Developing rational reflection is best route to happiness and to avoid the empty restlessness that modern society encourages, the authors of a new book say.
Husband and wife Benjamin Storey and Jenna Silver Storey tell Afternoons they see a deep sense of what they call restlessness among their politics and international affairs students at Furman University, a reflection of a wider cultural malaise.
Distraction has replaced self-reflection and the market philosophy we have inherited, despite pretending to let us live as we please, produces decidedly homogenous and unhappy lives, the university professors say.
Their book, Why We are Restless: on the Modern Quest for Contentment, argues that finding true contentment requires interrogating our most basic assumptions about happiness, and they draw from a rich Socratic tradition of thought in doing so.
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The pair say they encounter many students who’ve reached lofty academic goals during their college career, but end up more disoriented, distracted and confused than when they started out.
“We see in that student a kind of restlessness," Jenna says. "It's a frenetic energy - they're working, they're going to their activities, they're achieving in their classes, but they're not sure where they're going anymore. So instead of feeling like they're making progress, they're kind of running around in circles. We chose to describe that as a kind of restlessness.”
Those students are also caught up in the lure of screen time, with its diversions and distractions, and a pursuit of endless variety in what we eat, drink and wear, and an appetite for mind-altering substances, from pot, to Prozac, to pinot, they say.
Activities like random web surfing may be very modern, but the pair say it is a 21st century version of a problem much older.
“The authors that we drew upon in writing this book are not just old, but centuries old. Someone like Blaise Pascal, a 17th century French author, looked around in his time at the aristocrats who were the other members of his class, with their favourite amusements of flirting, hunting and gambling.
"And he said, ‘these people are just distracting themselves’. He said famously, that the cause of all human unhappiness is our inability to sit alone in our rooms. And that was as much true in his time as it is in ours.”
What is different in 2022 is that the availability of things such as digital distractions, which Benjamin calls "a kind of accelerant".
We have also lost an appreciation for what Aristotle would have called purposeful rest, the authors say.
“Aristotle understood restful activity not just as flopping on the couch after a long day, but engaging the human mind, soul and body in its intended work. We tend not to think that way about what might be a cure for our distraction,” Jenna says.
Boredom can also be the starting point of inquiry and intellectual engagement, all of the writers considered in the Storey's book agree. Yet distractions stop us from reaching this creative springboard of the mind, Benjamin says.
“Michel de Montaigne famously retired from his political life and settled back into his chateau. He says, ‘I sat down there I was bored, and my mind sort of bolted like a runaway horse’. But out of the energy of this psychic ennui, Montaigne found the impulse to write his famous essays. And so, sitting still with boredom is the kind of thing that can allow us to find genuinely purpose of activity.”
Alexis de Tocqueville, the famous philosopher who wrote Democracy in America, influenced the pair, particularly the chapter ‘Why Americans are so restless in the midst of their prosperity’.
“Tocqueville talks in that chapter about the kind of restlessness that we're talking about - the restlessness of people achieving and achieving and achieving, but aren't quite sure where they're going in the end.
“They're particularly good at thinking about means using their reason, their minds, their creativity, to figure out how to get from A to B, but they haven't they're not used to training themselves to thinking about what is the worth of B, where am I going and what is the intrinsic worth of that goal.”
Many see happiness as the goal of life, instead of a by-product of living a virtuous life and are therefore get frustrated and are subject to this pathological restlessness.
Those with affluence and economic means in society experience the same restlessness as the privileged aristocrats of bygone times, while those striving to make ends meet are too preoccupied with meeting basic material needs to do so, they say.
For Plato happiness is a kind of satisfaction of the soul living in accordance truth, beauty and the good, and the three parts of the human constitution – emotion, appetite and reason - being in balance.
Aristotle continues this theme. “Aristotle defines happiness as the activity of the soul in accordance with virtue. Happiness, he says is that activity of the soul. The soul is the animating feature of the human being,” Jenna says.
“I think the Aristotelian definition of of happiness indicates that happiness is best approached indirectly. In other words, you don't get happiness by seeking it by going out and saying, ‘Well, how do I find happiness?’. You get to happiness by trying to do things well.”
Why Are We Restless book cover Photo: supplied
The pair were driven to develop a teaching structure that would convey these ideas to students.
“Jen and I decided that ‘wait a minute, we should address this problem directly in the curriculum’. The way we did that was by designing a course that uses texts that speak to this question directly.”
They use Plato’s Gorgias to raise the question of the good life, and how and why it should be pursued using reason. The book pits Socrates’ arguments about the virtuous life, with those of Callicles, a sophist who considers the pursuit of power and pleasure as virtue and the measure of happiness.
Her husband teaches the Gorgias, while Jenna teaches the second half of the course, which includes other thinkers like Saint Thomas Aquinas, and his Treatise on Happiness.
“I have my students go through an exercise of like, what do you want to do with your life? What do you want to be? What are you aiming for? And let me see if we can find ourselves among his questions,” she says.
The couple are committed to a firmly Socratic endeavour of encouraging dialogue and critical self-interrogating as a means of developing critical thought and rationally-informed action in society.
They see intrinsic value in knowledge, that which is objective and morally persuasive, informed by eternal truths that the mind can master if disciplined.
“I think most of us most of us have been taught, as many of our students have been taught, that happiness is something purely subjective," Benjamin says.
"But when people try to live by that doctrine, they find themselves pulled around by the sway of their emotions and even more than that, by the opinions of the other people around them, because they don't have any rudder that can tell them when it's okay to disagree with their friends, for example, or disagree with the authorities in their lives.
“So, what we tried to do in our teaching, and what we tried to do in our writing, is to help people discover the resources of rational reflection that can allow them to think their lives through and thinking our lives through, we think can make for a better a better, more fruitful, more stable quest for happiness.”
