fitness proxies). The higher the expected value of an outcome, the greater the motivation—i.e. the amount of attention and energy mobilized—to pursue it. “Happiness” is triggered by a positive prediction error. We feel happy when the actual value of an outcome turns out to be greater than its expected value. This error causes us to rapidly mobilize energy (if more energy is needed), rapidly relax (if energy is no longer needed), attend to (i.e., “savor”) the outcome, simulate it in working memory, determine which features were counterfactually unique to it, upweight those features’ expected value, and encode them in long-term memory. As a result, those unique features will appear more valuable to us (i.e. more energizing, more attention-grabbing) the next time we encounter them. This is just another way of saying that we are “positively reinforced”—i.e., the features that were counterfactually unique to the outcome now have a higher expected value than they did before. The more frequently we experience the outcome, the better we get at predicting its value (i.e. the prediction error decreases), and the less “happy” we feel when we experience it (i.e., the less attention and reinforcement is needed). Eventually, after many repetitions of this process, we stop “liking” the outcome while still continuing to “want” it: that is, we continue to value and pursue it but are no longer surprised by it, attentive to it, or further reinforced by it. This model is an amalgam of the prediction error theory of dopamine and the internal regulatory variable theory of motivation.

This theory has many testable implications, but here’s one of them: the frequency and intensity of happiness should decline with age. Why? Because as we get more familiar with the good things in life, we get better at predicting their features, our prediction errors decline, and our happiness wanes. As I put it in the post, “We’re not pursuing happiness so much as chasing it away.”

And what do you know? This hypothesis has recently received a stunning confirmation from a meta analysis of over 400 studies. The meta analysis found that “positive affect”—i.e., the frequency and intensity of reported happy and joyful states—declines “from age 9 for almost the entire time until age 94 (d = -1.71).”

Take a look at that effect size (d = -1.71). In case you’re not familiar, that is beyond enormous. An effect size of that magnitude is virtually unheard of in psychological science. For comparison, most psychology findings hover around d = 0.3. And over 400 studies! With no evidence of publication bias! Reality is trying to tell us something folks, and it is not being coy.

Now, because we’re being nuanced Spartans, we must add a caveat: the meta analysis found different results for “life satisfaction,” which does not decline like happiness does; rather, it ebbs and flows as we age. But to measure “life satisfaction,” you have to ask people a bunch of vague question about how much they’re getting what they want. Saying that we want “life satisfaction” is like saying “we want what we want.” It’s circular and devoid of meaning. To say that we want to feel the emotion of “happiness,” on the other hand, is not circular: it’s just wrong.

Here’s another prediction of the theory: happiness should decline with repeated exposure to the thing that makes us happy (e.g., the new car, the new job, etc.). Not only does this prediction match common sense, it has tons of evidence in its favor. It’s called “habituation,” and psychologists have been doing research on it for decades (see here for an overview).

Now if we were pursuing happiness, we’d be left with a puzzle: why aren’t we constantly and frantically switching between activities and romantic partners like Jason Statham in Crank? Why do we commit to spouses, careers, hobbies, friendships, ideologies, and communities over decades, long after we’ve habituated to them and harvested most of their good vibes? Because, you fool, we’re not pursuing happiness.

Another prediction of the theory is that happiness and motivation will be neurologically separable. As I put it in Happiness Is Bullshit:

We need to make a distinction between happiness (enjoying stuff) and motivation (wanting stuff). These are different things that live in different parts of the brain. You can enjoy something without wanting it, and you can want something without enjoying it. For example, I enjoy meditating, but I never want to do it. Doomscrolling upsets me, but I often want to do it.

This prediction is supported by a large body of research in neuroscience. From Berridge & Robinson (2016):

…The brain circuitry that mediates the psychological process of ‘wanting’ a particular reward is dissociable from circuitry that mediates the degree to which it is ‘liked’. Incentive salience or ‘wanting’, a form of motivation, is generated by…mesolimbic dopamine. By comparison, ‘liking’, or the actual pleasurable impact of reward consumption, is mediated by smaller and more fragile neural systems…

The theory also converges with the prediction error theory of dopamine. From Glimcher, 2011 (italics mine):

Theory and data indicate that the phasic activity of midbrain dopamine neurons encodes a reward prediction error used to guide learning... Activity in these dopaminergic neurons is now believed to signal that a subject’s estimate of the value of current and future events is in error and indicate the magnitude of this error. This is a kind of combined signal that most scholars active in dopamine studies believe adjusts synaptic strengths until the subject’s estimate of the value of current and future events is accurately encoded.

