Transcript
The Friendship Formula for a Happier Life
What if happiness isn't something you achieve alone? Dr. David Donley from the Department of American Studies at Cal State Fullerton explains why friendship may be the key to living a happier, more meaningful life.
This transcript was created using speech recognition software. While it has been reviewed by human transcribers, it may contain errors. Please review the episode audio before quoting from this transcript and email hssdeansoffice@fullerton.edu with any questions.
Jessica Stern
Hello, Lowkey Confused? listeners. We’ve been doing a series on happiness where we talk to people with different training and different disciplinary expertise about the nuances of happiness.
Today, we are joined by Dr. David Donley, who teaches American Studies and Philosophy, to help us understand happiness and, particularly, the role that friendship plays in happiness.
Thank you so much for being here.
David Donley
Yeah, happy to be here.
Jessica Stern
Let’s start generally. What role does friendship play in happiness?
David Donley
It’s an excellent place to start.
I think most people approach happiness thinking about it as a very individual or solo project: What makes me happy?
What I love about friendship is that it makes you realize it’s not a solo project. It’s a very deeply social project.
For me, when we’re seeking out happiness, friendship is one of the relationships most suitable to those goals.
Nothing against family. It’s just that friendship is the most democratic form of relationship that you can have. You get to choose them. They choose you. You can end it when things are not reciprocal.
Family is a bit more complicated. You don’t have the choice there. Ideally, they contribute to your happiness, but if they don’t, it’s not so easy to just go, “I don’t want anything to do with you.”
Whereas with friends, if you’re contributing to my misery, if you’re bringing me down, then I don’t necessarily want to be friends with you.
Often, what draws people together are similar sources of joy.
I think there’s probably too much emphasis on how I’m supposed to do this alone. That can be challenging and demotivating.
I liken it to saying, “I want to get healthy, and I’m going to go to the gym.” There’s going to be a certain amount of motivation there.
But we know that if you have a gym buddy, if you have a friend who’s counting on you to be there, even on the days when you’re like, “I don’t know if I really want to work out today,” you think, “But I can’t let my friend down.”
Then you’re happy you went, right? The endorphins get going.
The things we need to do in order to develop our capacity for joy and happiness are going to be easier if we have friends to support us along the way.
Jessica Stern
Let’s dig into some of the differences here. What are the different types of friends and the roles that friends play?
David Donley
A philosopher who talks at length about friendship is Aristotle. He talks about there being at least three kinds of friendship.
He doesn’t use these labels, but folks who study his work on friendship have adopted them.
One kind of friendship is a mutual pleasure friendship.
For him, what defines the kinds of friendships is what attracts the friends and bonds them together.
I liken this to sports. You can watch sports at home, and there’s a certain amount of joy to take in that. Or you can go to a sports bar where people are all cheering — hopefully for the same team as you — and that’s a much more pleasurable, enjoyable experience.
But oftentimes, those friendships don’t necessarily leave that domain. That’s what brings you together.
Maybe when the season is over, or a different sport starts up, you continue it. But you don’t necessarily share intimate details about your life.
It’s nothing against the other person. That’s just not what’s bringing you together.
If it isn’t reciprocated — maybe our friend starts drinking too much, becomes belligerent and you’re like, “This isn’t as fun to watch the game” — you’re going to hang out with other folks.
Hopefully, it’s not taken as something bigger because that was what brought us together.
Another kind of friendship is mutual advantage.
When I’m teaching this, I bring up the concept of a study buddy. You’re in the same classes. It’s to your advantage to split up the study guide. You do the first half, I do the second half. We meet up, we help each other, and if we do well on the test, it’s like, “All right, let’s do that for the next test.”
Maybe it’s somebody in your major. You’re doing well in classes with this person’s support, and the same is true for them.
“What classes are you taking next semester?” Maybe you’ll enroll in the same ones.
But when the semester ends, or just outside of classes, you might go your separate ways.
