Question According to Goethe, the only people who are truly happy are those who are like children, who are made blissful by the smallest things, and if you try to see life as it is you would be doomed to despair. What would fulfill the requirements of being like children, and how would that make you happy?

Accepted:
November 28, 2005

Comments

The image of the happy child is often invoked as a model for adult happiness (you mention Goethe; Nietzsche, in Thus Spoke Zarathustra, in the section on the three metamorphoses, for instance, does so as well). While this seems an overly romantic view of a child's world, the model as such has at least the following components:

1. Children, it is said, lack a complex inner life, so that their responses to events are immediate, near-instinctive, and without the quality of angst that can often accompany adult retrospective analyses of actions taken, nor the having of second thoughts about the wisdom of having taken such actions. There is a kind of freedom that an adult could well experience in virtue of being able to act to a situation by assessing it swiftly and with clarity at the outset, without the conscious intervention of a range of beliefs and desires that typically precede (and stultify?) adult action.

2. Connected to the first component, children lack the baggage of the past, and have less ability to concretely imagine their futures (although they no doubt have rich imaginations) so that their perspective tends for the most part to be present-oriented. For adults, then, the model suggests a heavier weighting of the present than of either the past or the future as a component of happiness.

Does this model of the happy child give us as adults some ideas for how to make ourselves happy? Perhaps. If it forces us to ask what it is that one does see, as an adult, as one scrutinizes one's own current (and past) life and contemplates one's future; If it helps to pry us away from the felt heaviness of past decisions and commitments, and to ask: am I really stuck with a certain way of doing things or are there options currently before me that I cannot SEE? If it gets us to roll around on the floor,as children do, cracking up with laughter at a joke one came up with oneself ....(there are currently laugh clubs all over India, where the goal is to engage in belly-heaving laughter for no good reason -- a very hip kind of adult therapy!)