The myth of happiness

[sawyl]

Occasionally interesting, if rather Freud-heavy, piece on happiness by Adam Phillips in today's Guardian Review:

It is not surprising, in other words, that happiness has always had rather a mixed reception. No one in their right minds we might think, especially now, would be promoting unhappiness; and yet the promotion, the preferring of happiness – the assumption of a right to happiness – brings with it a lot of things we might not like. And the desire for happiness may reveal things about ourselves that we like even less. "A people who conceive life to be the pursuit of happiness must be chronically unhappy," the anthropologist Marshall Sahlins wrote.

Which makes me think of Tito Melema in Eliot's Romola, a man so dedicated to pursuing an easy life that he makes to fall at every moral hurdle, effectively sabotaging his own chances at happiness. Or at least, since I've yet to finish the novel in question, that's how things have panned out thus far...