Verified by 
Americans, perhaps more than other nations, have a complicated relationship with happiness. While the founding document of our republic explicitly encourages the pursuit of happiness, it does not offer any advice on what to do with it once caught. Wouldn't it be nice to be able to keep happiness handy for future use? As Kozma Prutkov, a fictional personage invented by four Russian satirists during the stifling reign of Nicholas I, is said to have remarked once, "If you want to be happy, be so." Alas, you can't occupy happiness and expect not to be evicted; nobody can, not even the one percent of us who think they own it all. Nor is it advisable to try. As William Blake put it in a poem titled Eternity:
He who binds to himself a joy
Does the winged life destroy.
He who kisses the joy as it flies
Lives in eternity's sunrise.
Blake's poetical wisdom notwithstanding, the fleetingness of happiness is annoying, especially when it runs counter to our sense of entitlement. Having succeeded at getting hold of happiness after a particularly exhausting chase — the project finished, the promotion secured, the book published, the record broken — we feel that our hard work should have earned us more than a mere temporary lifting of our spirits. And yet, all we get even from the loftiest achievement is a temporary boost, followed by a quick slide back to what psychologists who study these matters have termed the set point — a routine level of well-being, different for each person, which hardly changes throughout adulthood (see, for instance, Lyubomirsky, S., K. M. Sheldon, and D. Schkade (2005). Pursuing happiness: The architecture of sustainable change. Review of General Psychology 9:111-131).
To figure out what can and what cannot be done about this predicament, we need to understand its deep roots in human nature — indeed, in those aspects of our nature that we share with all animals. One such characteristic is our capacity for forethought (for an overview, see the recent volume edited by Moshe Bar, Prediction in the Brain, Oxford University Press, 2011). In the world that is ever-changing yet is not entirely random, survival and flourishing are furthered by the ability to anticipate future developments, from the turn that your prey — or the predator that aims to make you its prey — will take next, to the twists of your workplace dynamics.
Evolution, which is the ultimate guarantor of the importance of this sense of foresight for all animals endowed with brains, is a harsh mistress, as species whose members are predisposed to rest on their laurels eventually discover. We humans came to dominate the planet not the least because of our collective cognitive prowess and drive for discovery (to the point of ruining the very ecosystem that made our ascent possible). Given that effective cognition and successful exploration depend critically on the capacity for foresight, it is no wonder that normal functioning for us means, at all times, having one metaphorical foot in the future.
This, then, is the root of our inability to prolong the enjoyment of even a well-earned respite from the mad pursuit. The higher the just-attained peak of happiness, the more likely it is that whichever way you look from there will be down. No matter: while it feels good to reach the summit, it is just as much fun (and it lasts longer, too) to be on your way up. Coming to terms with our instinctive yearning for the future is thus a good recipe for making the most of the only time during which we are alive: the present.
The philosophically minded among us will find this insight pleasing, insofar as it exemplifies the value of self-knowledge — something which is, or should be, a pan-human desideratum. Even more satisfyingly, the application of our emerging scientific understanding of how the mind really works to the pursuit of happiness leads to a curious convergence with the intuitive understanding of human nature attained by certain humanistic thinkers and teachers — from Aristotle and the Buddha, through David Hume, to Alan Watts, whose words (in The Book on the Taboo Against Knowing Who You Are) were given a wonderful paraphrase by one of the people interviewed by Werner Herzog for his film Encounters At The End Of The World: "Through our eyes, the universe is perceiving itself. Through our ears, the universe is listening to its harmonies. We are the witnesses through which the universe becomes conscious of its glory, of its magnificence."
And this brings us full circle to the source of the title of this post:
Somewhere did Blake not speak of the Machineries of Joy? That is, did not God promote environments, then intimidate those Natures by provoking the existence of flesh, toy men and women, such as are we all? And thus happily sent forth, at our best, with good grace and fine wit, on calm noons, in fair climes, are we not God's Machineries of Joy?
— RAY BRADBURY, The Machineries of Joy (1964)
