The Philosophy of Everything: On the Pursuit of Happiness — Introduction

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You think you are choosing, but mostly you are running on instructions you never wrote. I spent most of two decades mistaking a shelf of other people's thoughts for a mind, and this book is how I walked out.

In brief: In this introduction I explain why I think so much of our unhappiness comes from living at the surface of things and wanting what we were taught to want. So does much of the damage we do to the planet. I tell you how my own search slowly sorted itself into four kinds of work, which became the four parts of this book. Then I say a word about suffering, so that you read everything that follows in the right key.

Most of what is wrong with the human world, I have come to think, starts in one place. We are trying to be happy in a way the world will not allow. We chase pleasures that do not last. We take more than we need. We act as if the planet is a buffet that will be refilled in the morning, and we are surprised, every year, when something else has run out. The forests are smaller. The rivers are dirtier. The air carries the news of what we have done. None of this is hidden. We just preferred not to look at it, because looking at it would have required us to want less. And wanting less was the thing none of our teachers ever taught us how to do.

The world is also moving faster than the pleasures can keep up with. By the time you have got what you wanted, the wanting has moved on. You buy the thing. The thing is briefly bright. The brightness fades. A new wanting moves in. This goes on for the whole of an ordinary life. It goes on until the person dies of it, without ever having figured out what was actually being chased. Greed, not need, drives a consumer society. The greed wears the costume of need so well that most of us never see the costume. We just feel like we need the next thing. We do not. We are being run by a wanting that does not belong to us.

And the worst part is not what this does to the outside. The damaged forests are outside. The damaged climate is outside. Then there is the damaged inside of a person who has spent forty years buying things they did not need. That is inside. The inside damage is the part nobody is selling you a solution to. The solutions on offer are all more outside things.

People want to be happy. I have not met anyone, when pressed, who said otherwise. People want to be at peace with their lives, with each other, with the animals and the trees and the time they have left. The peace they want, though, is not where they are looking for it. It is not at the surface, where most of us spend our days. It sits a little below the surface, in the territory of what is actually true. Most of the unhappiness I have seen in my life came from not bothering to walk down to that territory and see what was there. That includes my own unhappiness. The looking, done honestly, feeds a person. The not-looking starves them.

I think there is one truth. I do not think there is one road to it. Every person who has found any part of it has found it through the shape of their own mind, and the shapes are all different. A method that worked for me, on the days it worked, will not work for you in the same way. This is why the systems that promise a single road eventually disappoint their followers. The systems were built for an average person who does not exist. The actual people walking around are you, me, the cousin who left the religion last year, and the friend who never had one. We have to find our own way through, with whatever materials we happen to have.

The trouble with finding your own way is that the territory is full of confident liars. Belief systems everywhere ask you to take them on trust, punish you for asking the wrong questions, and offer nothing you can check. I spent most of two decades walking through this country. For a long time I thought I was thinking. What I was actually doing was collecting. I had a fine library of other people's thoughts on a shelf inside my head. And I had mistaken the library for a mind.

When I finally noticed this, the work split, for me, into four kinds. It split that way slowly, over years. I did not sit down and design it. I found, after walking around for long enough, that the same problems kept coming back, and that those problems sorted themselves into four piles. How do you know what you know. What is actually there, underneath the explanations. What your own mind is doing while you try to figure both out. How to live next to other people once you have begun. I am not going to argue that everyone has to do the work in this order, or that these are the only four kinds. I am going to tell you what I found at each one.

The first thing I had to figure out was how I knew anything at all. This sounds like a strange place to start. It is the only place to start. Most of what is in our heads got there because trusted adults repeated it, not because we tested it. The thing they call common sense is mostly inherited assumption. The thing they call faith is the same.

Before you can find out what is true, you have to know what counts as finding out. You have to have some way of telling a story from a fact, an opinion from an observation, and a belief that has been checked from a belief that has only been repeated. This is the dullest-sounding part of the work and one of the most important. Without it, you spend the rest of your life being carried along by whatever information happens to be loudest near you. And most of what is loud is wrong.

A mind that does this work, examining what it has been told before keeping it, is what we call a conscious mind. This kind of mind has built every good thing in human history. It has also not built quite enough yet. There are still questions science has not answered. Into the gaps, people pour their guesses. The guesses harden into "truths." The truths get organised into religions and ideologies. Some of them, over time, start killing people. Most of the suffering in human history sits in this gap: the gap between what we actually know and what we have agreed to call knowing.

We know more, now, than we ever have. Most of the guesswork could be retired. But the knowledge has to be put into a shape an ordinary person can use. At the moment it is mostly locked up in academic journals and technical vocabulary. There is also a deeper problem. The picture science gives us, accurate as it is, speaks mostly to the body. It tells you what your atoms are doing. It does not tell you what to do with your afternoon. We are not just bodies. We live inside our minds, and our minds want meaning, not just material. A philosophy built on molecules alone leaves a person feeling that life is pointless and the universe is indifferent, that it simply does not care. The molecules are true. The feeling of pointlessness is also true. It is a problem worth solving, and science alone will not solve it.

