Philosophy of HappinessAllen Jeffrey Gurfel

I argue that John Kekes has dressed up a trivial truth—that a happy man can be

called happy—in the garbs of philosophical insight. The idea of a singular second-order

want that must be satisfied as a precondition to the title of “attitudinal happiness” is

obviously mistaken. His theory, undressed, is essentially no novel theory at all, but rather

the introduction of a linguistic convention—let’s call the man who is happy often enough

“attitudinally happy,” even when he’s feeling neutral or miserable—and a simple

restatement of hedonism. There is a kernel of wisdom in his view, however: not all wants

are created equal, or more precisely, not all things, relationships, and circumstances

contribute equally to a broadly happy life. It isn’t the case that satisfaction with life

broadly must follow the satisfaction of explicitly stated first-order wants. Satisfaction has

other conditions and can come by surprise. Moreover, there are objective standards for a

good, happy life. At the same time, a vast diversity of lives can meet those standards, and

there are subjective elements essential to genuine life satisfaction. There is no stable,

determinate one-size-fits-all mold.

John Kekes proposes a conception of happiness that aims to account for the two

ways in which we often speak of happiness: as the subjective experience that

characterizes those fleeting episodes of joy we experience episodically, and as something

that can be said of a life more broadly, a life taken as a whole, what we might call a

“good life.” This latter is called attitudinal happiness, and we call a person attitudinally

happy if he has satisfied many of his most important first-order wants—those desires that

are fulfilled by obtaining something or doing something. More precisely, it is he himself

who forms a life-plan, or hierarchy, of first-order wants and judges himself to be happy.

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There is no external standard Kekes sets forth or acknowledges, no objective model for

happy lives. Interestingly, he holds that life-plans can be assessed rationally by others,

inconsistencies and challenges pointed out. The final word on whether an individual is

happy, however, seems to belong to the individual.

But what precisely is the relationship between episodic and attitudinal happiness?

Kekes admits that “the connection between satisfying episodes and an attitude of

satisfaction in one’s life is not simple.” It seems possible and even common, for example,

that although one satisfies or is satisfying a central first-order want, nonetheless, one

seems not to be happy, or even to be unhappy. Yuri’s life-plan may include, as a

centerpiece, the first-order desire to be a Don Juan or, more concretely, to rack up sexual

conquests. He may be successful in this while remaining, or even becoming, unhappy. It

is not the case then that happiness consists merely in doing or having what one wants.

Clearly, in the case above, Yuri is aware that he is meeting with success in seducing

Mary, Esther, Rachel, Regina, and so on. Even while he continues to value conquest and

few other things, he is unhappy; he is satisfying his own professed second-order want, his

life-plan, and yet, he is unhappy.

Suppose George explicitly formulates a life-plan and that, above all else, he

desires to gain his father’s approval and to make it to Los Angeles and become an actor.

He packs his bags, hops in his car, and heads West. But life takes him elsewhere. His car

breaks down, he meets a girl, he stays a while. The young couple have a child and marry.

He finds work where he can, and life goes on, far from California and the silver screen.

His father disapproves of the girl and the shotgun wedding. Still, George calls himself

happy.

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How can Kekes handle these challenges? With regard to Yuri, Kekes may claim

that Yuri’s plan was faulty. He prioritized a first-order satisfaction that is only capable of

very transitory satisfaction. But suppose it’s the status that comes with being a player that

Yuri is after, recognition from his frat brothers that he’s a man’s man. Perhaps, Kekes

may respond, Yuri has made an error in committing to this singular first-order want so

exclusively that “his soul shrivels.” With regard to George, Kekes may argue that

George’s life-plan underwent revision. Whereas it was important to him to impress his

father, now it is important to him to be a role model for his son or daughter; whereas it

was important for him to become an actor, now it is important to him to be a valued

member of his community.

At least two difficulties arise. First, with regard to George, he only ever explicitly

formulated a single life-plan. In the life he actually led, he stumbled into happiness. He

was swept up by life and found himself happy—he never consciously reprioritized. Many

of us never come up with a carefully considered second-order hierarchy in the first place.