It’s not that you’re not interested in each other beyond that. It’s just how some of these things unfold.
Maybe something more grows out of it, but it doesn’t have to.
The third kind of friendship for Aristotle is a character friendship.
It’s based on that person’s character. You’re drawn to the other person for their character, their good moral qualities.
Aristotle thinks that in terms of happiness, this is what we’re really interested in.
I think when we say “best friends,” that’s closer to what we mean.
It’s not just that this person provides us pleasure. It’s not just that there are advantages. It’s who they are as a person.
One way to think about it is with the sports bar. I could go to a different sports bar and still have the same pleasure. I could find somebody else in class, and we could help each other study.
In some ways, those things are a bit more interchangeable.
But think about whoever your best friend is. Even if you try to list all the qualities they have and I find somebody else who has all of those qualities, you’re probably going to say, “That’s not quite it.”
You can’t fully communicate what it is about them. Yes, it’s those qualities, but it’s more than the sum of that.
That’s the sort of thing I think is occurring at the level of character friendship. These people are not replaceable in the same kind of way.
We lose a part of ourselves if that relationship falls apart. We don’t so easily disentangle.
Something bad has to happen, or we have to become a different person. Our character changes and then we say, “Okay.”
It’s always a sadness. It’s tragic that there’s a separation there.
These friends get to know you. They know your vulnerabilities, and they care about the projects you’re invested in. They want you to succeed at them, and you want the same for them.
There’s this reciprocated well-wishing. There’s an intimacy and a trust that develops.
Granted, in Aristotle’s time, this was more manageable. Ideally, you would live near each other or together for good parts of your life.
That’s probably harder now to facilitate, but we have the phone. We have ways to keep in contact daily.
Those are the friends that, in terms of our ability to be happy, are going to contribute the most.
Jessica Stern
There have been news stories recently about the pain of friend breakups.
It seems that losing a friend in that character category can be soul-crushing.
David Donley
It’s hard.
Part of the reciprocated well-wishing is, say, there’s some opportunity your friend takes on the other side of the country. You know how important this opportunity is to them. You wish them well, but then you’re not together, and that’s painful.
Ideally, maybe they move back or something else brings you into close proximity again. If not, you try to maintain as much as you can.
One sign in those situations — and it’s happened to me personally, too — is when you do see them again, it’s like you pick up exactly where you left off.
Jessica Stern
There is this element of friendships you forged in childhood where, even as your life goes on, you reunite with this friend and it’s like no time has passed. It’s like a time collapser.
David Donley
Yeah.
Those other friendships — pleasure and mutual advantage — can be formed throughout one’s life.
Aristotle doesn’t quite say this, but he does have a developmental view about humans. You have to start off on the right foot.
One thing you can add to that is that character friendships are harder to develop later in life because you need all that time together for the intimacy and trust to develop.
It’s having nothing to do as a kid, the boredom, and then how you resolve that and whatever you get into.
There’s not as much of that when you’re older. Every moment is, “I’ve got this to do. I’ve got that to do.”
It’s not impossible for them to develop, but I think they’re less likely to develop.
Jessica Stern
Does Aristotle say anything else about friendship that we should know about?
David Donley
There’s lots.
It’s one of his longest discussions, and then it carries over into politics, where he talks about this civic kind of friendship. But that’s different from character friendship, and the project there is different from achieving a state of flourishing.
One thing that’s important is the feedback you get from a friend.
Because you know they love you and trust you, you’re going to take that a lot more seriously.
Whereas if it’s from a stranger or just somebody who’s a coworker, you might be suspicious: “Are they really trying to help me, or are they just tearing me down?”
Aristotle thinks we need that kind of feedback.
This is long before the heuristics and biases literature. We’re prone to self-deception. We’re prone to either an overly harsh view of ourselves or an overly favorable view.
To have somebody who knows you, knows your tendencies and can say, “I know you think you’re doing this, or you’re coming off like this, but this is what I see” — you can trust that that’s coming from a good place.
