While standing in line at my neighborhood Lowe’s to buy deck-building materials, an item unexpectedly caught my eye. Amid issues of Fine Woodworking and Creative Gardening was a magazine titled The Happiness Formula: How to Find Joy & Live Your Best Life. I had to buy it, even at the price of $12.99. The magazine is a glossy, ninety-five-page collection of articles, pro tips, and graphs about the science of happiness. In short, snappy prose, it explains how modern science—specifically positive psychology—teaches us how to live. Eat right, avoid toxic relationships, and ride bicycles like the happy Swedish people do. Even a home improvement store is offering help on the happiness question, proving that many are searching for ways of finding meaningful happiness.
And why not? After all, this is what it means to be an American; it is written into our Declaration of Independence. The great American experiment was self-consciously rooted in the Enlightenment view that all humans are created equal with inalienable rights. Among these rights, a “big three” are stated explicitly: “Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness.” While there are critiques of Enlightenment philosophy and American culture, they are onto something universal. The desire for joy is fundamentally human and not inherently wrong. Ultimately, the pursuit of happiness in faith represents a deep, spiritual longing.
However, humanity faces a significant problem. I do not mean the issues that dominate our news feeds, such as social inequity, political polarization, or global pandemics. These are real challenges, but they are not the core human problem I am addressing. In our search for satisfaction, the necessity of finding joy in the Lord as source is often overlooked in the rhythm of our daily lives.
I’m talking about a wider, deeper, and older problem that can be boiled down to the question of meaningful happiness. Does any of what we do really matter? Does it have ultimate and lasting meaning? And will this meaningfulness make me happy? These are not just the musings of 19-year-olds in their first philosophy class but are questions that all humans eventually ask themselves. And it’s not just a modern existential question. The Old Testament book of Ecclesiastes records the exact same wrestling by an ancient Near Eastern guy.
The fact that we all eventually ask that question shows there’s something to it. So then we must ask, How do we live meaningful lives? How do we find and maintain true happiness?
These are the questions at the foundation of human experience. Without meaning, life is not worth living. Only humans die by suicide. Even many who do not choose to end their own lives eventually feel like the philosophical superhero Deadpool, who remarks sardonically, “Life is an endless series of train wrecks with only brief, commercial-like breaks of happiness.”
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Content taken from Jesus the Great Philosopher by Jonathan T. Pennington, © 2020. Used by permission of Baker Publishing BakerPublishingGroup.com.