Life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness have been distilled into a sociopathology of consumption and unrealistic expectations of "prosperity" that do not lead to happiness or well-being.
What's the point of prosperity?
Though few people ever voice this question openly, the general assumption is that prosperity and wealth increase happiness. The pursuit of happiness (famously grouped with “life” and “liberty” in the Declaration of Independence as an inalienable right) has become the pursuit of prosperity and wealth.
That physical comfort and security grease the skids of happiness is self-evident; living a hand-to-mouth existence inside a cardboard box is not as conducive to human happiness as having a comfortable home and secure income.
But it is equally self-evident that a secure dwelling and income do not guarantee happiness; rather, they provide the physical foundation for the much more elusive qualities of happiness. We can make the same distinction between the civil liberties that underpin the pursuit of happiness and the actual pursuit of happiness. The first is a political system devoted to safeguarding liberty; the second is a messy, dynamic process that continues through all of life.
If the basic political and material foundations for the pursuit of happiness are in place, we might anticipate a broadly happy society. If prosperity and wealth are causally linked to greater happiness, we might expect to find that prosperous people are generally happy.
America has great material wealth, but is happiness as abundant as wealth? And if not, why not?
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