They mean well. They want what’s best for you.
Jessica Stern
That’s interesting.
There’s been a lot of discussion about loneliness and about people not having enough friends or enough deep friendships.
One article I read suggested that the deep friendship problem is coming from people not being entirely honest with their would-be friends in the beginning. Then they get comfortable and they’re honest about something, and it all blows up.
So I think this is an important point about honesty and friendship.
David Donley
Also, with kids, it doesn’t dawn on you to do image management with your friends.
Jessica Stern
Yes.
[Laughs]
David Donley
But when you’re older, you become a lot more preoccupied with that.
How do you break that ice? I could see that being a difficulty.
Relatedly, I watched a TED Talk from a researcher. She studies things at the intersection of technology and sexuality.
The opening of her talk is that 70% of American teenagers have formed a relationship with an AI companion and 50% are interacting with it daily.
It’s not just romantic relationships being formed. It’s also friendships.
I wonder if, for some of the older people doing this, it’s in part because you don’t have to worry about image management as much. You’re not going to get the harsh feedback. It’s programmed to tell you what you want to hear.
Jessica Stern
Yes. I read one article that talked about this gender aspect, where a female student felt so liberated by talking to an AI chatbot.
She said, “I realized I spend my entire life worrying about hurting people’s feelings, and all of a sudden, here I have an interlocutor and I don’t have to worry about that.”
It was freeing.
David Donley
On one hand, it’s that. But we should be careful how we go about this because it’s also intimacy without sacrifice.
It will give and give. You don’t have to give back. You can just take.
Especially for those who are younger, that’s not a healthy way to start modeling friendships.
For others who are older and have gone through this, as long as they know not to get too attached in those kinds of ways, I think it can be helpful to work through some of those anxieties.
Then hopefully you meet the right folks.
That’s the thing about character friendships. You can go up to somebody in class and say, “Do you want to study with me?” Or, “Do you want to watch the game together?”
Outside of little kids, we don’t go, “Do you want to be my best friend?”
In some ways, it’s not even a choice. You just keep showing up in each other’s lives, and eventually, over time, you realize that’s what you are.
It’s about meeting the right people where someone does something disarming for you. You realize, “Okay, I can be myself.”
Maybe that’s a gateway to realizing there are other people like this, and I don’t have to be as anxious or worried about negative reactions.
With your best friend — versus family — sometimes you can’t always be yourself because there’s this hierarchy involved. You need to appease your parents and grandparents and such.
But usually with best friends, that pressure dissipates. You get to be your full self, and you don’t have to worry about, “What do they really think of me?”
You can have your bad moments and know they’re going to think, “They’re going through a tough time. They’re not usually like this.”
That’s harder to do in other relationships.
Jessica Stern
We’re having sociologist Allison Pugh come to campus, and one of the things she’s going to talk about is the importance of friction in friendship.
It’s reminding me of some of this.
Let’s dig a little deeper. Why is mutuality important in friendship? Why might honesty and a little bit of pushback be important?
David Donley
Honesty, definitely.
If you’re worried that people are just saying things to appease you, or you think the opposite is happening and people are after you, knowing that they keep showing up through the good and bad moments is the value of friendship, especially close friendship.
With other folks, we’re not taking the time to get to know them on that deep level.
Then comes the mutuality. It has to be this pattern, this history, so you can trust that that’s the case.
In the beginning, people will be squeamish. For me, it’s hard at this point to remember that with the folks I would call my character friends. But I’m sure there was some initial discomfort.
In my group, there are seven of us I would call character friends, and there’s one of them where we don’t even remember how we met this person.
I imagine at that point there was some, “Who is this individual?” There was probably a little bit of suspicion because with the others, it was explicit what brought us together.
But this person just showed up in our friend group. Maybe because we felt embarrassed, we didn’t say anything, and they just kept showing up.
Then there was this established pattern of mutuality: They’ve done things for me. I’ve done things for them. I can count on them.