It’s certainly unintuitive to say that any teenager who has not formulated a life-plan

cannot be said to be happy, or that any college student who has no idea what to major in

or what to do with her life cannot be happy. Second, Kekes ends up with a theory that

says, essentially, one is happy when one has most of the things one desires and those

things make one happy. It’s a sort of true-come-what-may theory: if I have a life-plan,

and I find myself successful in my plan but miserable in my experience, this does not

disconfirm Kekes’s theory; if I have a life-plan, and I find I’ve failed in my plan but am

happy in my experience, this does not disconfirm Kekes’ theory. All complicating factors

can be written off by faulting my life-plan if I’m unhappy, or by claiming, if I’ve failed in

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my plan but am happy nonetheless, that really I have a different life-plan than the only

one I’ve ever claimed.

An additional challenge is obvious. I might find success in satisfying nearly all of

my broad first-order wants but still be distinctly unhappy. A single event—for example,

the death of someone close—can destroy all my happiness permanently. It remains true

that I’ve satisfied the vast majority of my goals, my first-order wants, yet I’m miserable.

Kekes holds that “each satisfied want is an episode contributing to the formation

of [an individual’s] attitude to his life as a whole.” But it is perfectly conceivable that a

satisfied want could fail to contribute to attitudinal happiness. For instance, we may

derive no episodic happiness from obtaining the thing we wanted or doing the action we

wanted to do. In fact, we may have known in advance that we wouldn’t derive any

happiness from some action and did it solely out of obligation. Perhaps we’re just

depressed. Or the satisfied want may bring us episodic happiness in the present, but

become the source of unbearable regret in the future. Suppose I wanted to write a book. I

wrote it, published it, and everyone hated it. It’s the Gigli of books.

Kekes can say that my plan was faulty, that an act done out of obligation isn’t

really a first-order want in my life-plan, or that what I really wanted was to write a book

everyone loved (even though I always believed I merely wanted to complete a book). In

the case of a depressed person, he may say, the problem is that he has no wants. This

might be the case; it might not. As an example, take someone who undertakes a quest for

revenge. We can be sure that person has been seriously, deeply hurt; we can also be sure

he has a want, a goal, namely revenge. Will revenge bring episodic happiness? It’s not

likely. “But that’s because this person wasn’t suited to revenge-seeking” Kekes may

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reply. What does it here mean to be a person who’s unsuited for revenge-taking? To be a

person who isn’t made episodically happy by getting revenge?

Again, the theory seems true, come what may. Let us make this element of Kekes’

picture explicit by rearticulating the theory and see where it leads.

What is episodic happiness? The satisfaction of a want to do or obtain something.

This definition, however, is ambiguous. After all, I may want to do or obtain something

but, upon doing or obtaining it, find that it brings me no enjoyment, as I presumably

expected it to. In a sense, the want was satisfied—I no longer have that want. At the same

time, I am not satisfied. It would be strange to call this an instance of happiness. So an

episode of happiness must be the satisfaction of a want such that the satisfaction of that

want causes a subjective experience of happiness in me.

To be attitudinally happy I must satisfy a certain proportion of my first-order

wants and that satisfaction must in each case result in episodic subjective happiness. In

other words, in order to be attitudinally happy I must have been, in the past, and expect to

be, in the future, actively, subjectively happy. What of the claim that it must be my most

important first-order wants that are satisfied? I may certainly be as mistaken about my

most important first-order wants as I might be about my less important ones. How would

we tell whether or not I was mistaken? Presumably, if I satisfy, in the sense of objectively

achieving, an important first-order want but derive no subjective happiness from it, I was

mistaken, and this “satisfaction” will not be an instance of episodic happiness, and will

not contribute to my attitudinal happiness.

It is clear, then, that attitudinal happiness tracks durations and intensities of

subjective, experienced happiness. What amount of happiness suffices for attitudinal

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happiness is unclear. What it means for an individual to be attitudinally happy is that,

even if he isn’t experiencing subjective happiness right this moment or at every moment,

he’s experienced some such happiness and can reasonably expect to experience more. A

happy person is one who’s experienced and expects to experience happiness. What can be

more obvious? And we can call that person “happy” (attitudinally happy) even if he isn’t

presently happy—even if he’s presently very unhappy. This isn’t any sort of deep

philosophical claim. It’s merely the introduction of a linguistic convention.

