A few weeks ago I had the privilege of attending a seminar consisting of professor guided discussion regarding Plato’s Symposium with a group of other bright high school students. In the Symposium, Plato writes about a dinner party where a variety of guests and characters take turns giving speeches praising Eros, the personification as well as the god of Love. Although the exact names and details have since become lost to my mind, I can still quite clearly recall the topic of one of our more interesting conversations. Essentially, it boiled down to the relationship between the attainment of joy and happiness and the fulfillment of desires. We wondered of what nature this relationship was: was it positively correlated or negatively correlated or not correlated at all? 

To tackle that question, we first had to tackle what joy and happiness were, and define how we attain it. To this end, it seemed easier to not focus solely on what constituted the attainment of happiness, but to instead determine what we could agree was certainly indicative of unhappiness. 

One of our first targets was the idea of boredom—you’re unhappy when you’re bored— most people would agree with that. However, what I found interesting was why we thought boredom was an inherently unhappy endeavor: because we had nothing to do. At first glance, this state of stagnant nothingness induced by a total lack of goals appears to be limited to only situations where someone is lazy, has motivation deficiency, and is simply idling about. However, this is not the case, imagine a situation where you have completed everything there is to complete, and perfected everything there is to perfect, would that not result in boredom? Does completion of all your goals leave you with that same missing element, a goal. Therefore, the laziest person and the most complete person are both bored and thus, unhappy. 

Now if this is the case, how does one truly obtain happiness? I posit that it is through the pursuit of goals—whether realistically attainable or not—that brings people true happiness. This is due to the paradoxical reality of not pursuing your goals as well as completing all your goals leading to the same destination of boredom and unhappiness, since you are neither happy when you haven’t begun to work on your goals nor when you have completed them all.

Cover photo by Jaylan