So there’s converging behavioral and neurobiological evidence for the theory. It is precise, mechanistic, and consistent with everything we know about how brains and evolution work. All told, it’s a pretty good theory.

Now what about the theory that we’re pursuing happiness? That everything we do is part of a grand quest to put positive vibes in our heads? The idea that happiness is a mental substance of intrinsic goodness whose job is to motivate us to do things—a neurological carrot dangling in front of us?

It’s a terrible theory—an intellectual catastrophe. As I argued in a Twitter/X thread:

Happiness is not a piece of food, and suffering is not a sharp object. Happiness and suffering are specialized brain processes. They exist because they were brought into existence by natural selection. Which means they have a function.

But their function cannot be to motivate us, because that makes no sense. Motivation doesn’t need them. Motivational circuits are connected to our hearts and muscles. They can literally push us around and make us do stuff. No happiness or suffering is needed.

Think of a thermostat. It does not need happiness or suffering to keep our homes at the right temperature, does it? No, it just needs to be wired up right. A diagram of a thermostat needs no boxes for "happiness" or "suffering". Neither does a diagram of motivation.

It also conflicts with the logic of evolution:

Biological fitness is not in our heads—it is in the world. It lives in the approval or disapproval of our peers, their sexual attraction to us, their willingness to protect us, and in the material conditions that nourish our bodies. These are the sorts of things we're pursuing—not happiness.

And no, we're not pursuing the mere idea of these things. Mere ideas don’t promote fitness. We want these actual things in the actual world. Apes that were deceived or mistaken about these things did not become our ancestors.

But what if happiness was correlated with biological fitness in ancestral environments? Couldn’t that explain our desire for happiness? Nope:

Consider what would happen if there was a connection between fearfulness and fitness in squirrels—i.e., more fearful squirrels were less likely to get eaten. Would squirrels evolve to pursue fear as a goal? No, they would just become more fearful.

For the same reason, humans would never evolve to pursue happiness as a goal. They would just evolve to be happier. Organisms don't evolve to pursue stuff in their heads, because evolution can just go ahead and get them that stuff, by rewiring their brains.

To show you just how confused this way of thinking is, consider a mechanic trying to get a car to accelerate more quickly. He asks another mechanic, “How do I get this car to go faster?” The other mechanic responds: “Whenever the car accelerates, give it a goodie. Like some ice cream.”

When it comes to our nervous systems, evolution is like a mechanic. It can restructure us or rearrange our parts. It can engineer us to seek out different things, in the same way that a car can be engineered to accelerate more quickly. To say that evolution needs to give us some goodie for doing fitness-enhancing things is about as silly saying the mechanic needs to give his car ice cream for working properly. The mechanic can just fix the car if it’s not working. Likewise, evolution can just fix us if we’re not working.

And there’s another problem with this “goodie theory” of motivation. If we need a neurological goodie to motivate us, then the goodie itself must be motivating too, right? If we didn’t want the goodie, it wouldn’t motivate us. But now we’re left with a troublesome question: how does evolution get us to want the goodie? Does it have to give us another goodie—a goodie for seeking the goodie? And then a goodie for seeking the goodie for seeking the goodie?

We have entered an infinite regress. The only way out is to say that some things need no goodie; we can just be motivated to get them directly. But then why aren’t we motivated to get all the the things we want directly? Why do we need the goodie at all?

We don’t. It explains nothing. It does nothing. It’s theoretical dead weight, akin to the prime mover in theology and the res cogitans in cartesian dualism. For the love of god psychologists, get rid of it.

But maybe you’re not convinced just yet. Maybe you still want to put good vibes in your head—or think you do. If so, allow me to add more nuance to what I’m claiming.

Here some ways we don’t quite want happiness, but come very close to wanting it:

1) We want to make other people happy.

We sometimes surprise our friends with gifts or try to cheer them up when they’re down. In these cases, our goal is not merely to give our friend a gift or say something nice, but to violate their expectations in a positive way—i.e., to make them feel happy.

