There Is No Path to Happiness, Happiness Is the Path

In the autobiography that appeared after his death in 1873, John Stuart Mill recalled how he recovered from a nervous collapse in his early twenties and reached a conclusion about happiness. Ask yourself whether you are happy, he observed, and you cease to be so. Happiness, he concluded, is only found by those who fix their minds on something other than their own happiness, on the good of others or on some art or pursuit followed as an ideal end. The saying often credited to the Buddha, though no early text is known to contain it, that there is no path to happiness and that happiness is the path, makes a similar point in sharper words.

Its meaning is that happiness is not a destination reached at the end of a series of steps. We usually think the opposite. We say that we will be happy when the degree is complete, the job is secured or the house is bought, and we treat the present as a corridor. The saying tells us that this posture makes happiness permanently postponed. If it lives anywhere, it lives in the quality of the walking, in the attention, kindness and purpose with which one lives each day.

Aristotle had said as much in a different language. The Greek word usually translated as happiness, eudaimonia, means something nearer to flourishing, and he defined it as an activity of the soul in accordance with virtue. It was not a feeling that comes after a good act but the good act itself, continued over a lifetime. A harpist is not made happy by a prize for harp playing. He is happy in the playing. For Aristotle a person was fully human when engaged in the activities that expressed his best capacities, and happiness was the name for that engagement.

Everyday experience supports the claim. Ask people to recall the happiest period of their lives and many name a time of hard work, a student hostel with little money, a first job or the early years of a marriage, when they were absorbed in building something. The goals they were aiming for have since been reached, and the reaching is dull in memory. What they miss is the walking. The Gita describes the sthitaprajna, a person of steady wisdom who is neither elated by gain nor shaken by loss, and the figure represents a happiness that does not depend on arrival.

Modern psychology has found the same pattern in the laboratory. Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi spent decades asking people, through pagers that interrupted them at random times, what they were doing when they felt most alive. The answers described a state he called flow, in which a person is so absorbed in a task of the right difficulty that time and self fall away. Surgeons, rock climbers, chess players and weavers reported it. Few described it while resting on a sofa. The happiness in these moments was not sought directly but arose from the activity.

The happiness in these moments was not sought directly but arose from the activity.

Viktor Frankl reached the conclusion from the extremity of the concentration camps. In Man's Search for Meaning he wrote that happiness cannot be pursued and must ensue, as the unintended side effect of dedicating oneself to a cause greater than oneself. Those who survived the camps with their dignity intact were often those who held a purpose, a child to see again or a manuscript to rewrite. The Indian traditions concur. The Eightfold Path of Buddhism is a path of right view, right effort and right mindfulness, to be practised every day, and the Gita counsels action without clinging to its fruit.

However, the saying is not beyond challenge. The Declaration of Independence in 1776 spoke of the pursuit of happiness as an unalienable right, and the founders plainly thought that people could and should seek it by building a just society. Most people can say, after a bereavement or a bout of illness, that they are less happy than before, and they know what would help. The saying also sits uneasily with poverty. A mother who cannot feed her children cannot be told that happiness lies in her walking, because her path leads to a hunger that no change of attitude removes.

A fair reading takes both views seriously, and it begins by noticing that they answer different questions. One asks what makes a good life possible and the other asks what a good life feels like from the inside, and a person can hold both without contradiction. Material conditions set the ground on which a good life can be built. Without food, safety, health and some freedom, the question of how to walk is hardly available. Beyond that ground, however, more possessions add little to what attention, work and affection can give. The saying is wise for those who have enough and who nevertheless find themselves postponing their lives, and it is a luxury for those who do not. Its force depends on who is hearing it.

There is a risk in making a doctrine of the saying. A person who is told that happiness is the path may start to monitor his own walking for signs of it, and so fall into the trap that Mill described. Wellness industries sell mindfulness as another thing to be achieved, with apps that count the minutes of calm, and the effort turns the path back into a goal. Anxiety about whether one is walking happily is a new unhappiness of its own.

The teaching therefore carries a paradox that it can state but not escape. If happiness is the path, then it cannot be sought, and if it cannot be sought, then the advice to walk it seems to lead nowhere. The Buddhist teachers answered this by saying that the answer would be found only in the practice, by those willing to walk without asking where the walk ends. Whether that is the deepest wisdom or a graceful refusal to answer remains uncertain, and the one who is walking has no reason to stop and decide.