Even small things, like planning for a party and they bring the stuff they promised to bring. Or even just showing up.
Ghosting is this other phenomenon that I think makes it harder for people to want to trust other individuals.
Once that back-and-forth happens, there’s no set amount of time, but eventually the guards come down and then you can disclose intimate details.
There’s no way to speed this up.
Sadly, some people may betray your trust, and I know that’s going to make it more difficult to want to put yourself out there.
But there are plenty of us who say, “No, there are good folks out there who are not going to do that.”
Jessica Stern
Let’s talk a little bit about the intersection between friendship and politics.
I think this is another place where there’s been news reporting — this idea that it’s less and less likely to become friends with somebody who doesn’t agree with you politically.
Now, with the algorithms of digital friendship-making, you’re more inclined to only make friends who are in your—
David Donley
Echo chamber.
Jessica Stern
Yes, the echo chamber.
Any thoughts on this topic?
David Donley
At a different talk I was at, the person said that at this point, we are more likely to change our religion than our political affiliation.
That speaks to the depth of the divide.
Another thing that person brought up — they weren’t necessarily thinking about friendship — was that because of algorithms and our information about other echo chambers being filtered through them, what we’re being shown is the most extreme version of that political view.
In the absence of more nuanced evidence, it’s easy to say, “They’re all like that.”
And on the other side, they’re picking somebody from your side who is the most extreme version. You may say, “Yeah, I agree with some of that, not all of that,” or, “I don’t agree with the way they’re presenting that.”
That all gets lost. You are conflated with them.
Amidst that dynamic, I think friendship can help, but it can’t first be about politics because then we’re already going to be polarized.
If what brings us together is other things, eventually intimacy grows. Of course, we’re going to have to deal with that political divide.
One thing that goes wrong with trying to talk this out with strangers is: How do you trust that this is a good-faith conversation and it’s not an “Aha, I got you” moment?
If you establish common ground in other things and then shift into this terrain slowly over time, I think the person is more likely to hear you out.
They know that your position is not coming from wanting to demonize or put them down or score points on them.
There’s this aspect of politics that I don’t like where it resembles the Super Bowl now. My team has to win. That team has to lose.
Probably not the healthiest approach for democracy — a pluralistic one like ours.
Daryl Davis has taken on this terrain. He’s a jazz musician, and at some point, I think in the early ’80s, he gets invited to play at this bar. He pretty quickly realizes this is a meetup for KKK members.
Talk about opposite politics.
What becomes the common ground is music. He doesn’t bring up politics explicitly, although obviously there’s no avoiding it.
At some point, that topic gets approached.
He’s never broken down — at least in the book that he wrote — the mechanics of how each of these things goes. But over time, friendships form. They blossom. He gets invited to KKK rallies.
It’s a very strange sort of thing to see.
Folks treat him well. Over years of friendship and getting to know him, they start realizing the flaws in their beliefs about all Black people.
That starts to crumble because he is dependable. He is there. He comes in their time of need.
He ends up humanizing Black folks in general for these people.
I don’t know what number he’s up to. He has a collection of Klan robes. When folks quit the Klan, he asks, as a souvenir, to keep their robe.
But what he is always consistent about is forming these friendships with them. Who he is as a person is counterevidence to what they think is true.
His dad admits that Daryl is special.
He didn’t grow up here in the United States. His dad, if I remember correctly, was a diplomat. So he grew up abroad in this very multicultural environment, going to school with children of diplomats from other countries.
He still has this traumatizing memory of the first time he experienced racism in the American context because he didn’t grow up thinking of it as a normal thing.
He approaches this with a level of curiosity that I think is only possible because of those experiences and because he has those comparison points.
It’s not for everybody. He doesn’t advocate that everybody do this. He’s just trying to show that this is a method.
He’s been at it for almost 40 years, and it’s worked for him.