This makes sense. We want to show our loved ones we care about them, even more than they might have expected. What doesn’t make sense is when we naively swap in ourselves for other people—when we assume we want to make ourselves happy too.

Now, I can understand why we’d make this mistake. The stuff we give to other people often overlaps with the stuff we want for ourselves. So it makes sense that if we want to make others happy, we should want to make ourselves happy too.

But it’s a non sequitur. After all, we sometimes want to tickle people, but that doesn’t mean we want to tickle ourselves—indeed we couldn’t, even if we wanted to. We also sometimes plan surprise parties for people, but that doesn’t mean we want to plan surprise parties for ourselves—indeed we couldn’t, even if we wanted to. Now replace “tickling” and “surprise parties” with “happiness.”

2) We want to avoid bad things.

We’d like to have our bodies intact and properly functioning. We’d prefer to avoid going bankrupt or becoming social pariahs. But people confuse these obvious goals with the goal of avoiding unhappiness or bad vibes in our heads. As I wrote in “You Actually Want to Suffer.”

We obviously want to avoid making terrible mistakes and hurting the people we love. What I’m saying is that we want to experience the suffering caused by those bad things if they do happen. If we truly make a mistake, we want to feel regret. If we truly hurt a loved one, we want to feel guilt.

Think about a toothache. In this case, the feeling (“my tooth hurts”) and the thing itself (tooth damage) are hard to tease apart. This is because pain is our primary means of knowing about the thing itself: it is a sense, akin to seeing or hearing, called nociception, whose job is to sense tissue damage. So when we’re in pain, what we’re avoiding is what our nociceptors are informing us about, namely the type, location, and severity of the tissue damage.

Likewise, when you’re in fear, what you’re avoiding is what your eyes and ears are informing you about—say, a lion moving toward you. But you don’t want your eyes to stop informing you of the approaching lion, any more than you want your nociceptors to stop informing you of real tissue damage. When you see a lion, you want to avoid the actual lion—not the sensations that tell you “there’s a lion.” When you withdraw your hand from a hot plate, you want to avoid burning your actual hand—not the sensations that tell you “you’re burning your hand.”

If I’m right about this, then it should be possible to feel pain without wanting to avoid it. This could happen if you have good reason to think the pain (or the nociception) is misleading. For example, let’s say you know the salsa verde is not actually scalding your tongue or giving you nerve damage. Your tongue is fine and will recover shortly. Or let’s say you know an intense workout is not actually shredding your muscles or pushing you to the brink of death. “No pain no gain,” as they say. When you know the salsa is fine and the workout is good for you, the motivation to avoid the “burn” of either one can dissipate. You might even actively seek them out. Many people enjoy intense workouts and spicy food (I’m one of them). This demonstrates that painful sensations per se are not aversive. Rather, what’s aversive is your brain’s best estimate—using all the knowledge at its disposal—of how badly (if at all) your body is being damaged.

3) We want to avoid needless suffering.

Then again, in a few rare cases, you may want to avoid the suffering itself. This can happen when you know the suffering is unnecessary or dysfunctional. If you’re suffering from chronic pain and there’s nothing wrong with you, you’ll likely want the pain to go away. If you’re about to get a life-saving surgery, the pain from being vivisected is unnecessary and will make it harder for the surgeon to save your life.

But most suffering is not like this. As a general rule, suffering has a point—it serves an important function—and most of us are well-aware of this fact. That’s why, for the most part, we want to suffer (or rather, we want to suffer in response to genuinely bad things).

4) We want valuable long-term goals.

From an evolutionary perspective, such goals would include rearing offspring to maturity, becoming a valued member of our community, ascending a social hierarchy, or outcompeting rival groups for power and resources. These goals give us a sense of “meaning,” which explains why people find meaning in family, altruism, careerism, and (depressingly) hatred of outgroups. The function of “meaning,” I surmise, is to enable short-term fitness costs in pursuit of long-term fitness gains. The more “meaningful” a goal seems, the bigger the short-term sacrifices we should be willing to make to achieve it.

