In a previous post on happiness I noted that research tends to show people who have children are less happy than those who don’t. Yet, at the same time, most people who do have children will say that the kids make them happy, often even that their kids are their deepest source of joy in life.
Why? The answer seems obvious: if you don’t think that your children make you happy, if you resent them and regret them, you’re going to be a bad parent. By telling yourself your kids make you happy – even if they don’t – you are giving them a better life, doing something that will help them out. Surely that’s your duty as a parent, to think of your kids as your great joy and the centre of your life.
But there remains something unsettling here. Do we really want to say there’s a duty to lie to oneself, even for such a noble reason? If one allows oneself this kind of self-deception, surely it makes room for other, more harmful kinds of self-deception? I imagine this will be a difficult question to resolve – the kind that would require going down to the foundations – but I would like to hear your thoughts.
(For the record, I don’t have children and don’t plan on having them, so this is not a personal question for me.)
I’m really sorry for getting all po-mo on you here, but aren’t you just constructing a philosopher’s trap, one in which “happiness” becomes a stable thing you can sensibly talk about?
A person may be assessed “empirically” to be happy at time T. Let’s call this Happiness-T. Now a researcher may discover that the same person may report to be happy at time T+1, after they have become a parent. Let’s call this Happiness-T+1. But lo and behold, our empirical measurements show that whatever it is they are experiencing, it is surely not the same state as Happiness-T! So they must be lying to themselves about their happiness!
I don’t think this makes any sense. The only conclusion we can draw from this empirical research is that at time T+1 the person is not experiencing exactly the same state they were experiencing at time T. (And hey, isn’t the above sentence universally applicable?) The person has confused our hapless researcher by using the same word to refer to a different state.
On what planet must one live to insist that Happiness-T+1 must be identical to Happiness-T for it to be “real happiness”? One must live on a planet of philosophers, “happiness studies” researchers, and assorted self-help gurus, who think “happiness” should be a stable and universally available thing, and who often are trying to sell their particular happiness-producing products.
Here’s what I think: The same person will use the word “happiness” to mean different things throughout the course of his or her life, just as a person will use “delicious” to mean different things. When I was a child, mustard was not delicious. Now, mustard is delicious. The definition of “delicious” has changed for me, but I still use the word freely. This does not mean I am lying to myself, t simply means that all such states are momentary, idiosyncratic, and context-bound.
Well, first, I think this gets us to a point about the nature of concepts. No, X-at-time-T doesn’t have to be the exact same thing as X-at-time-T+1 for them to both count as X. But there still has to be something they share in common that makes them both X, or they’re not both X. That applies to “delicious” as much as to happiness. Even if the definition of “delicious” has changed for you, there’s still something that you-at-age-5 and you-at-age-30 would both recognize by the word “delicious,” that makes it meaningful for you to speak of what is “delicious” in both contexts. (I would actually suspect that we may be able to go further and say that the definition itself hasn’t changed, only its referent. We now know that asbestos is carcinogenic; we didn’t know that it was carcinogenic a hundred years ago. But that knowledge doesn’t change the definition or meaning of “carcinogenic” or even “known carcinogenic”; it only changes the members of the set that “carcinogenic” refers to.) Some amount of stability has to be present in a concept (whether “happiness,” “delicious” or “known carcinogen”) for the concept to mean anything at all. The survey respondents themselves seemed to have no problem recognizing “happiness” as something they felt more at one time than another.
Your previous cursory hint at children not making people happy has been very thought-provoking for me. Out of my personal observations, I would say that, yes, several parents just spend their lives struggling with children as if they were their enemies (“I have to make him/her sleep in order to be able to live my own life” or the like), are desperate to find a baby sitter even when on holiday and hate messy lunches and kid-plays. But I’m pretty sure children often are a source of joy. Maybe, those for whom they are a source of joy are actually better parents and the other just lie because they 1. feel they should be happy because of children, 2. do not want to admit they made a fatal mistake in desiring children, 3. conform to others.
By the way, you refer to data about children not being source of happiness as univocal. Where can I find them? In Gilbert’s book? I would like to have a glance at the statistics and at the kind of questions asked.
Gilbert’s book is my main source for the data. I’ve read it in other places too, for sure, but given that I don’t remember where they are, the point doesn’t really matter. I’ve been meaning to follow up on this post, but I do really need to go back to the book to do that properly; the devil is indeed in the details. Right now it’s packed up somewhere in boxes from my recent move, so that might take a while.
I just found this highly apt comic:
http://www.smbc-comics.com/index.php?db=comics&id=1259#comic
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