Happiness: Small Pleasures

A secularised version of happiness has been converted into social and commercial objectives, instead of the heavenly ideal inspiring the salvation religions.

Small pleasures (petit bonheur) — to satisfy the material demands of one’s living standards — has become the formal goal of Western ideology. But happiness, even well-being, is not to be found in this marketplace of dupes. Never have suicide rates been higher.

Defined strictly in terms of economic and materialistic well-being, these small pleasures falsely presume that all human beings aspire to the same ideal of quantitative consumption. This purely passive objective, despises the spiritual, historical, and cultural requirements of an individual’s inner sense of well-being. It destroys communal solidarity. It excludes everything that cannot be attained through a material level of life. Its massified individual knows, as such, only anguish and insecurity in a society promising heaven on Earth through mere possessions. The frenzied search for material well-being, socially sanctioned but never attained, is leading to what Konrad Lorenz called the ‘warm death’, which softens and undermines a civilisation.

This narcissistic materialism of small pleasures is accompanied by the simulated pseudo-spirituality of consumer hypocrisy: human-rights, humanitarianism and other so-called ‘cultural policies’ designed to elevate the contemporary soul.

Quotes

• “The rapid transition from desire to satisfaction and from this to a new desire is what constitutes happiness.” – Arthur Schopenhauer, in: Die Welt als Wille und Vorstellung, Volume I, 1819, pp. 307 f.

See also

• Consumerism
• Domestication
• Individualism