What this suggests is that having valuable long-term goals is good for you, evolutionarily. If you have no children to care for, no viable path to high status, no way to make yourself valuable to your community, or no tribe to rally, then you’re in a bad spot, evolutionarily. You’re adrift, aimless. Maybe this corresponds to feelings of “depression” or “ennui.” I’m not sure.

But the point is: we’d like to avoid this state. And we’d like to be in the opposite state: the state of pursuing valuable long-term goals (and, ideally, making good progress on them). Confusingly, a lot of people call this long-term-goal-pursuing state “happiness.” But more often, people call it “meaning” or “purpose.” Whatever you decide to call it, I’m okay saying we want it.

But wait. That doesn’t mean we want the mere feeling of it. We don’t want to be tricked into thinking we’re raising healthy children or becoming valuable members of our communities. It would be very bad if somebody lied to us about the health of our children or flattered our egos while secretly despising us. Even if we’d be happier living a lie, we’d prefer to be in touch with reality.

So again, we’re not seeking vibes in our heads. We’re seeking real things in the world. When given the choice between real meaning and fake meaning, we’re going to choose real meaning, even if the fake meaning feels nicer.

5) We want to perceive beautiful things.

A lot of people respond to my claim that happiness is bullshit by saying, “But what about my desire to be in nature? To gaze at a sunset? Those things make me feel happy!” My response is that yes, of course, you want to be around beautiful things. We humans have an aesthetic sense that likely evolved to facilitate perceptual information gathering. But wanting to be around beauty is different from wanting to be happy. Yes, beauty is enticing, but it is the beauty itself—not the happiness it elicits—that you’re seeking. I know, the two are hard to tease apart, as with pain and bodily harm, but let’s give it a try.

Suppose you have two choices: gaze at something beautiful (say, the most gorgeous sunset imaginable), or gaze at something hideous (say, a person horribly vomiting and there’s blood in the vomit). You have two choices: 1) gaze at the sunset, or 2) gaze at the person horribly vomiting blood, but you’re under the influence of a drug that makes you feel like you’re gazing at the sunset. If you only cared about happiness, you’d be indifferent between 1) and 2). It’d be a toss-up—you’d feel equally happy in either case. But I’m guessing it’s not a toss-up, is it? No, I’m guessing you’d prefer to gaze at the sunset. That’s because your brain evolved to pursue beauty—not happiness.

6) We want what makes other people happy.

One of the most common objections I get is drugs. What about people who do drugs? Aren’t they taking the drugs so they can feel good? As strange as it sounds, the answer is no. People don’t take drugs to feel good.

Consider the following statements:

• “The pizza was pure bliss.”

• “The massage felt incredible.”

• “The hotel was heaven.”

You kind of want to stay at that hotel now, don’t you? You’re keen on getting that massage and eating that pizza. When something makes another person feel happy, that suggests the thing is very very good. So good, in fact, that it exceeded the person’s expectations of how good a thing can be.

Happiness, like many emotions, can be vicarious. We want to try things that make other people feel good, because other people’s happiness is an excellent cue to what things are valuable in the world—what is worth seeking out.

Okay, so now we have an explanation for why people are interested in trying drugs. Other people say the drug is amazing—it’s pure bliss—and we want to try the things that make others feel good.

So let’s say you try the drug. Sure enough, it makes you feel good, and the good feelings recalibrate you to want the drug more, per the theory. So you do it again, and it makes you want the drug more. Each time you take the drug, the “high”—the good feelings—get milder and milder, because it gets more and more predictable, and your brain needs less and less recalibration, per the theory. Pretty soon, you can perfectly anticipate how the drug will make you feel, and your motivations are perfectly aligned with the sky-high—and erroneous—value of the drug. You’re an addict. You desperately want the drug, but it no longer makes you feel good. It has destroyed your life.

Now, if you were seeking good vibes in your head, this story would make no sense. As the high got milder and milder, you’d want the drug less and less, and you’d naturally quit. But that is not what happens. The opposite happens. As the drug makes you less and less happy, you want it more and more. What this implies is that the addict wants the drug—not the high.

7) We want happiness as a means to achieving some other goal.

My argument is that we don’t want happiness as an end in itself. It does not lie at the heart of our motivations; rather, ancestral fitness proxies (e.g., food, status, beauty, safety) lie at the heart of our motivations. But sometimes we want things instrumentally, as a means to getting some ancestral fitness proxy. For example, we want money as a means to getting pizza or status or sunglasses. But we don’t want money as an end in itself. If all currency collapsed, we’d stop wanting money.

