These are some thoughts on why I consider happiness a considerable danger to human society. This reflection is intentionally anti-conclusive and anti-systematic; as I allow my younger self to meditatively reflect on these looming questions, I will let my thoughts wander into unknown depths while remaining anchored in the pragmatic existence of being-in-the-world.
Although my ideas are influenced by Martin Heidegger, the primary purpose of this piece is to expand my own relationship with technology, pushing unanswered questions toward their uncomfortable, phenomenological conclusions.
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Every time I speak against happiness, people misinterpret me—they assume I am romanticizing suffering. Although there may be a grain of truth to that, I violently disagree with the premise. For starters, I believe the pursuit of happiness is functionally perverted from the beginning. It makes the assumption that life is a tool to be “used” rather than a reality to be simply experienced and explored. There is a subtle but vital distinction between utilizing existence and experiencing the tragic beauty of life.
Furthermore, this utilitarian approach is deeply anti-aesthetic in nature. The egotistical idea that we are somehow born to utilize material comfort is primarily driven by utilitarian and hedonistic ideals—the reductive conclusion summarized by the slogan, “the greatest good for the greatest number.” This mindset effectively reduces both human and natural values to mere numbers and statistics on a screen, ultimately paving a road to non-being and depersonalization.
I am equally skeptical of the other side of this spectrum: the capitalistic mindset of those who convert human suffering into an “output” or measurable performance. This essentially commits the same error, dehumanizing the individual by reducing them to their quantitative yield.
On the contrary, a life driven by affirmative action does not shy away from suffering. It embraces it without resentment, offering an unconditional “yes” to existence. Such an individual subscribes to the notion that whatever they bring into this world should add to nature’s beauty rather than subtract from it. It is precisely this affirmation to life that makes a person truly Dionysian in their essence.
This brings me to one of my central disagreements with techno-maniacs and techno-capitalists. They are extremely confident about how the world will look through their naive, utopian lens, but they rarely ask why the world should look that way in the first place. They fail to question whether that kind of life is truly life-affirming, or if it celebrates existence by transcending suffering. A true revaluation of all values must always consider whether the values imbued in a given technology shy away from the tragic disposition of life, or if they affirm its beauty through vitality and pure presence.
This is not to say that I am strictly anti-technology. Rather, I believe we must explore its subjective dangers beyond surface-level observations. The ways in which we interact with technology go beyond immediate physical and mental states; its influence cascades, accumulates, and infiltrates every aspect of our lives.
I want to emphasize that this is a phenomenological statement, not a normative conclusion. One can arrive at this same inference simply by inquiring into the essence of technology and one’s personal relationship with it.
We must not fall into the erroneous belief that we can seamlessly curate our feeds while overestimating our own cognitive resilience. Often, people only adopt this belief after technology has already altered their lives beyond immediate repair, turning their supposed agency into a post-hoc rationalization.
I will conclude this note for those who have inquired into the nature of the self and observed how we project our mental states onto the people around us. Technology and our immediate environment ultimately reflect these projections back at us. In other words, technology is never a neutral entity; it carries moral baggage, sometimes rendering us lethargic, and other times making us energetic.
Perhaps the best way to encapsulate this complex, mirroring relationship between the self, others, our suffering, and the world we build is through Nietzsche. The following exchange from Klage der Ariadne (Lament of Ariadne)—where Dionysus speaks to his philosophical lover, Ariadne—is cryptic by design. Yet, it perfectly summarises the labyrinth we must navigate when confronting our own nature and the tools that reflect it back to us:
Dionysos: “Be clever, Ariadne! You have little ears, you have my ears: Tuck a clever word into them! – Must one not first hate oneself, if one is to love oneself? I am your labyrinth…”