The Conquest of Happiness and Why It Matters Today

Date

February 7, 2021

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Bertrand Russell’s book ‘The Conquest of Happiness’ (1930) attempts to analyse the conditions for happiness in our modern world, focusing on the mindsets of the unhappy and the happy person and how they differ. For Russell, the unhappy person is preoccupied far too much with their own life and career, and with how they present themselves to others; while happy people engage with life and with intellectual pursuits that are not related directly to themselves, displaying a quality of character he calls “zest” for life.

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“My purpose is to suggest a cure for the ordinary day-to-day unhappiness from which most people in civilised countries suffer, and which is all the more unbearable because, having no obvious external cause, it appears inescapable,” writes Bertrand Russell in his 1930 book ‘The Conquest of Happiness’. It is not a book on philosophical theory. Instead, Russell draws on his own life, his own experiences as an unhappy child and young man, to try and understand what makes us unhappy — and how we could be happier.

Bertrand Russell (1872-1970) was a British philosopher and writer, one of the most important analytic philosophers of the 20th century.

Russell begins by clarifying that unhappiness is not some kind of personal fault of the unhappy person — at least not entirely:

I believe this unhappiness to be very largely due to mistaken views of the world, mistaken ethics, mistaken habits of life, leading to destruction of that natural zest and appetite for possible things upon which all happiness, whether of men or animals, ultimately depends. (‘The Conquest of Happiness’)

Society certainly also plays a part in making people unhappy, especially through endorsing those “mistaken habits” and “mistaken views of the world” that cause people to become miserable. But since it is this “natural zest and appetite” that makes a life happy, each one of us can improve their happiness without needing to wait for a change in society. Each one of us has the power to correct their mistaken assumptions about the world and, through clearly understanding the roots of unhappiness, to finally create a happy life for ourselves.

Society certainly also plays a part in making people unhappy, especially through endorsing those “mistaken habits” that cause people to become miserable.

We have so much improved the material conditions of life in the 19th and 20th centuries, he writes in ‘The Conquest of Happiness’. Then why are we still so unhappy?

Animals are happy so long as they have health and enough to eat. Human beings, one feels, ought to be, but in the modern world they are not, at least in a great majority of cases,” Russell writes. And: “Watch …

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