The notion of a life-plan or a singular second-order want is therefore an attempt to

dress up an obvious, trivial truth as a philosophical insight. I can be utterly mistaken

about the episodic happiness the satisfaction of my first-order wants will produce. I can

be happy—in the broad, whole-life sense—even if I stumble into a life that brings me

episodic happiness, one that is completely not the ideal life I planned. Some of us have

life-plans; others don’t. Individuals from both groups can be plausibly called happy in the

broad sense.

Kekes writes, “A man is satisfied with his life if he wants it to go on without

radical changes; of he is not seriously frustrated; and if he has frequent experiences of

joy, pleasure, or contentment.” A man who is satisfied in this way should be called

(attitudinally) happy. First, life-plans have nothing to do with this criteria. Second, this is

essentially just the claim that a man who is happy with his life and experiences happiness

should be called happy. Third, it isn’t even entirely true, for the desire for radical change

is consistent with happiness. I may desire to no longer be a student, to live on my own, to

have a certain job, to travel often, to eat at restaurants, and so on while, at the same time,

being, in my present circumstances, happy. I may believe I would be more happy, or

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more secure in my happiness, if I could satisfy those wants, but that does not mean I am

not happy now.

I wouldn’t call a zebra white, overall. This is what the term “attitudinal

happiness” does. It calls an individual who is happy often enough, and perhaps in an

intense enough way, happy in general. What enough would be is unknown, but we can

say the more often he is happy and the more intensely, the happier he is. This, of course,

is hedonism plain and simple.

Divorced from ethical considerations, what does Kekes’ hedonism amount to? (1)

The claim that happiness is nothing but a subjective, affective state. (2) The suggestion

that we label certain individuals “attitudinally happy.” Which individuals? Those who

express satisfaction with their lives and who experience some undetermined amount of

positive affective states. Kekes claims that these positive affective states must be caused,

at least in part, by the satisfaction of certain explicit, highly-valued wants. But why? As

he has built attitudinal happiness on episodic happiness, it seems that the satisfaction of

highly-valued wants must produce a different order of episodic happiness than the

satisfaction of less-valued wants. A different order how? What are the candidates?

The satisfaction of highly-prioritized first-order wants may produce either more

intense happiness or longer-lasting happiness. There certainly are wishes we have that,

were they to be fulfilled, we would experience greater and longer-lasting happiness than

we would under some other circumstances were some other wishes fulfilled. But if this

contributes to broad happiness it is precisely because we are set up to derive deeper and

more abiding happiness from whatever it is in question and not because we explicitly

articulated these wishes as goals of ours ahead of time.

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Let us consider George. If George found happiness with Samantha and not by

becoming an impressive actor it is because love, at least for George, is a source of stable

happiness. It is not because he’d ever explicitly articulated a want for Samantha or even

for a spouse prior to discovering, in the moment, that he was already deriving happiness

from their relationship. If we say that this relationship is now a first-order want for

George, this is precisely because it brought him, unexpectedly, and continues to bring

him great happiness.

For any given person, there are things that will bring him happiness, depending on

what that unique person is like, whether or not he has ever explicitly acknowledged a

desire for those things. If those things are present in that person’s life, he will have a

stable source of happiness to draw on even if he does not have all that he wants. He may

or may not correctly identify, ahead of time, what things will seriously contribute to his

judgment that his life is happy, good, satisfying.

If George is happy but suddenly develops a strong and persistent desire for

something he does not possess, he may experience a diminution of his present happiness.

This would be the case even if the satisfaction of his new desire would not bring him an

ounce of happiness. If our desire for something in the future is experienced as a genuine

lack of something in the present, our happiness in the present may fade. Whereas before

we may not have felt deprived in any area of our lives, now we experience the absence of

our new object of desire as a deprivation. George may become dissatisfied with the life

that up until now has made him broadly happy.

A satisfied man is not necessarily happy; he’s merely not unhappy, not

dissatisfied. A man who is genuinely satisfied with his life is happy almost by definition.

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But as I’ve argued, life satisfaction is not guaranteed by and does not require the

fulfillment of any concisely acknowledged desires or wants. What is conducive of

genuine satisfaction?