The next thing I had to figure out was what was actually there. The question, in plain English, is this: what is the world made of, and is there anyone running it. Most human beings have been taught one answer, ever since human beings started teaching each other anything. The answer is that the world was made by an intelligent being who is watching and who has a plan. This being will balance the books in another life if they cannot be balanced in this one, rewarding the good and punishing the bad. I understand why this answer has done well for so long. It makes the suffering easier to carry. It promises that the worst things will be paid for later. It puts somebody in charge.

What I came to think, after a long time, was that the answer is not true, and the cost of believing it is too high. The universe, as far as anyone can check, is not a story being told by an author. It is a kind of playground where two teams of energy play their game. The teams are the potential and the kinetic, which is to say the stored and the moving. They play by a small handful of rules that have not changed in fourteen billion years. The whole arrangement (every galaxy, every plant, every person, this sentence) assembles itself from the bottom up out of those rules. Nobody is directing the traffic from above. The traffic is its own director. This is so hard for an ordinary mind to accept, and here is the reason. An ordinary mind cannot easily believe that accidents, of the right kind, in the right place, over enough time, can produce something as strange as a person who is reading this. It does not feel like an accident. It is one anyway.

There is a price to believing in the designer, though. I want to say this carefully, because the people who hold this belief are often kind, often decent, often trying very hard to be good. The price is that you put the controls of your own life into the hands of an authority you cannot check on. You have to take, on trust, that the authority is good. You have to take, on trust, that the people speaking for the authority are speaking for it accurately. You have to take, on trust, that the suffering you and the people you love are going through is part of a plan whose terms you do not get to see. That is a great deal of trust to spend on something nobody has ever produced evidence for. I spent a great deal of it before I stopped.

A life run on inherited belief, without that examination, is not quite a life. It is a program running on someone else's code. The will of the person is buried under instructions they did not write. They are not steering. They are being steered. The instructions can be religious. They can be political. They can be commercial. The mechanism is the same in every case. You think you are choosing. You are mostly executing.

After what is there, you start to wonder what is doing the looking. This was the next thing I had to take apart. The mind has parts. There is the instinct that pulls you towards food and sex and safety, the things the species could not have got here without. There is the self that thinks of itself as you, which is mostly a story the mind tells about its own contents. There is memory, which is much less reliable than the people who depend on it would like. There is intellect, which sorts and judges. There are emotions, which colour everything. There is behaviour, which is what comes out the other end of all this. And there is consciousness, which watches all of it. If you have not looked at these parts carefully, they run you. If you have, you can begin to run them.

Energy is the same underneath all of these. The same energy that becomes a star becomes a stone, becomes a sparrow, becomes the person reading this. It is, I sometimes think, like water poured into different vessels: a glass, a jug, a clay pot. The water is the same. The vessel is what changes. The names and forms are endless. The thing underneath is one. Most of what people call disagreement in the world is the consequence of looking at the names and forgetting the thing underneath. Unity in diversity is not a slogan. It is a description of what is actually there.

What ties a person to their suffering, I have come to think, are three things. The tendencies they were born with. The conditioning that was poured into them by everyone who got to them first. And the consequences of what they have already done. These three keep the mind swinging like a pendulum between pleasure and pain. Think of the weight in an old clock, going back and forth all day. Years of this, and the person gets tired, and tiredness is most of what we mean by unhappiness. Shouting at the pendulum does not help. The pendulum does not hear. Understanding the pendulum is what helps. That means knowing how it works, what pushes it, and how to slow it.

A will that has been freed from the pendulum starts behaving differently. It moves towards what brings actual pleasure and away from what brings actual pain. It stops chasing the cheap version of pleasure your conditioning sold you. The person who comes out of this work is harder to frighten, harder to manipulate, and easier to live near. The hero in you, if you want to call it that, finally beats the villain. The villain was you. The hero was also you. The whole fight was inside.

But a person who has done this work cannot live in a vacuum, cut off from everyone else. They have to live in a society. And the society, if it is bad, will undo the work. A person can only be about as decent as the worst people around them. This is because, past a certain point, decency starts costing more than the person can pay. Personal philosophy without a social one is not enough. You cannot save yourself alone if the building you are inside is on fire.

This was the fourth thing I had to figure out: how human beings can live next to each other without making each other miserable. The argument, after all the walking, is simple. Cooperation works. Competition, past a certain point, does not. A society where the relationships among people are mutually beneficial, good for both sides, keeps going. A society where one group wins by making another lose ends in collapse, eventually, every time. This is not a moral claim. It is a description of how systems hold up.

