Comment by joshmarlow
8 hours ago
A few years ago I read a claim that the word 'happy' is relatively young - ~500 years old - and that translations of others words into 'happy' are somewhat approximate.
My takeaway is that (presuming the argument is correct) that much of human striving is probably better described with specific words (as you suggested - joy, accomplishment, fulfillment, excitement, etc). For most of human history, most people probably didn't think "I want to be happy" but "I want to have a good partner", "I want a big family", "I want my crop to grow so I don't die."
I wonder how much unhappiness is caused by seeking a poorly-defined ideal of happiness.
The book was called "Power, Pleasure, and Profit: Insatiable Appetites from Machiavelli to Madison".
> My takeaway is that (presuming the argument is correct) that much of human striving is probably better described with specific words (as you suggested - joy, accomplishment, fulfillment, excitement, etc).
All those four words combined is something like the concept of eudaimonia that Aristotle describes in his Nicomachean Ethics:
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eudaimonia
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flourishing
I've not read Aristotle directly but translating eudaimonia was an example in the book that I mentioned. The argument was that eudaimonia is often translated as happiness but that doesn't make sense in contexts where we talk about a soldier dying experiencing eudaimonia (suggesting a loose translation).
You don't think it possible for some one to die happy?
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Oh, absolutely. 99.999% of human history has been "just want to survive another year."
Russ Harris has a great book about this called The Happiness Trap [0], which is an introduction to ACT (Acceptance and Commitment Therapy)
[0]: https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/76053/the-happiness...
Dunno. Traveling to less developed places parents still want the kids to be happy for a start. It's surprising in places without roads, internet, phones etc. how normal everything is.
It's normal for parents to want their kids to be happy… it's less normal for those kids to be "happy" all the time.
The word שמחה and conjugations appear in the Bible about 200 times, so we have a good idea of what it means in context. It means exactly what I perceive the noun Happiness and the adjective Happy to mean in English.
That's very interesting and is good evidence against the thesis - thanks for sharing!
Just because the word 'happy' is relatively young in the English/European language, a conclusion can not be made for the whole Humankind.
Very true - which is why this piece "that translations of others words into 'happy' are somewhat approximate." would be very interesting if accurate.
Thanks for the book recommendation.