On Happiness as the Justification of Life

Without a dogmatic support in religion or philosophy, human life lacks an ontological connection to an eternal entity whose existence is necessary. Suspended, like angels in an abyss empty of original reason, we lack a good answer to the basic question, the first and last question of the thinking being: why? Why do I exist? More than once I have been overwhelmed by the vertigo of knowing that I lack evidence that—outside of all this we call the universe—anything exists, or rather, that it is necessary for anything to exist at all. It could be, perhaps, that there were nothing, that nothing had ever existed; in which case I would never have known it, for I would not have existed either. Without this original reason, without this logical guarantee that something had to and must—in and of itself—exist necessarily, I find that any other fact or event, including this minuscule blink of thought that makes up our human life in the universe, is nothing but an irrelevant nothingness, with no transcendence whatsoever in the infinite void of the possible. To live enclosed in such a framework would be intolerable, were it not for one detail: that happiness exists, and that it contributes an absolute value to my human life. Thus, in my cosmology, happiness—even in its potential form—is the indispensable ontological excuse, and the only implicit benefit, of living. Although it does not follow from this argument that happiness is attainable, repeatable, or capable of being perfect, I am convinced that it is, that it must be. I came to this conviction not by induction, but by direct experience. Although experience has the last word for each of us, I wish to share mine, hoping it may be of benefit to others who face the inevitable, inescapable question. Here is my confession: I discovered, while being happy, that happiness exists, and that one can be aware of being so.