This means that it is possible for us to want happiness in the same way we want money: instrumentally. How might that happen? I’m not sure, but one possibility is that happiness (like money) could become a status symbol. In this case, we’d want to display how happy we are to signal that we’re high-status. I suspect this is true and explains a lot of what occurs on Instagram.

Another possibility is that happiness could become a way of signaling how nice you are. Happy people are generally easy to get along with. They cheerfully do what you say and help you out when you’re in a jam. So we might try to show others that we’re happy—or care about being happy—to signal that we’re sweethearts. There’s some evidence for this hypothesis here.

Yet another possibility is that we want to appear intellectually consistent. If we make up a bullshit story about how we’re pursuing happiness, it makes us look irrational if we act in ways that contradict that bullshit narrative. “Why do you keep doomscrolling on social media if it makes you so unhappy? You’re being so irrational!”

So if we want to signal our superior rationality, we might comb through the scientific literature in positive psychology, harvest it for empirically-validated happiness interventions, and restructure our lives to optimally maximize happiness. Turns out a guy named Luke Muehlhauser did this to win status points among his “rationalist” peers in 2011. And—what do you know?—he won a lot of status points for it.

So people often try to appear happy, or pursue happiness, as a strategy for achieving their more unflattering social goals—e.g., signaling and status-seeking. Of course, they don’t want to admit they have these goals because, well, they’re unflattering. Since self-persuasion is a great way to persuade others, people often genuinely convince themselves that they’re pursuing happiness, and get annoyed when people (like me) tell them they’re wrong.

8) We want the things that made us happy in the past.

The job of happiness is to reorient us, to nudge our motivations and expectations in the right direction—i.e., toward valuable things in the world. That means that whatever directions we’re heading in right now must have been shaped by all the happiness we felt in the past. So when we reflect on what all our strivings have in common, we might realize that they’re all rooted in happy memories. This creates the illusion that we’re pursuing happiness, because we mistake correlation for causation. We assume that pursuing causes happiness. It doesn’t. Happiness causes pursuing.

9) We imagine that we’d like to be happy.

When we imagine being happy, it seems pleasant. “Sure, I’d like to have more of that feeling,” we naively think. And so we conclude, erroneously, that we want to be happy.

What’s the problem here? The problem is that our imaginations are crappy. As I wrote in Imagination Is Bullshit:

Our imaginations are flawed and feeble programs built by natural selection to navigate small tribes and small-to-medium-sized objects… Bereft of subtlety, statistical literacy, humility, or insight into the nature of our own minds, our imaginations are faulty equipment with which to understand the human condition in the 21st century.

So how are our imaginations bullshitting us here? Well for one thing, emotions don’t happen in a vacuum; they’re triggered by, and revolve around, specific things in the world. Hunger is about finding food, fear is about getting out of danger, and happiness is about adjusting to new and awesome things. To imagine hunger untethered to food or growling stomachs, fear untethered to danger or threats, or happiness untethered to new and awesome things, is to imagine feelings that do not—and cannot—exist.

So when you imagine “happiness” in a vacuum, disconnected from any kind of real-world cause or cognitive/behavioral effect, your imagination is bullshitting you. It is presenting you with something impossible, like psychic powers or Superman flying through the air without means of propulsion. Just because we can imagine Superman and psychic powers doesn’t mean they’re real. Likewise, just because we can imagine happiness in a vacuum doesn’t mean it’s real, and it certainly doesn’t mean that we’re striving for it.

Let’s fix our crappy imaginations and try to imagine something more realistic—say, being happy because you got a promotion. In this case, the scenario no longer tells you very much. Sure, it might be nice to get a promotion, but is that because you want to be happy, or because you want a promotion? It’s not clear.

To disentangle the thing in the world from the happiness it elicits, let’s imagine something that normally would not elicit happiness. Imagine your child just died of cancer. And yet, in this imaginary scenario, you’re not feeling the worst possible sadness a human can experience. Instead, you’re blissed out with a shit-eating grin, happy as a clam, living your best life.