Think of traffic. If everyone drove however they pleased, the road would be a slaughterhouse. So there are rules. Stop here. Go there. Give way to the one on the right. Nobody likes the rules. Everyone follows them anyway, because the alternative is worse. A society needs the same kind of rules. These are rules that keep one person from harming another, without piling on so many rules that life becomes paperwork. A good society guarantees a few simple things to every person, no matter how perfect or imperfect that person happens to be. They can live without being killed. They can speak without being silenced. They will be treated equally before the law. And opportunity is not handed only to those who started with everything. Beyond those few things, the society should leave people alone.

The Earth keeps a careful distance from the Sun. Close enough not to freeze. Far enough not to burn. Human beings should keep something like that distance from each other. Too close and we suffocate. Too far and we abandon each other. The whole work of ethics, in the end, is finding the right distance.

Say you have all of this: knowledge tested, reality looked at clearly, a settled mind, a society that is not on fire. Even with all of this, a person can still be unhappy. Peaceful coexistence is not the same as a meaningful life. A peaceful life can still be empty. What makes a life worth the time it takes is meaning. The sense that what you are doing matters. The sense that the people you are doing it next to are people you care about. The sense that the days have texture, not just duration: that they feel like something, and do not just pass.

This happens, in my experience, when a person stops drawing a tight wall around the self. They start seeing everyone else as continuous with them, as part of the same whole. An identity that includes everyone and excludes no one. It also happens when the life is allowed to be beautiful: festivals, music, food, the small ceremonies that make a Tuesday different from a Wednesday. Then the life is lived, instead of being treated as a list of tasks. And it happens when the relationships are built so that both sides come away with something. The relationships built on one side winning poison everyone, eventually. The relationships built on mutual benefit do not.

There is one more thing a person needs, and almost nobody talks about it. A goal. The brain was built to survive and reproduce. For most of human history that was a full-time job. The meaning of life did not need to be invented, because survival used up all the meaning a person had. Now, for many of us, survival is mostly taken care of. The brain has nothing to do. So the brain, with nothing to do, manufactures despair. The way out is to invent a goal: something worth pursuing even though nothing strictly requires you to pursue it. I call these surrogate goals. A surrogate is a stand-in. They are not the original mission. They are the mission a person picks once the original one has been completed. Without one, a person rots in plenty.

There are four piles of work, then: how to know, what is there, what the mind is doing, and how to live with others. These are what I think the work splits into. Put them together and a person can begin to walk out of confusion under their own power. The walking is the point. The book is one example of someone having walked.

One last thing before we begin. I want to say something about suffering, because if I do not say it, you will read everything that follows in the wrong key. It would be like hearing a song played in the wrong key: every word in place, and the whole of it sounding wrong.

Suffering is not the enemy. I used to think it was. I have come to think suffering is more like the engagement ring life slides onto a person at birth. It is uncomfortable, and sometimes too tight. But it is a reminder that there is work to do, that you have agreed to something, that you cannot just float through. Suffering is how a person finds out they have been walking the wrong way. It is the GPS in the car saying, reroute. Without it, we would never change. We would sit in the same life until we died of it. The point is not to escape suffering. The point is to listen to what it is telling you, let it do its job, and then let it pass. Knowledge, in my experience, comes mostly to people who have had reason to look for it. People who are comfortable rarely bother.

The real source of unhappiness, in the end, is not what is happening to you. It is what is happening inside you while it is happening. This is the whole reason a philosophy is needed at all. The outside cannot always be fixed. The inside can be worked with. A good philosophy is one that quiets the inside enough that the outside stops feeling like the emergency it used to feel like. That, in the simplest words I can find, is what I have tried to put in this book.

Words to Keep

• greed in the costume of need: the wanting that drives a consumer society, disguised so well as need that most of us never notice it.

• conscious mind: a mind that examines what it has been told before keeping it. It is the kind that has built every good thing.

• two teams of energy: the potential and the kinetic, the stored and the moving, whose game builds everything from the bottom up.

• inherited belief: belief taken on trust from others and never examined. A life run on it is a program running on someone else's code.

• unity in diversity: one energy underneath endless names and forms, like water in different vessels. It is a description of what is there, not a slogan.

• the pendulum: the mind's swing between pleasure and pain, kept going by inborn tendencies, conditioning, and the consequences of what we have done.

• mutual benefit: relationships in which both sides come away with something. A society built on it keeps going.

• the right distance: like the Earth and the Sun, close enough not to freeze and far enough not to burn. Finding it is the whole work of ethics.

• surrogate goals: goals a person invents once survival is taken care of, worth pursuing even though nothing strictly requires them.

• suffering: not the enemy but a signal, like a GPS saying reroute, that you have been walking the wrong way.

Sources and Further Reading

This introduction comes from my own walking, reading and living over many years, not from any one book. The chapters that follow name their sources as they come.

Next in the series: Part I: On Epistemology.