happiness

Psychoanalyst and philosopher Adam Phillips stated, “[A]nyone who could maintain a state of happiness, given the state of the world, is living in a delusion. Argue for or against this stance.

I’m going to argue against this stance. Yes, the world is crazy right now but if you are happy as a person that should be all that matters. I think what he is trying to say is that no on should be happy with the economy and all the craziness in the world. Some examples are the terror attacks, guns, and all the political scandals that are going on.

“One of the obstacles is the demand that we be happy, that we enjoy our lives. I think it’s a huge distraction, and it’s very undermining, I think. So, living in a quasi-hedonistic culture, I think it’s a big problem. It’s wrong because, if we are to make this crude, in the old days whenever that was, there was an internal injunction to be good. Now the injunction is to be happy, or to be enjoying yourself. And the reason this is a distraction is because life is also painful, in other words—and it’s a very simple thing and its very obvious—and it starts in childhood—which is that if someone can satisfy you, they can also frustrate you. This is ineluctable, this is structural, it is never going to change. This means that everybody has to deal with ambivalence.”

Fancies of Satisfaction: A Psychoanalysis of Pain, Pleasure, and the Good Life by Ethan Richardson

This quote above and the reading that I did leads me to think that Phillips was an unhappy person in life.