The pursuit of happiness

They are bombarded with key decisions that must be made: stay local or head into town; stick with the safe options, or seek out a “new wave” establishment; pre-book a table and run the risk of an empty restaurant or turn up and check out if it’s really the place to be seen on a Saturday night. The couple end up eventually glowering at each other in an Italian eaterie they both dislike, squeezed between two other tables of bickering couples. She’s furious because he’s ordered the same meal as her, he’s irate because the waiter has forgotten to light their candle.

It’s just one of many such passages in the wonderfully thought-provoking The Age of Absurdity and the key to its accessibility. Foley understands that when you’re going to populate your book with people such as Nietzsche, Kierkegaard and Sartre, and expose the unwitting reader to the result their ruminations on the meaning of existence you damn well better tell a few jokes to balance the experience.

But don’t worry, Foley isn’t funny for funny’s sake. He’s funny in the same way an observational comedian is funny — pointing out things that we take for granted and highlighting how absurd they are, and by doing so we all laugh at ourselves.

According to the Derry-born Foley, life is absurd. Once we agree on that first principle then, and only then, can we move on to being content with it. For, you see, becoming truly happy is impossible.

Foley has trawled through the works of the greatest thinkers and picked out their ideas on happiness. He has followed this up by sieving the very best sociological experiments and studying the nuggets of revelations about human conditioning.

Finally, he has combed through the latest research in neuroscience and plucked the essential facts about how our brains work. His conclusion is that life — society, family, relationships, friendships, work, hobbies, eating, literature, cinema, etc, etc — makes it impossible for us to be happy.

“The good news is that there are … strategies. The bad news is that all of them are discouraged by contemporary Western culture. The great achievement of the age has been to make fulfilment seem never easier, while actually making it never more difficult.” Thus we see entire sections of bookstores given over to self-help books — happiness in just six weeks!

And the latest technological gizmos whose prime raison d’etre seems to be to interrupt us with the latest email or update or text or tweet or blog. Digitised sneezes from the other side of the planet we feel obliged to answer with a “bless you” in the least number of characters as possible — happiness by staying connected!

The sweet simple irony of postmodern life is that we are not living at all. Not in any way that would be recognisable to the giants of philosophical thought if they were capable of rising from their tombs and engaging their eminent grey matter again.

Schopenhauer, says Foley, understood humans tend to always live in constant anticipation — for instance, the workplace prayer that Friday would arrive sooner — but the German philosopher would scold us for being “under the spell of potential”. What he means is the things that used to be means to an end have become ends in themselves. Money, fame and sexual attractiveness have become the goals instead of methods of attaining a comfortable lifestyle, social responsibility and a chance to procreate.

Our brains are wired in such a way that it is difficult to overcome groupthink; to break down the walls of conformity. Foley repeats the account of the infamous Milgram experiment where supposedly reasonable and intelligent volunteers gave what they believed to be almost fatal levels of electric shocks to others on the orders of a white-coated authority figure. Shocking though the results may be — no pun intended — Foley believes Western culture is not only conditioning individuals who would follow suit, but would go farther sooner.

“An autonomous, attentive, sceptical and critically minded individual, aware of undesirable personal and group inclinations, can resist … and persuade others to do the same.” It’s bordering on a circular argument — we must become responsible, critical individuals, so let’s go. Like the scene in Life of Brian we are all individuals, except that guy over there.

In the end, Foley believes if you want to be happy you will never attain it, and if you are happy you won’t know it until you’re not happy anymore. What he proposes is what the postmodernists have been arguing ironically for all along, plus a good dollop of Stoicism thrown in for flavour and a pinch of realism to finish. We must embrace our age of absurdity, a world where millions follow a dog on Twitter or running 5km on a gym treadmill while the sunshine beams in through the window.

If that army of great thinkers ever did rise up to condemn our absurd lives they would offer us one key piece of advice, one that Foley’s short volume of wisdom can be whittled down to: “strive”.

Living requires effort and effort is rewarded. It may not lead to happiness, but it would not be a life wasted.

Otherwise it would be like that unlit table candle — inert and unrealised.