I’m guessing the happiness no longer seems so desirable in this case, does it? No, I’m guessing it seems deeply fucked-up. What this reveals is that, again, we’re not actually striving for happiness. We want to feel happy when it’s appropriate for the situation, and we want to feel sad when it’s appropriate for the situation. If you felt happy while betraying everyone you loved and destroying everything you cared about, there would be something deeply fucked-up about you. We don’t want to be deeply fucked-up, even if it would make us happier.

Taking stock

Now, I acknowledge that these nine things are really similar to wanting happiness—so similar that it is very easy to confuse them with it. But “similar” is not “same,” and I stand by my claim that we do not actually want to feel the emotion of happiness as an end in itself.

Trust me: when I got really good at meditating, I could give myself all the happiness I wanted, and I didn’t want it. I found it boring and unappealing. A desire for happiness is not what is driving our behavior. It is a terrible way to predict our behavior. It is a naive way of thinking about human psychology that will lead you into a morass of confusion, contradiction, and infinite regress. Understanding the things we actually want, by contrast, opens up a whole vista of insights about the human mind. It sheds light on addiction, Instagram, and the glory days of our youth.

Okay, at this point, I’m assuming you’re more sympathetic to my thesis than you were before. Maybe I’ve even convinced you. Now we can ask the more interesting question: why were people so riled up by the idea that happiness is bullshit? Why were they so, dare I say, offended by it?

The answer is in the next and final section, which I really think is the best part.

Happiness is a sacred value in WEIRD cultures

I’ve thought a lot about sacred values—honor, equality, diversity, wisdom, beauty, tradition, etc. I have a whole complicated academic paper on the topic here. I also briefly wrote about sacred values in a post called “Status Is Weird.” So let me fill you in on my thinking.

Status is a weird thing, and seeking status is an even weirder thing. Status symbols are capricious and volatile, rapidly morphing and inverting across time and space. Why? Because all too often, seeking status lowers your status. We have a variety of terms for status-seekers: snobs, blowhards, egomaniacs, ass-kissers, douchebags, etc. We think of them as vain, petty, selfish, manipulative, or insecure. If someone is seeking status in the form of power or dominance, we call them a “bully,” an “asshole,” or a “petty tyrant.” If people are seeking status in the form of moral superiority, we call them “holier-than-thous” or “virtue signalers.”

So we don’t like status-seekers, and this has a very important implication: our status games can collapse under the weight of mutual awareness. Once we all realize that we’re playing a status game, we lose status for playing it. The hierarchy inverts, with the people at the top looking selfish and egotistical, and the people at the bottom looking humble and pure. As I wrote in my academic paper:

In the aftermath of a collapsed status game, the players often gain status by doing the opposite of what was done previously. If neatly-combed hair and crisp, black-and-white suits become cues of dominance and snootiness, then long, messy hair and flowing, colorful outfits may become cues of the opposite—rebelliousness and authenticity (Heath & Potter, 2004; Potter, 2011). Whenever members of a subculture get outed as puffed-up status-seekers, it creates an opportunity for everyone else to conspicuously differentiate themselves... Acting in defiance of a collapsed status game signals that one doesn’t care about status—which, paradoxically, raises one’s status.

So if our status games can collapse, then that is a big problem for hierarchical primates like us. All those years of social climbing—down the drain. At the same time, low-status or embittered people might actively strive to make a status game collapse, tearing their rivals down and lifting themselves up. You might call this kind of striving “strategic cynicism,” and you might call the opposite “strategic idealism.”

Once you start thinking of cynicism and idealism as strategic moves in a status game, you start to see them everywhere you look. “You’re just virtue signaling.” “No, I genuinely care about justice.” “You’re just defending your privilege.” “No, I genuinely care about free speech.” Perhaps in the 1800s, you’d hear things like, “This whole dueling business is just a macho pissing contest.” “No, it’s about manly honor.” As I wrote in Status Is Weird:

When we defend our status games, we usually appeal to sacred values, like manly honor, beauty, faith, knowledge, equality, integrity, or authenticity or something. We have to pretend these values are intrinsically important and worth upholding for their own sake, independent of any status we get for upholding them. We create sacred narratives about how none of us are vain or self-centered at all; we’re just noble souls who are impartially motivated by an abstract love of truth or beauty or self-expression or whatever. If anyone questions our sacred narrative or mocks us for being uncool status-seekers, it might cause our fragile status game to collapse, and that would be terrible. That’s why questioning sacred values is taboo.

