If Everything Is So Amazing, Why’s
Nobody Happy?
By Mark Edmundson (/people/mark-edmundson)
PUBLISHED: October 5, 2015
I often start the school year teaching Plato’s Republic to firstyear students at the
University of Virginia. We then go on to read Homer, the New Testament, and
Confucius and Buddha and Shakespeare. But as we move through the class I always
have the option and the pleasure of asking a very smart group of students a revealing
question: “What would Plato say?”
I thought of this question not long ago when I encountered an inspired riff by the
comic Louis C.K. on our current condition.
The riff got a lot of attention when it came out and continues to circulate vigorously
on the internet. It goes under the title “Everything’s Amazing and Nobody’s Happy.”
We have everything, Louis says. We have magnificent cell phones that can dial
anywhere in the world in a flash; we have computers that function in midair, when
we’re in flight. And flying! Are the seats uncomfortable, are the planes often late? Well
okay, but think about it for a moment. You’re doing what people have dreamed of for
thousands of years. You’re up in the air. You’re borne aloft heading for the destination
you choose, anywhere on the planet. You’re flying!
And yet no one is happy, says Louis C.K. Everything is amazing and nobody is happy.
Why not? The answer that Louis suggests is that we’re unhappy because we’re a bunch
of ungrateful little snips. If we looked around at what we had (at least those of us who
are rich enough to own computers and fly on planes), if we counted our technoblessings,
we’d become more equable. We’d become grateful. We might even manage
to be—whisper this; don’t say it too loud—something like happy.
Really? Are you sure?
Well, let us ask an authority, maybe the ultimate philosophical authority on the
subject of happiness. So: What would Plato say?
It’s a little strange to put the greatest of philosophers in dialogue with Louis C.K.,
admire Louis as I do. But I take Louis to be honestly looking for an answer to his
question. And it’s a question that has occurred to others, too. Many of us seem to have
access to products and pleasures that would have thrilled an emperor a couple of
hundred years ago. And yet things aren’t quite right for us. Matters are out of joint. If
everything is so amazing, why aren’t we happy?
I suspect Plato would say that it’s not so strange that everything is amazing and
people don’t seem happy—certain people, Plato might add, in particular. Plato
believed that the best of all lives were based upon a quest, and an arduous quest at
that. People who sought the Truth were the ones who, to Plato, lived with the most
intensity and even joy. They cared nothing, or very little, for the trappings of
successful life: They would be inclined to sneer at our gizmos, except as they were
means to an end. The end? The discovery of what is actually the case. Contact with
the real!
Plato was not interested in discovering the truth for males, for aristocrats, for
Athenians, or for Greeks (though many have accused him of doing so). He was
devoted to finding a truth that would apply to all people at all times. What is a just
state? What is a wellbalanced soul? What are the uses of art? How do you educate
children? When Plato attempted to answer these questions, he was trying to do so for
all time. He might well have failed: Even Plato, confident as he was, understood that.
Others might come along in time to do better.
The quest for Truth is an ideal. When men and women engage it, their days are alive
with meaning and intensity. They know what they are doing on Earth. They know
what they want. They don’t need everything to be amazing. They know that happiness
comes from picking out a noble goal, an ideal, and dedicating themselves to it.
Plato understood the lure of the quest for Truth, and he understood another great
ideal as well. Though Plato writes to revise Homer, he still has high respect for the
values that radiate through Homer’s poems. Homer’s heroes embody a variant of the
sort of courage that Plato wants the warrior caste in his ideal state to embody. Plato
admires those who quest to be martial heroes, though not as much as he admires
aspiring thinkers. Plato understands how the best of warriors fight not for material
wealth or for conquest, but to defend their families and their nations and to live up to
the code of honor. Homer’s warriors, who fully embody the heroic ideal, are often
afraid of nothing. This is surely the case with Achilles, greatest of them all. Plato’s
warriors are men (and women, too) who know what to be afraid of and what not to be.
And for this knowing they are all the more admirable.
Plato affirms ideals: the philosopher’s ideal and (with modifications of his own) the
warrior’s ideal. Without these high standards, Plato suggests, there are many people
in a given society who will be frustrated. They will have nowhere to direct their
considerable energies. They will look around and they will see that no matter how
amazing everything is they are still not happy.