(1) Freedom from the domination of certain negative affects, such as anxiety, fear,

sadness, obsession, self-loathing, shame, worthlessness, hopelessness, anger, regret, and

dread. (There are of course circumstances that arise, in an otherwise happy life, that

warrant certain negative affects, such as fear and anger. In those cases, these affects may

be consistent with an overall good life.) (2) Non-material sources of positive affective

states regularly experienced, such as creative endeavors and opportunities for self-

expression, relationships, meaningful work, performance, hobbies, and the enjoyment of

art, music, and literature. Positive affective states include gladness, cheerfulness,

curiosity, joviality, tranquility, serenity, flow, engagement, meaningfulness, amusement,

exaltation, awe, and contentment. (3) Values, cares, and concerns. (4) A stable

disposition suited to coping with the adversities of one’s everyday life and to promoting

ones values, cares, and concerns. (5) The absence of persistent longing or acute desire

experienced as emptiness, lack, or deprivation in the present. (6) Agency. (7) Self-

esteem/self-acceptance/self-knowledge. (8) Success or progress in one’s projects. (9)

Self-sufficiency/financial security/success/independence. (10) Adherence to one’s ethical

code. (11) Optimism about the future and/or pride in past achievements. (12) Emotional

stability, basic equanimity, or a typically open emotional stance. (13) Ability to play. (14)

Freedom from oppression, violence, and abuse. (15) Material security—i.e. bodily

integrity, safety, nutritive food, clean water, shelter, privacy. (16) Community. (17)

Family. (18) Wealth and luxuries. (19) Development of talents. (20) Education,

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development of reason, intellectual pursuits. (21) Exploration, travel, access to new

experiences.

It seems that some substantial combination of these is necessary

for genuine human satisfaction. A given individual may give more

weight to some categories than to others. For example, a young

graduate student might focus more on political activism—the values,

ethics, and community dimensions—and less on play. A retiring

businessman might focus more on achievements, community, family,

and wealth and less on self-expression and exploration. It seems too

that certain items above are critical while others are less so. A life

dominated by self-hatred, regret, and hopelessness cannot be called a

happy life, but is it possible that one who leads such a life expresses

genuine satisfaction? Obviously not, for regret implies a haunting

dissatisfaction with regard to the past experienced in the present, self-

hatred implies the exact opposite of affirmation of one’s self, and

hopelessness implies an explicit disbelief that circumstances will ever

be such that one can affirm them. Similarly, it’s difficult to call a life

devoid of positive affective states a happy life, but is it possible that

one who leads such a life expresses genuine satisfaction? One may

devote her life to a cause and work to advance that cause at a great

cost to personal happiness, in the sense of positive affective states.

But in terms of satisfaction, if not happiness, the value, ethics, care,

and agency dimensions (and possibly others) can cause her to strongly

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affirm her life. To be right with an overwhelming ethical call one

apprehends, with oneself even, is no small matter for one who is set up

a certain way.

Can one misreport genuine satisfaction with life? Can one be

mistaken in her judgment of herself as genuinely satisfied? It seems

possible. For example, if an individual has formulated an explicit life-

plan à la Kekes and satisfied many of his highly-prioritized first-order

wants at great costs and with great effort, and yet he finds himself out

of possession of the happiness he had expected such satisfaction to

produce, he may suppress this knowledge, unwilling (though not

consciously) to admit his error. Or consider a recent example from the

news. A man who had been the director of a “gay cure” organization

was revealed to be gay himself. Since that time he has married a man.

We might reasonably suspect that he would have reported himself

genuinely satisfied even though he was living a lie, and it is perfectly

conceivable that his report was no lie in a certain sense, that his

psychology contrived to erase the obvious falsity of this judgment from

his conscious awareness, that the cognitive dissonance he

acknowledges he was experiencing in retrospect was at the time

repressed, rationalized, disavowed, or projected elsewhere. If we say

that he was mistaken in his judgment, that he was wrong, what could

motivate and justify such a claim? We can justify the claim by pointing

out that there is another life available to him, one that he himself, were

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he to pursue it, would admit (as he has admitted) offered orders of

magnitude more satisfaction such that could rightly be called genuine,

i.e., not built on and not requiring self-deception and not featuring

internalized, if suppressed, self-loathing, characterized instead by self-

acceptance, the freedom and lightness of being that comes with easy

honesty, and the possibility of developing intimate relationships.

In summary, broad happiness and genuine satisfaction are both

compatible with many second-order wants, yet they do not require any

explicit formulation of a second-order want, of a life plan. An individual

may be genuinely satisfied without being predominantly happy, for

happiness is not the sole contributor to a good, affirmable life.