Now, back to happiness. If happiness is a sacred value—a kind of strategic idealism—then what kinds of status games is it designed to protect? My hunch is that it emerged to protect the status games surrounding consumerism. You’re not buying this bullshit to compete for status; you’re buying it because it makes you happy. We’re not selling you this bullshit because we want to make money; we’re selling it to you because we want to make you happy. In fact, I remember one of McDonald’s ad slogans was: “We love to see you smile.” Awww. How nice of the McDonald’s corporation.

The happiness myth might also protect the status games surrounding careerism. I’m not climbing the corporate ladder to ascend a social hierarchy; I’m doing it for me—for the sheer satisfaction of it. This version of the happiness myth recently merged with a bit of psycho-babble: “self-actualization.” Ah, doesn’t that sound much nicer and more sophisticated than status? In case you’re not convinced that self-actualization is bullshit, a 2017 study by Jamie Krems and colleagues supports the idea. The Krems team asked participants to freely describe what self-actualization “meant to them.” Here were some the participants responses:

• “Making seven figures.”

• “Getting a 4.0 GPA.”

• “I would be a successful, admired, wealthy stage actor, maybe on Broadway.”

• “I would be named CEO of Microsoft.”

• “I’d working at Wall Street and making tons of money.”

• “I’d be writing the great American novel.”

Another recent offshoot of the happiness myth is the idea of “wellness” or “self-care.” According to this species of bullshit, you’re so busy taking care of other people (how nice of you) that you don’t leave enough time for yourself. And if you can’t take care of yourself, how are you going to take care of other people? What you need is some “me time,” honey. Get yourself a makeover, and a massage, and a vacation, and a nice meal, and a new outfit, and a renovation on your house—you know, anything that Thorsten Veblen would understand.

Oh, and if you need to do something selfish, like diss people behind their backs, just say you did it to “vent.” You needed to let the bad vibes out of your head. After all, if you don’t let the bad vibes out, they’ll pollute your inner sanctuary of emotional wellness. Cards Against Humanity recently satirized this bullshit with one of my favorite new cards: “Fucking my husband’s brother as a form of self-care.”

The happiness myth can help you rationalize anything. Need to virtue signal? Talk about how “fulfilling” it is to help others. Need an excuse for your fucked-up behavior? Blame it on the bad vibes in your head, or the bad vibes reverberating from your past—you know, “trauma.” Need to break up with someone because they’re too ugly, low-status, or unimpressed with you? Just say you aren’t “happy” in the relationship. As I wrote in happiness is bullshit:

The actual motives of human primates are pretty unflattering, and we would prefer not to talk about them. That’s why we pretend that happiness (or self-actualization or whatever) is the reason for everything we do. It’s the perfect PR story. We run cancer marathons not to show off our health and virtue, but because we find it “rewarding.” We help our friends not to make them feel indebted to us, but because we’re “happy” to do it. “So glad you could make it,” we say to the asshole. “Happy to take care of it,” we say to our boss. We tell people we want to be happy because it sounds good. Or at least, it sounds better than the truth.

If happiness is a sacred value, then naturally some people are going to get hostile when I come along and call it bullshit. People don’t like it when their sacred values are attacked. To question a person’s sacred values is to expose their unflattering motives, to make them look bad, and to potentially deprive them of a “meaningful” pursuit—i.e., the pursuit of status under the guise of a sacred narrative.

Hostility isn’t the only feeling that could be elicited though. The idea that happiness is bullshit is also likely to elicit a feeling of existential disorientation. People often ask me: “What am I supposed to pursue in life, if not happiness?” When I point out how they weren’t pursuing happiness in the first place, which makes the question moot, they feel confused. It’s as if I’ve pulled the rug out from their entire understanding of reality—decades of socialization and confabulation and rationalization folding in on itself.

The pursuit of happiness is one of the cornerstones of western culture. It is so thoroughly enmeshed with our social, economic, and political lives it is hard, if not impossible, to extricate ourselves from it. But I think we should extricate ourselves from it, no matter how difficult and counterintuitive it might be, because it’s bullshit.