"He's not happy though....And his life of the mind is a construct."
I suppose it would be a devastating refutation for me to point out THAT I AM HAPPY. ;-)
This is an interesting aspect of internet culture in the 21st century: the idea that one side "wins" and the other side "loses" simply by insisting, "I know you're not happy!"
The point here being, "You teach us that we should all force our girlfriends to read Aristotle and Plato's First Alcibiades with us, but just look at yourself: you're not happy!" Genuinely, you have no idea how happy it might make the two of you —conversely, you have no idea how miserable. The two of you might well break up by the time you get to the end of the Gorgias.
Happiness is not what people think it is: if I meet a true believing Communist who is happy this will not motivate me to re-evaluate the morality of Communism —nor will it make me re-evaluate the psychological significance of belief itself. It does not matter how intensely happy the Communist may be, nor how miserable I may be by contrast. The happiest drunkard cannot convince me that I'm miserable because I'm sober —nor can he convince me that he'd be any less happy if he were sober himself. However, as I've already disclaimed: I am extremely happy with my life, at this very moment. (Feb. of 2025)
Happiness comes about in unexpected ways: I criticize the notion that you can know what will make you happy with any greater certainty than you'd ever know what will make you miserable. The reasons for one's own happiness are always discovered too late.
A large part of my public work has been self-criticism, reflecting on bad decisions I've made in my life, and examining the false assumptions "behind" (or "beneath") those decisions. You will notice that the participants in this Reddit group resolutely ignore this evidence that I'm not a narcissist (although it's a huge part of my corpus, even appearing within my books and articles, not just in my podcasts and videos). If I were diagnosed with NPD I wouldn't be ashamed of it any more than a diagnosis with autism: each resembles the other closely enough that (e.g.) the symptoms of autism seen in Elon Musk could instead be interpreted as narcissism. If you've known people with NPD you wouldn't ridicule them for this: they are quite incapable of doing what I've done (certainly more than a hundred times on the internet) publicly or privately. They are also incapable of doing what Durianrider did, on numerous occasions, in having a laugh at his own expense (i.e., I have never believed that Durianrider had NPD). They are quite incapable of making comedy mocking themselves, and/or engaging in the kind of serious self-criticism I've been so bold as to bore my audience with.
Studying Chinese at UVic made me miserable: I can explain to you the reasonable expectations that led up to the decision to study that subject at that place —and I can explain to you the false assumptions that the experience debunked. That's how life is for all of us: the things that make us happy arise adventitiously —they are very hard to foresee.
This is one of many reasons why I urge people NOT to live their lives FOR happiness: they are making the mistake of regarding something unknowable as known.
