We're All Trying To Be Happy: The Origins of Virtue
A Birthday Meditation in the Middle of a Dark Wood
A prelude to a new series of virtue, which we’ll launch into next week, I think. But today’s my birthday, an occasion for melancholy, open eyes, and asking what happiness is for.
Happy Birthday to Me: You’ll Probably Die Sooner than Later
Today is my 45th birthday, written on the afternoon before, so all things being equal, I think I’ll see my birthday tomorrow. More than any other year, I’ve felt my age. I don’t mean that in a physical sense: on Wednesday, I worked harder and faster than folks ten years younger than me in our morning Cross-Fit.1 By that metric, I feel better at 45 than I did at 35. But at 45, I’m realistically firmly in the back-half of my life.
There’s no telling how long any of us have, absent some kind of intervention by the state.2 My grandmother died this year at 92, but my grandfather died of esophageal cancer at 56. On the other side, people lived between 85 and 63: there’s no accounting for one’s lifespan, and there’s little chance that I’m just starting the downhill descent: most likely, I’m somewhere on the backside of the mountain, heading toward the valley of death’s shadow.
And so, sobriety is the tenor of the day. As I write this, I’m in the middle of two book projects, with another one getting under contract soon. I’m assuming that I’ll finish these; all signs point to their conclusion. But birthdays cause me to ask why I do this: Why write? Why teach the same questions again and again? Why help the same lightbulbs to come on year after year? Ecclesiastes pokes its head around the corner with the same stupid answer: it’s all dust, all the same cycle that humans have been doing since the beginning. And when the Internet crashes, all of this will be forgotten.
The words that get birthed in this newsletter, and the teaching that gets done regularly: these are, as one writer recently put, part of the infinite game:
A finite game is played to win; there are clear victors and losers. An infinite game is played to keep playing; the goal is to maximize winning across all participants. Debate is a finite game. Marriage is an infinite game. The midterm elections are finite games. American democracy is an infinite game. A great deal of unnecessary suffering in the world comes from not knowing the difference.
The teaching of students and the writing of words are part of doing finite games as part of the quasi-infinite game. There are finite games I play constantly: semesters come to an end, and the book manuscript finds its conclusion. And absent any other frame, they are the hamster wheel of futility.
But in doing these finite things, we’re joining up with an infinite project, one which may very well—will very well—forget us all in the end, though it carries on. But the hope in all of this is, in the end, as the Mountain Goats said, “Transfiguration’s gonna come for me at last and I will burn hotter than the sun.” One day, it all ends, and either you will welcome the glory of having pursued Good Things for a lifetime, or crash the hamster wheel, having never realized that the finite games are how we participate in the Infinite Game.
The Infinite Work, and Infinite Happiness
If we see the repetition of the “finite game” as depressing, it’s because we forget that we only get to join in the infinite goods of wisdom, goodness, and truthfulness in finite ways. It’s only by having some stakes in doing the same kind of things over and over again that we get to participate in the Big Things, the Capital Letter versions of goodness, truth, mercy, and love.
Now, some of the ways that we latch into these infinite goods are positively debilitating. Pursue something like Absolute Happiness in the form of fentanyl, and you can expect a brief burst of ecstasy followed by a quick demise. Pursue something like happiness in the form of abusive behavior toward women, and you’ll be removed from society, more alone and more the devil than you were before.
But pursue something like happiness in its Finite Games, the form of parenting a child, and it will endure longer—sometimes, interminably—but happiness will find you in a strange form: hardship and suffering. The raising of my children is the most full happiness I could ever imagine, and the longest evenings one could wish for, the deepest joy and the slowest of fingernails in the eyeballs. More seriously:
Blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.
Blessed are those who mourn, for they will be comforted.
Blessed are the meek, for they will inherit the earth.
These things travel together—the deepest of happiness and the slow arc of difficulty, suffering, hardship. And they do so through ordinary, finite actions, over and over again.
Aspiration and Happiness: Chase Them Waterfalls
These Finite Games are, frankly, boring by comparison. This week, the country salivated over the fate of the chambers of Congress, awaiting the word of whether we have a deadlocked Congress. In the previous issue, I made my case for why I think the prioritizing of politics over against ethics is a problem, primarily because it causes us to give ourselves to social things in the wrong form, or at least in a very foreshortened kind of way: the legislative shape of the world is a slowly shifting sandcastle, and one which is reliably full of stuttering steps.
Give yourself to something like the moral life, and you’ll find yourself entering into a longer journey which eventuates itself in how we commit ourselves to the common life. But it’ll happen in strikingly ordinary ways, and with the understanding that all of it comes with more discomfort and mundane features than we’d wish.
Aspiration toward influence and greatness are, as seen in this obsession with politics local and national, largely accidents for those pursuing playing the long game. Commit yourself to the kind of ordinary excellence that constitutes something like parenting, and it may end well: your kids may grow up to not be assholes. But you can’t count on it. Commit yourself to something like political chicanery, and you may be a power broker, wielding influence on a grand scale, shaping societies to your vision. Or, you can devote yourself to chicanery and just be an average, albeit morally terrible, citizen. One minute you’re the Vice Presidential candidate; the next, you’re coming in twenty points behind in a representative race, with little to show for it all except an SNL cameo.
Success is, as I’ve said before, largely a matter of accident. It’s the illusion of having grabbed hold of the power of the Infinite Game, when really, it’s just that the finite game you played worked out really well. But it too ends. And all that matters is whether you recognized the difference in those Finite Games.
It’s Okay to Be Happy: The Beginning of Virtue
So, if it all ends either way, why commit oneself to being good? Why take the trouble? The short answer is that, in playing the finite game well, we learn to love what stands behind it: the infinite game. Virtue repeatedly talks about happiness: that the point of the moral life is to be happy, in that Goodness is that which makes us ultimately satisfied. The strange thing about virtue—the beatitudinal life—is that it makes it really fine to be happy, provided that we recognize that the happiness we have comes to us 1) not necessarily linked to extraordinary successes, and 2) with difficulty not as an enemy, but a friend. To know the Infinite Game—or as Christians put it, the Good Life that is God—is to remember that this graced life we live is, in its not-being-immune-to-suffering—being used by God to make us holy.
The mundane, the ordinary, the putting of words down, the teaching of students, the patient parenting: Christians have taught for centuries that this is the way to happiness. There’s no need to apologize for the joy that comes through it, in that through these small things, we find out how the spiritual life works: our transformation through good old fashioned creaturely life.
So, here’s to ordinary birthdays: they befit the kind of lives we are called to live—faithful, repetitious ones. I’m off to grade some exams. But as a birthday treat, from me to you, Sam Bush singing about his lost love: ordinary happiness, done excellently.
(If you want to give me a birthday present, why not try out becoming a subscriber?)
I Cross-Fit. I apologize for mentioning it. It won’t happen again.
All forms of state-sponsored death should be abolished: capital punishment, physician assisted suicide, euthanasia. Full stop. Happy birthday.