Maybe happiness isn't the point of life

Happiness was a collateral benefit of other pursuits for much of our history

Credit: Edmund Blair Leighton

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One of the most curious things I’ve learned over the years from reading about marriage in medieval Europe is that the idea of consent was really important. In Ancient Rome, before the medieval era, the paterfamilias — or, the male head of the family — had significant power to arrange marriages as he saw fit (romantic love might have been seen as a “medical symptom of puberty” and was best ignored¹).

However, by the end of the first millennium, the Catholic Church had successfully exerted its power over local customs, and among the things it chose to emphasize was consent between people getting married. If a couple pledged themselves to each other, they were hitched ² ³.

The rise of consent isn’t so strange, but what really surprised me was that despite this change in social norms, arranged marriage hung on as a standard procedure for hundreds of years. And it wasn’t just for aristocrats; even peasants would try to arrange advantageous weddings that might improve their family’s standing⁴.

As a modern guy from the West, I found this puzzling. How could consent and arranged marriage coexist for so very long? Of course there were cases where it was more “consent” than actual consent, but the idea that a couple had to agree to a marriage was not a joke (and ultimately reshaped society⁵). Aren’t these two ideas, I wondered, fundamentally opposed? And, critically, how could people know they’d be happy if they were marrying a partner their parents chose?

The answer, of course, is that people didn’t know if they’d be happy. Certainly there was the hope that love or affection would eventually blossom in marriages⁶, but that was not the primary concern. People were not getting married because they had preexisting emotional ties with each other. They had other goals, such as advancing the interests of their families. In other words, happiness was a collateral benefit, not the main objective.

I was thinking about this history recently while reading the tsunami of media coverage on polyamory. I’m not going to retread the debate here, but it was fueled by splashy pieces in New York Magazine, the New York Times, and the New Yorker as well as a widely read rebuttal in The Atlantic.

I’m not going to weigh in on polyamory here; I know a bunch of polyamorous people who are super cool, and I tend to have a libertarian attitude about personal relationships. Do whatever you want⁷. In fact I had no plans to write more than a few lines on the topic.

But then I read this sprawling Astral Codex Ten post that dives into a variety of data on polyamory. And what I found interesting about the post was its attempt to identify whether polyamory is good or bad based on data about happiness. In other words, the premise is that something is “good” if it leads to happiness, and bad if it doesn’t. And using this framework, the post sums up the data by concluding that polyamory and monogamy are “equally good.”

I bring this up not because I want to discuss polyamory, but to highlight this rhetorical framework about happiness-verses-misery — which is both ubiquitous and I think not particularly useful. It assumes the primary goal in life is maximizing individual happiness, but ignores the possibility that maybe some things are more important. Maybe, just maybe, the goal isn’t doing whatever thing you want in the hopes that you will be more happy.

Consider the debate about having kids. Typically, this conversation unfolds in exactly the same way we’ve been debating polyamory: Whether or not you should have kids hinges on whether or not it’ll make you happy. The childless in this debate point to data showing that they tend to be happier, while the parents counter with their own data showing that they’re plenty satisfied with their lives. I’ve made the latter argument multiple times here at Nuclear Meltdown, including just a few weeks ago when I used my own post-child happiness as evidence that “yes, you should have kids.”

Happiness obviously matters, and I’m grateful that my own sense of satisfaction in life has risen. Everyone needs a certain baseline level of happiness to function.

But happiness also doesn’t have to be the primary goal. Much as was the case with medieval marriage, many in history have viewed reproduction through a more pragmatic lens. Kids could contribute to the household economy by working on the farm, for instance, or they could be married off in some advantageous union.

I’m not suggesting we bring back those specific practices. And I’m sure parents since time immemorial have derived joy from their kids. What I’m saying is that these older ideas about having kids or getting married give us examples of entirely different, but common-in-history, paradigms through which people understood the purpose of life. The pursuit of happiness was a secondary concern.

Older relationship paradigms are particularly interesting right now. In addition to ideas about consent, and as I’ve written before, marriage in the pre-modern West was generally less about emotional bonds and more about two people functioning, in the words of historian Stephanie Coontz, as “work-mates.” They were partners in some enterprise, be it survival (at the bottom of the economic spectrum) or conquest (at the top). Over time, the “work-mate” paradigm was replaced with an emphasis on “soul-mates,” or the idea relationships should be first and foremost emotionally rewarding. Posts like the one from Astral Codex Ten, and basically all the coverage of polyamory, are useful illustrations of this worldview.