Dimensions of morality and meaning also contribute to broad life

affirmation, and can compensate for shortages of subjective, affective

experience of standard happiness. Happy, satisfied lives are

compatible even with failure to reach or satisfy many of one’s first-

order goals or wants, if such wants are formulated.

Finally, let us consider a problematic example, the stereotypical

Wall Street hotshot whose life is organized around the amoral

accumulation of material wealth and symbols of status, purchased sex,

dating models, extreme parties, luxury, drugs and frequent

intoxication. It can be admitted that these pleasures are fleeting. Few

material possessions yield long-lived enjoyment, sex lasts a short

while, intoxication is temporary. But suppose the banker is capable of

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filling his life with a steady stream of these pleasures. He reports that

his life rocks, he is satisfied, and even feels bad for the rest of us who

lack access to all these pleasures and luxuries. Should we take him at

his word, or is there something to our intuition that he is not genuinely

satisfied, that his life is not a happy one?

Kekes would have to call him happy since he satisfies his first-

order wants (which were likely explicitly articulated, for it is difficult to

just stumble into the life of a Wall Street banker), has no will to alter

his life, and reports satisfaction.

We can admit this much: if he is truly incapable of deriving

happiness from anything else—caring friendships, literature,

compliance with deeply felt ethical obligations, creative self-expression

—he is perhaps as satisfied as it is possible for him to be. Even so, we

should pity him, for this happiness falls far short of the happiness

human beings are capable of experiencing. The excessive enjoyment

of luxuries and brute pleasures is a shallow happiness. Importantly,

this is not necessarily an objective value judgment. It is an objective

structural fact about the nature of such pleasures and the human

psyche.

Consider the phenomenology of apprehending a mere material

object. It has a determinate size, weight, texture, color, and shape.

Material objects as mere material objects are incapable of contributing

to our happiness—a piece of gum on the pavement, a mug, a cloud. If

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a material object contributes to our happiness, it is only because it

does something to or for us. You may find a certain painting, a material

object, exceptionally beautiful while I find it downright hideous. You

would hang it in your home not as a mere material object but as an

object of beauty, because it triggers in you a certain experience, such

as awe, comfort, serenity, hope, or some more vague and abstract

aesthetic enjoyment. I hold dear a certain teacup, but I hold it dear not

as a mere circular, concave, ceramic thing. I hold it dear because,

when I bought it, the cup was one of very few things that were solely

my own and I’d made a special occasion of finding the right one. For

years, I used it only to drink green tea, which I would prepare and

enjoy mindfully, reminding myself to appreciate small things in the

present. I treasure a small statue of two hounds on the hunt not as a

shapely chunk of marble but as a last gift from my grandmother, a

reminder of her life and her influence on mine. These objects

contribute to our happiness because they touch us in deep ways. They

are irreplaceable. Other material objects contribute to our happiness

because they are useful to us in certain ways. For example, paint,

brushes, and canvas are necessary for painting, for a creative

endeavor. If I derive deep joy from painting it is, strictly speaking, not

the brushes that contribute happiness. Rather, the brushes facilitate

the activity productive of happiness. A book may contribute to my

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happiness, but it does not do so in virtue of being a rectangle with

pages; it does so because of its contents.

Is there an essential difference when it comes to the acquisition

of excessive material wealth and status symbols? Yes, the objects of

profligate accumulation are meaningless. They do not facilitate, as

instruments, activities conducive of deep joy. They are not reminders

of anything beyond purchasing power. They are not irreplaceable. They

do not move or touch their owners. They can go missing without one’s

ever noticing, and should their absence be noticed they can instantly

be replaced. As a matter of time, one cannot use or enjoy each of ten

thousand objects. Status symbols are not acquired for their facilitation

of happiness-producing activities at all. They serve as declarations or

reminders, either to oneself or to others, of one’s status, of one’s high

position relative to others. To the extent that one values such items,

these items betray certain psychological facts about their owner.

Specifically, they indicate that he craves a vapid form of approval that

does not even remotely touch on his being, and that without such

acknowledgment he is insecure and empty at his core. He depends on

an illusion, on the conflation of the worth of these items with his worth

as a person. Thus such a person is typically angered by others’ refusal

to be impressed by his possessions and often must find others ways of

asserting his dominant status over them, for example, by mocking

them as nobodies whose opinion doesn’t matter. If we ask him why he

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really needs a $60,000 Steinway S concert grand in his foyer when he

does not know how to play the instrument the delusion may become

apparent even to him. These status possessions are pathetic cover-

ups. They are matters of appearances and having, and not of being,

and are thus capable of producing only shallow enjoyment, if any at all.

