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Happiness Is for Idiots

October 28, 2025

happiness, ignorance, philosophy, society

Herodotus has Solon deliver the famous adage, Call no man happy until he is dead – and if you are a perceptive reader, you could even make a pivot to Giacomo Leopardi’s “Everything is evil”. Happiness is elusive, happiness is difficult to define, and ultimately, happiness is for idiots.

I’m not the one who has made this observation, to which I subscribe. Slavoj Žižek has mentioned it on several occasions, and here’s a fairly recent one:

I will briefly refer to Žižek’s take, but in this post I’m basically using it as a starting point. Yes, happiness is for idiots, but my main thesis is that happiness – much like love or success – is a concept people don’t really understand.

Crucially, they don’t even bother to understand and that’s the main problem.

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The Happiness Illusion Paradox

April 1, 2018

Philosophy

experience, feelings, happiness, musings

Do you feel happy right now? Let’s assume that you do. What if I told you that you’re wrong? What if I told you that you only think that you’re happy? Maybe you would then change your mind; or maybe, you wouldn’t. Defining happiness has been an elusive activity since ancient times. For Aristotle, for example, happiness was more of an activity and less of a state of mind. Today let’s take a look at an interesting aspect of happiness, which is subjectivity. Let’s talk about the happiness illusion paradox.

By happiness illusion, I refer to the hypothesis my questions above posed: what if you only think that you’re happy while you actually aren’t. The happiness illusion paradox exposes the fallacious notion that happiness is an objective state – and where it is, it’s a facade for something else; when people talk about happiness, they might mean passivity and conformity. In other words, the happiness illusion paradox underlines the fact that you cannot measure or detect happiness outside the experiencer. If you think you’re happy, then by definition you’re happy.

happiness illusion paradox — Can happiness be anything but subjective?

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