But imagine if we started debating polyamory in the context of the work-mate paradigm. Suddenly, the most important question wouldn’t be if non-monogamy makes practitioners happy, it’d be if it makes them successful. Are the polyamorous financially better off? Does having more partners open more social or professional doors? Is polyamory a driver of upward mobility? And so on.

I have no idea what the answers to these questions are. Maybe polyamory actually is a great way to live in a work-mate world. It’s certainly conceivable that a larger romantic circle could lead to other, non-romantic opportunities. Imagine being a queen and marrying your son off to not just one enemy princess, but five or fifty. Perhaps you’d win more peace that way. Or maybe not; the concept as it’s currently discussed is new enough that we probably don’t know yet.

But again, polyamory is just a case study here in the way we debate topics. The real point is that whether any particular lifestyle choice — parenthood, monogamy, career, financial planning, etc. etc. — is “good” or “bad” doesn’t have to boil down first and foremost to whether or not it makes you or I happy. There are so many other ways to look at the world, and today’s relentless focus on individual happiness is actually a historical aberration.

And that’s basically the thesis today. I think for a lot of us — and I was definitely in this camp — the idea that happiness wouldn’t be the primary goal of any big life decision is now so foreign that my main objective in this post is to simply raise awareness that our modern worldview is actually very weird (or, WEIRD, if you’re familiar with the work of Harvard’s Joseph Henrich).

Put another way, the pursuit of happiness doesn’t have to be the purpose of life. It wasn’t for most people in history and they got along just fine. And if we’re being honest, we probably should more seriously consider factors beyond emotional satisfaction when it comes to things like having kids and forging relationships. What if polyamorous folks, for example, actually are more successful by non-emotional metrics? I’d be a lot more interested in that news than in tales about how polyamory is a good way to find one’s self, have sexual adventures, or be super cool — which have more recently been the focus of coverage on the topic.

Of course, this does also raise an obvious question: If the pursuit of happiness isn’t the objective, what is?

There are plenty of options, but I will briefly reiterate the Nuclear Meltdown thesis that the pursuit of family has a long successful track record⁸. In other words, those arranged-but-consenting medieval marriages hold a lesson for us today; people were choosing to put their tribe first. And I suspect that’s still an option today, even if we don’t specifically do arranged marriage or other medieval practices.

So in this worldview, the question at some big crossroad isn’t, “what will make me most happy?” it’s “what’s best for my family, tribe, or village?” For example: Should I have a(nother) kid? Well, what is best for the family? Should I be monogamous or not? What’s best for the family? Should I live in this place or that, or choose this job or that job? What’s best for the family?

Answers will vary depending on the person and family. But my hope — and I think my real life experiments are bearing this out — is that by adopting an older, family-above-all worldview, I’ll also get some of the things such as a village that in olden times people had in abundance.

Ironically, I also suspect this sort of sideways approach may be a better path to happiness as well. Maybe happiness was always supposed to be a collateral benefit. Or, to quote Brad Wilcox, "family first, me second. This is the paradoxical route to happiness in marriage."

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1. Growing Up and Growing Old in Ancient Rome: A Life Course Approach. 2001. Mary Harlow, Ray Laurence. Page 59

2. Marriage, a History: How Love Conquered Marriage. Stephanie Coontz. 2005. Pages 2 and 106, among others.

3. This raises the specter of clandestine marriages, which were problematic because they raised questions about who actually was married and because they could potentially happen without church approval. But by 1215, the Fourth Lateran Council had expressly prohibited such marriages.

4. Marriage, a History: How Love Conquered Marriage. Stephanie Coontz. 2005. Page 110

5. The WEIRDest People in the World. Joseph Henrich. 2020. Pages 167 and 191, but also the whole book.

6. Even in Ancient Rome, affection was an “expectation of married life but by no means a prerequisite.” Growing Up and Growing Old in Ancient Rome: A Life Course Approach. 2001. Mary Harlow, Ray Laurence. Page 59

7. Though, I am sometimes annoyed that the media coverage on this topic crosses from descriptive to prescriptive without simultaneously being up front about which behaviors are statistically most likely to lead to success.

8. Henrich has pointed out, for example, that “our most fundamental institutions are rooted in kinship,” described marriage specifically as the “most primeval of human institutions” and characterized the family as society’s most fundamental building block. (The WEIRDest People in the World and The Origins of WEIRD Psychology) The family also didn’t just evolve for no reason; George Mason University’s Jonathan F. Schulz has noted that going all the way back to the Neolithic period people lived in extended family groups because such groups “facilitate the defense and succession of property” (Kin Networks and Institutional Development). And even today, U.S. Census numbers show that more than 20% of American parents rely on family to provide childcare, meaning family continues to represent a practical solution to life’s challenges.