Is happiness just chemicals flowing through your brain or something more? Since happiness is the goal of human life, this is a vital question. The moronic boomer take is that traditional morality somehow stands against happiness, or seeks to repress or stymie it due to arbitrary or authoritarian rules. The truth is that morality itself was understood to be ordered to human happiness. If you merely seek the happiness that arises from chemicals flowing through your brain, you quickly discover that the quest often leads to deep unhappiness. The purest example is drug use, which is most direct'—ingesting chemicals to manipulate the chemicals in your brain—but one could say much the same about sexual gratification as Hunter S. Thompson said about drugs.
Anyone who wants to believe that there is a chemical source of happiness needs to read “Brave New World” by Aldous Huxley. In it, “soma” is the solution. Soma, sadly, does not create happiness, but rather a blissful separation from reality and sensation. It may erase the mundane, but it doesn’t eliminate it.
As a boomer, I believe as many classical thinkers did; namely that happiness can be found in the exercise of virtue. Do what is good and right, and you will find satisfaction and maybe even peace, joy, and love.
Anyone who wants to believe that there is a chemical source of happiness needs to read “Brave New World” by Aldous Huxley. In it, “soma” is the solution. Soma, sadly, does not create happiness, but rather a blissful separation from reality and sensation. It may erase the mundane, but it doesn’t eliminate it.
As a boomer, I believe as many classical thinkers did; namely that happiness can be found in the exercise of virtue. Do what is good and right, and you will find satisfaction and maybe even peace, joy, and love.