Happiness Without Hedonism: What the Stoics Meant by a Good Life

Two meanings of happiness

The English word “happiness” covers two different things. One is a feeling: joy, contentment, a good mood. The other is a judgment about a life: that it is going well, that it is worth living, that it is a good life. The two often coincide, but not always. A person caring for a dying parent may be unhappy in the first sense and living very well in the second. A person drifting from pleasure to pleasure may feel good most days and be living badly.

Ancient philosophers, almost without exception, were concerned with the second meaning. The Greek word was eudaimonia, literally “having a good spirit”, and every major school had a theory of what it consisted of. For Aristotle, it was activity in accordance with virtue, with enough external goods. For Epicurus, it was pleasure understood as freedom from pain and anxiety. For the Stoics, it was virtue alone. See eudaimonia: the happiness the Stoics were talking about.

The Stoic position

The Stoic view of happiness follows from their view of the good. If only virtue is good and only vice bad, then a good life is a virtuous life, whatever else happens. Wealth, health and pleasure are indifferents: preferred, but not necessary for happiness in the full sense.

Zeno defined happiness as “a good flow of life” (euroia biou). Later Stoics described it as living in agreement with nature, which for humans means living according to reason. Epictetus spoke of freedom: the happy person is the one who cannot be hindered or compelled, because they want only what is up to them.

Few modern readers accept the strict claim that virtue is sufficient for happiness. It seems to ignore the plain fact that pain, poverty and loss make life worse. A softer version is easier to defend and still demanding: character is the most important part of a good life, the only part fully in your hands and the part that no one can take away.

Why pleasure is not the goal

The Stoics did not oppose pleasure. They classified it as an indifferent, and in their view joy, a rational elation at what is genuinely good, was one of the good feelings a wise person would have. What they rejected was making pleasure the measure of life.

Their reasons were partly logical (pleasure can come from bad actions, so it cannot be the good) and partly practical. A life organized around pleasure is fragile. It depends on circumstances, it adapts and fades, and it pushes toward always wanting more. That last point has been studied extensively by modern psychologists.

The hedonic treadmill

In 1971, Philip Brickman and Donald Campbell used the phrase “hedonic treadmill” to describe the tendency of people to adapt to changes in their circumstances, so that gains in pleasure fade and people return toward a baseline level of wellbeing. A famous 1978 study by Brickman, Dan Coates and Ronnie Janoff-Bulman compared lottery winners with people who had become paralyzed, and reported smaller lasting differences in happiness than most people would expect.

Later research, summarized by Ed Diener and colleagues in 2006, qualified the theory. Baselines are not fixed, people differ and some events, such as long unemployment or the loss of a spouse, can change wellbeing for a long time. But the core observation holds: we adapt to most improvements faster than we expect, and that is why more so rarely feels like enough. See the hedonic treadmill.

The Stoics would have recognized this immediately. Seneca says that the person who craves more is poor, whatever he has. The treadmill is what you get when you treat preferred indifferents as goods.

Comparison and complaint

Two habits erode wellbeing almost everywhere, and both are, in Stoic terms, judgments that can be trained.

Comparison. Measuring your life against others’ makes satisfaction relative, and there will always be someone with more. Social media has made comparison constant and curated. The Stoic response is not to stop noticing others, but to stop treating their circumstances as the measure of yours, and to focus on your own conduct, which is the only thing you can actually compare fairly. See how to stop comparing yourself to others.

Complaint. Complaining feels like relief, but habitual complaint tends to fix attention on what is wrong and rehearse frustration. Epictetus is sharp about this. In the Discourses, he imagines his students complaining about their circumstances and asks whether they have not been given the faculties to bear them. See how to stop complaining.

Grief

A philosophy of happiness that cannot handle grief is not worth much. The Stoics are often accused of coldness here, and some of their advice does read harshly. But Seneca, in his letters and consolations, admits to tears and recognizes that grief must be allowed. What he warns against is grief that is prolonged by our own judgments: that the loss is unbearable, that we must show sorrow to prove our love. See grief, the Stoic way.

Realism over optimism

Popular culture often equates happiness with optimism, the expectation that things will turn out well. The Stoics were not optimists in that sense. They expected difficulties, rehearsed losses and accepted that much of life is out of our hands. And yet they were not pessimists either. They believed that whatever happens, it is possible to act well.

That position, realism about circumstances and confidence about character, may be the most useful thing the Stoics offer modern readers who are tired of being told to think positively. See realism over optimism: is Stoicism pessimistic?