I am not saying that there is no one in our culture who quests for truth and no one
who adheres to the warrior ideal. But I think there are fewer such people all the time.
Much of what goes on in humanities departments now involves showing how claims
to largescale truth like Plato’s are nothing but deceptions. Truth now is understood to
be transient, local, and often contingent upon existing power relations (and so not
really truth at all). There are surely people who uphold the warrior ideal. But more
and more our military is a professional one. We breed few citizensoldiers. When early
in the term I talk to my students about committing their lives to bravery or to thought,
they are often, to say the least, skeptical. Yet many of them tell me that they feel as
Louis says people now often do: Everything is amazing and yet they are not happy.
After Homer and Plato, another ideal rises up in the West: the ideal of compassion.
The ideal is anything but new when Jesus introduces it into his teachings. It has been
part of the thought of Confucius, part of the message of the Buddha, and inscribed in
the ancient Hindu texts. There are intimations of it in the Hebrew Bible. But Jesus
seems to bring the compassionate ideal to the West, announcing it in the teeth of the
Roman occupiers, who surely understand martial glory and may have some appetite
for philosophy but at the start, at least, have no comprehension of this new doctrine of
compassion. Plato would probably not have understood the allure of a life based in
lovingkindness for all, and Homer certainly would not have.
But it comes forth from Jesus and into the Western tradition. “Love your neighbor as
yourself,” the teacher says time and again. “Who is my neighbor?” a lawyer asks him.
And Jesus answers in a way that no one is likely to forget.
A man is beaten and robbed and left on the roadside. Members of his own group pass
him by, leaving him to suffer. But a Samaritan comes along and lifts the afflicted man
from the side of the road. He binds the man’s wounds and mounts him on his own
beast. He takes the sufferer to an inn and pays his bill and says that he will return to
visit and also to settle accounts. Then the teacher’s question: “Who truly was a
neighbor to the unfortunate man?”
Every man is my neighbor. Every woman is my neighbor. This is the central teaching
of Jesus, and though it is not an easy teaching to put into practice, it may confer upon
living men and women a sense of wholeness, full being in the present, and even joy. It
will almost certainly provide what the world of fast travel and fine food and electronic
gizmos will not: It will provide meaning.
How common are lives now that are devoted to compassion? I am sure there are more
than a few: those who work with and live for the poor, and certain lay brothers and
nuns who may well attempt to live out the teachings of Jesus and Lord Buddha. But
for the most part, we seek comfort and ease and enjoyment. It is natural that we do so.
It is expected. When I talk to my students about living for compassion, they tend to be
quite interested. But few of them have ever contemplated this sort of life before. Like
the life of courage and the life of thought, the life of compassion seems to be receding
in our culture. People don’t talk much about ideals any more. We don’t usually offer
them as viable options to the young.
Surely ideals are not for everyone. Some people will hear Louis C.K.’s riff and they will
say: Yes, I should be more grateful for the amazing gadgets and conveniences that
surround me. And I will be. They will be duly chastened by Louis, give thanks, and go
off to enjoy their lives.
But other people will find that no matter how amazing the technologies of pleasure
and power may be, life still feels empty. These people will feel that life ought to be
more than sleeping and eating and hoarding, getting and spending and having a good
time. In our current culture those people may feel confused. Where are they to go for
an alternative?
There is Plato behind them but still out ahead of them; there is Homer; there are
Jesus and Confucius and Lord Buddha. And perhaps they will turn to them and see a
new world of possibility open up.
Mark Edmundson (/people/mark-edmundson)
Mark Edmundson is the author of many books, including Self and Soul: A Defense of
Ideals (Harvard, 2015) and Why Football Matters: My Education in the Game
(Penguin, 2014). He is University Professor at the University of Virginia.
PUBLISHED: October 5, 2015
UPDATED: October 2, 2015
TOPICS: Plato (/tags/plato), Jesus (/tags/jesus), Buddha (/tags/buddha), Happiness
(/tags/happiness), Contentment (/tags/contentment), Higher Education (/tags/highereducation)