One cannot derive abiding joy from an object one neither needs nor

wants nor cares about in itself.

Material objects involve a subject in a limited way. We can

apprehend them through our senses and use them in activities that we

either have to do—for example, a sponge for washing dishes—or that

we want to do because they produce joy. But we encounter not only

material objects in our world, but immaterial objects as well, other

persons. Whereas material objects are in a clear sense immediately

given, immediately present for use, other people are not. We

apprehend their material form but their depths remain mysterious. We

are aware that they, like us, possess will, ideas, beliefs, and agency.

We are aware that other people, unlike material objects, perceive us in

return. Another individual—that is, another mind—involves a subject in

a deep, total way. We create friendships, relationships, and ties with

other people, not with things. These relations provide among the

deepest, most valued, most spiritual, and central experiences of which

human beings are capable. Human relationships represent a radical

break in our isolation, in our captivity in our own minds. As such, the

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happiness derived from relationships is deeper, more permeating and

penetrating, than the happiness derived from the possession of

material objects. If one does not form such relationships, one is closed

off from the possibility of such happiness. An inability to form genuine

human relationships may be irreparable—i.e. one may be constitutively

unable to experience the subjective states involved in deep friendship.

Or the cause of such an inability may be found in an individual’s

history. One may have shrunk from confrontation with the abyss of the

other. One may have a fear of exposing his own interiority, of “letting

others in.” One may have been betrayed or harmed, the pain of the

betrayal running as deep as the joy of friendship—a risk he in no longer

willing to take. Regardless of the cause, such an inability is a tragedy

and we rightly view it as such.

The Wall Street hotshot of our example places a shallow demand

on others: be available as a tool for my enjoyment, affirm my status,

do what I want you to do. This is to treat other persons as material

objects. It does not scratch the surface of interpersonal relationships

because the other person is not present as a person but as a one-

dimensional object. If we cannot perceive depth in others, neither do

we perceive it in ourselves. Self-knowledge becomes impossible and

genuine self-acceptance along with it. The self is experienced as

shallow along a single dimension of having, not being. Even the value

of possessions cannot be affirmed from within, and so one requires the

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admiration and perpetual approval of others for the maintenance of a

precarious egocentric illusion.

Can the perpetual enjoyment of parties, extreme experiences,

oysters, exclusive gentlemen’s clubs, and the highs of substance

abuse and sex make for genuine satisfaction? Again, these enjoyments

are shallow. If they are all the man is capable of, then perhaps we can

say he is as satisfied as it is possible for him to be. But we should pity

him, for this satisfaction falls far short of what human beings are

capable of experiencing. Not all happiness is created equal.

In conclusion, we should reject Kekes’ views. His picture of first-

and second-order wants does not line up with lived experience or with

our intuitions regarding who may be called broadly happy. His view

does not address the complexity and diversity of human lives and

experiences. He does not provide an account of the qualitative

dimensions of happiness or of how other factors—such as meaning and

morality—figure in life satisfaction. His term “attitudinal happiness”

might pick out certain actual individuals, but it will more often than not

pick out the wrong ones and leave aside the right ones. It is a trivial

category. His view is biased toward modern lives in capitalist societies,

those lives that tend to be rationally and instrumentally organized

around checklists along largely predetermined life-trajectories under

stable conditions.

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Instead we should acknowledge that people can be broadly

happy without a plan and thoroughly miserable with one. We should

admit certain obvious facts about human psychology and experience.

We should judge a man broadly happy by both subjective and objective

standards, for there are objective conditions for the deepest, most

intense, most formative, and most abiding forms of happiness we are

capable of experiencing. These conditions include genuine

interpersonal relationships. In turn, genuine friendships require a

capacity for care, empathy, and moral feeling—absent these, a “friend”

is no more than an instrument, another amusement. Finally, we should

remember that human experience is complex and we are not all the

same. Happiness does not exist on a meter stick or even on a simple

spectrum. It exists on complex matrix. Some elements of happiness

are straightforward while others are nebulous, unquantifiable, and

inextricably tied up with deeper, less analyzable aspects of our selves.

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