Chercher à être heureux, est-ce une quête égoïste ? (Translated to English) Is searching for happiness a self-centred quest? Taken from the happiness section of the 1996-2025 Philo Bac Prompts
The self-centeredness of happiness depends on its specific form. Namely, there are two main types of happiness: pleasure and fulfilment. Pleasure is happiness in its most primitive form, while fulfilment is a more abstract, less direct form of happiness, less common in creatures outside of humans. Things that cause pleasure vary little from person to person and are much more clear and consistent in their causality, while fulfilment is dependent mainly on the innards of one’s own mind. One does not imply the other: a rich man can feel unfulfilled with his life despite being able to fill every material desire, while on the other hand a poor man can be at peace. They are not mutually exclusive, but they tend to be inversely correlated, as too much pleasure can make one unmotivated to seek fulfilment. These definitions may lead one to believe that fulfilment is the more self-centred mode of happiness since it’s less dependent on the state of the outside world than pleasure, however often pleasure is zero-sum in nature. If I eat this piece of cake, you cannot also eat this piece of cake. In addition, fulfilment is very often dependent on helping others, while pleasure, being much more scalable, can also be automated with much greater effectiveness while cutting out others. Thus, we can say that lasting happiness requires others, while temporary happiness does not. Leading us to rephrase the above as:
Problematique: Is it better to seek easy, temporary happiness or difficult, long-term happiness?