Recent scientific survey suggests that happiness may be linked to our genes which come in either long or short versions. It says that people who inherit the long versions of the gene are generally happier and those with the short versions tend to be more pessimistic. Thanks to modern science, parents of the forthcoming generations may look up to a better future, whose children might finally be genetically engineered to live a fulfilled life instead of one being constantly filled with anxiety and despair . What’s more promising is that it might as well put an end to the age-old philosophical debate of how happiness may be attained. Sooner or later, we should no longer feel guilty of not having finished the works of Plato, Epicurus, and Cicero which we have bought years ago.
However, if we survey the history of philosophy, we may be tempted to discover that a range of philosophers who would disagree that happiness might not be actually worth pursuing. If happiness should not be confused as an object of desire, it is because happiness might harbour within us a sense of primordial optimism, forcing us to muddy the true schema of ourselves. Think of the self-help books in the franchise bookstores. Rather than helping us to realise our limits, self-helps books tend to fool us into thinking that we may eventually overcome all sorts of obstacles and aspire to greatness if we are willing to summon the desirable versions of ourselves through an optimistic temperament.
The problem of fierce optimism is that we may be easily invited to assume tomorrow will be much like today. It leads us to cast aside our tragic awareness of life and favour an absolute trust in science. But science can so far only offer us knowledge, not value judgements. In this age bombarded by a wide range of scientific techniques, we tend to think that roads and highways are mysteriously traffic-free and smartphones were invented to simplify our lives. But the reality, unsurprisingly, is always cruel. However fast our vehicles may become, however user-friendly our smartphones may seem, the traffic lights nevertheless provoke our anger while we are on the way to work and smartphones, on the other hand, have us suffer from a psychological assault on our capacity to fix our minds steadily on almost anything.
Behind the tendency to feel happy lies the danger of ignoring what life actually constitutes. Our hope to adjust our temperament to an optimistic one through genetics hints at a refusal to accept life is inherently frustrating. It easily generates in us a satisfactory feeling of what life naturally throws at us. It takes away our motivation to strive for the better, our ability to change what is, and thereby denying us of the liberty to invest our hopes in perfection.
Yet the value of pessimism is far more arresting. If pessimism is a more vital ingredient to a fulfilled life, it is because it allows us to grow wiser. Our happiness depends not on the commonly cherished things on earth: friendship, romantic love, beauty etc., but rather, things like intervals of separation and the endurance of loneliness. It is through our experience of pain and suffering we become wise of how we should live. It helps enforce moments of contemplation, pushing us to acquire a better sense of reality and placing pain in a more proper context, just like only when we stump a nail on the ground, we may have the awareness of pain, thus becoming wise to the fact that human bodies are fragile.
It’s because we are at the mercy of mortality, we may reflect on our regrets and take on a bigger to quest to compensate what we are previously reluctant to do. It’s the fact that life is short and might end at anytime we try to savour the moments we spend with our loved ones and fortify them within our souls. Pessimism grants us permanent access to certain emotional textures which could not have been arisen without loneliness, frustration, and despair.
Instead of consciously looking for solutions to cure sadness, we need to learn to be productively unhappy and let it become a seed for actual happiness. Happiness is always founded on sadness. To be sad is to be happy. So what does that say about science? It means even if we possess the technology to make ourselves happy, we should still let nature decide the fate for us. It’s better not to have full control over our destiny.
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