The Real Happiness Machine
Ray Bradbury on living and dying well
The stories of Ray Bradbury make for wonderful bedtime reading. They are not just clever and entertaining but also, although they were written more than 60 years ago, highly topical. In many of them we can find an entire philosophy of life that is well worth discovering and adopting, not the least because it provides a potent antidote to a view of life that is informed by deep resentment against the natural human condition, prompting us to seek salvation in technological progress and self-transformation and to worship individual ‘autonomy,’ and encouraging contempt towards all that is deemed ordinary. According to this increasingly dominant view, we cannot be entirely happy as long as we have to face limits to what we can do, there are things we cannot have, we cannot hold on to the things that we do have, and we eventually have to die. Bradbury’s attitude towards life (and death) is refreshingly (and reassuringly) different.
One of my favourite stories, published in 1957, is called “The Happiness Machine,” and it is about the ordinariness of happiness. Happiness is often thought of as a state of exaltation, or at least some kind of subjective, positive feeling that is desirable in its own right. It is decidedly not normal, out of the ordinary, something to be desperately sought and, when found, jealously guarded. We commonly feel that in order to be happy, we need to be able to enjoy all the good things in life, need to be healthy and fit, young and beautiful, and reasonably well-to-do. If all those conditions are met, then and only then can we rush off, from highlight to highlight, and pursue happiness to all those fancy places where we believe it is to be found (or, more likely, to be bought).
This assumption is shared by the protagonist in Bradbury’s story. His name is Leo Auffmann, and he has set his mind on constructing a ‘happiness machine’. Finally, after having tirelessly worked on it for some months or so, all the while completely neglecting his wife and children and his own health, he has a result, the machine is finished and it is working. However, to his dismay his wife is not the least interested in the machine, which, in her view, has almost ruined her husband’s life, not to speak of their relationship: “Man was not made to tamper with such things. It’s not against God, no, but it sure looks like it’s against Leo Auffmann. Another week of this and we’ll bury him in his machine!” And what’s all this artificial happiness good for anyway, she asks, and flatly refuses even to give it a try. “If you died from overwork, what should I do today, climb in that big box down there and be happy?”
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Then his son uses it and is utterly miserable as a result. Leo doesn’t understand. And when his wife finally gives in and decides that she will, after all, try out the machine, the result is disastrous. We hear her voice from inside. Apparently, she sees and hears and smells wonderful places, Paris, Rome, the Pyramids, feels herself to be dancing (not really, of course), gasps “Amazing!”, and then – she starts to weep. It’s the saddest thing in the world, she says when she comes out. She had never missed any of this, and now she does. Now she wants to see Paris, but knows that she can’t and won’t. The machine let her feel young again, but she knows she isn’t. It’s all a lie. Nothing of it is real. The happiness machine is in fact a sadness machine. The problem is that we have to go back to reality, and reality is not like that: there are dirty dishes to be washed, beds to be made, children to be fed.
Moreover, it is not even desirable to have those wonderful experiences all the time and whenever you want to:
When Leo replies that this is actually very sad, this briefness, the ephemeral nature of the good, she says: “No, if the sunset stayed and we got bored, that would be a real sadness.”
Eventually, the machine catches fire and they let it burn until it is no more. They can now go back to their lives, which are very ordinary indeed, but not so bad after all, back to “putting books back on shelves, and clothes back in closets, fixing supper” and other ordinary things like that. And then Leo finally discovers “the real Happiness Machine”, which is a life that is shared with other people, doing everyday things, and being there for each other. Nothing more is needed:
Naturally, all this will have to end one day. Things will stop working and what was there before will no longer be. But that is no reason to value it any less, nor to despair over its passing. Death, when it comes at the end of a well-lived life, is not a moral outrage that we have to wage war against. The prospect of it and the knowledge of its inevitability doesn’t even have to make our lives any less happy.
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We can learn this from yet another of Bradbury’s stories, also published in 1957. It is called “The Leave-Taking”, and it is very short and not really much of a story at all. What happens is that an old woman dies. One day she decides that enough is enough and she lies down and stops living. Not that her life is bad in any way. She lives with her extended family, seems to be well-loved and cared-for, and loving and caring herself. She has had a good life and is still having one. But that does not make her cling to her life as long as possible, as we might expect. On the contrary. It is the reason why she finds it easy to go. She has seen everything worth seeing, done everything worth doing, and it is simply time to go:
When her decision to die becomes known to the family, her grandchildren try to change her mind – they need her, will miss her, don’t want to be without her. She, however, insists that there is no reason to be sad. When one has lived for a long time, it is starting to feel like one has been watching too many movies in a row, and when that happens, “when the time comes that the same cowboys are shooting the same Indians on the same mountaintop, then it’s best to fold back the seat and head for the door, with no regrets and no walking backward up the aisle. So, I’m leaving while I’m still happy and still entertained.” And anyway, she says, she’s not really leaving. It is in fact only a small and insignificant part of her that will disappear. Just as we don’t mourn a clipped fingernail, we should also not mourn the passing of a person, because a person is, just like the fingernail, only a part of a larger whole, which continues to exist even when that particular person is gone, just like the body lives on when it loses some of its cells to be replaced by others.
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Personally, I find this vision strangely compelling. In fact, it seems to me that even without a family, without children, we have every reason to see our individual selves as being parts of a greater, more encompassing self, which lives on and in which we live on even when ‘we’ are dead. The boundaries of the self are, after all, not clearly defined. Where we end largely depends on where we see or think ourselves ending. I can see myself in you, can identify myself with the entire human community, or even with the community of all living beings, and if and when I do, then there is no reason to fear my own death because I know I will live on in others. This is not merely wishful thinking. We are certainly real as individuals. We do experience ourselves as separate from others. But we also experience the connection, and the connection, our being-with others and the world in which we find ourselves, is in many ways more fundamental than the separation. We are connected, distributed beings, and for those who live that connection, death is no longer such a terrifying prospect.
Bradbury’s story ends with the death of the old woman, but her death is more like a home-coming. It is described as if life had been a brief interruption from something else, something at least equally good: “A long time back, she thought, I dreamed a dream, and was enjoying it so much when someone wakened me, and that was the day when I was born.” When she lies dying, she is trying to pick up the thread of that dream, and then, in her last moments, she finds it.
And with this glorious trust in the fittingness of all things, of both life and death, the story ends.
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Michael Hauskeller is Professor of Philosophy and Head of the Philosophy Department at the University of Liverpool, UK. He specializes in moral and existential philosophy, but has also done work in various other areas, most notably phenomenology (the theory of atmospheres), the philosophy of art and beauty, and the philosophy of human enhancement.
His publications include Biotechnology and the Integrity of Life (Routledge 2007), Better Humans? Understanding the Enhancement Project (Routledge 2013), Sex and the Posthuman Condition (Palgrave Macmillan 2014), The Palgrave Handbook of Posthumanism in Film and Television (ed. with T. Philbeck and C. Carbonell, Palgrave 2015), Mythologies of Transhumanism (Palgrave Macmillan 2016), Moral Enhancement. Critical Perspectives (ed. with L. Coyne, Cambridge University Press 2018), and The Meaning of Life and Death (Bloomsbury 2019).
Cover image by Ayanna Johnson on Unsplash.