To me, I look at that and go, “Okay, if a Black jazz musician and the leader of the Klan in Maryland can become friends and the tensions can lessen, I guess I’m more optimistic about me and whoever disagrees with my politics.”
It shows what’s possible.
Jessica Stern
It seems in that story that the friendship had to come first.
Their first conversations were not about politics. They first established conversations about something they agreed upon: music.
David Donley
Yeah, and debating trivia about music. “No, that song was actually first written by…”
They were both passionate about this.
Of course, he slides in there that a lot of the music they like was originally written by Black folks. That’s his way of kind of pushing this on them.
There’s another case I’ve looked at where it was explicitly political that brought these folks together.
There’s a book called The Best of Enemies. It’s also been made into a film more recently.
It’s about the early 1970s, when Durham, North Carolina, had to finally integrate the schools.
Brown v. Board of Education had happened a number of years before, but it took all of these cases in individual districts to force the issue.
The city council did not want to decide this. They all knew that no matter what they decided, no one was winning reelection.
In a sort of bad-faith move that ended up working, they said, “Well, let’s let the people decide.”
They formed this committee with different stakeholders and let them decide. That involved bringing in leadership from the Klan and leadership from various factions of the civil rights movement.
These are folks who had had bitter battles publicly beforehand. Now they have to work together.
C.P. Ellis is the main guy who represented the Klan.
Over the course of just a few weeks, his whole perspective ends up shifting.
The guy who facilitated it structured things in a way where they quickly broke the ice. They got to the core of what it was that animated their disagreements.
It humanized everybody.
The folks from the civil rights movement who understandably hated him — those tensions end up lessening.
In particular, he and a woman named Ann Atwater become friends.
The common thing that established that friendship was talking about their kids and what they wanted for their futures.
Things started to click: Underneath all of the hateful rhetoric we’ve been spewing at each other, a lot of this is anxiety about, “I want my kids to succeed in the world.”
They saw what was going on with the schools as a threat to that. How do we put up front that their kids succeeding is what matters to both of them?
That gave them something to work with.
Jessica Stern
So, the importance of structure, the importance of finding a commonality.
David Donley
Yeah. And having a common task.
Actually seeing that you can work with somebody else and they’re not just a demon.
C.P. Ellis ends up leaving the Klan, and he essentially loses his entire social network. Even his wife leaves him and takes the kids.
He’s left disoriented: “What do I do with my life?”
He goes through this period of depression, which is understandable. Everything he’s known has slid out from under him.
But it is friendships like hers and a few others he made that help him come out of it.
He eventually becomes a union organizer, organizing integrated unions, and does that until he retires.
Friendships can inaugurate these transformations and then help sustain them for folks.
Again, to me, this is at the extreme end, which is why I think it gives me more hope.
Based on the literature, polarization is partly because we’re associating the most extreme beliefs with other people.
When you actually talk to folks, you’re often able to find common ground.
Building on that and then eventually wading into politics once there is intimacy and trust can shift the dynamic.
I’m not saying it’s the magic bullet or cure-all.
But given that we’re going in the opposite direction — “I don’t want to talk to that person. I don’t want to be around that person. I don’t want to live in the same state as that person” — we’ve got to de-escalate from that ledge.
Friendship can be a way to do that.
Jessica Stern
Let’s talk a little bit about you as a scholar.
You got your Ph.D. in Philosophy, and you wrote about friendship and political disagreement.
David Donley
Yes. These are two of the big examples I focused on.
For the same reason I just said: If it’s possible at this level, I think we should be optimistic about what we can do.
Jessica Stern
Another Lowkey Confused? episode we’re doing is with a psychologist who studies happiness. She talks about the methods psychologists use.
How do you study friendship as a philosopher?
David Donley
You survey the literature. What have other folks said about friendship?
There aren’t a whole lot of them who have talked about it.
I mainly focused on Aristotle.
There was also a more recent book called On Friendship by philosopher Alexander Nehamas. He runs with that account.
One thing he loosens is the idea that these have to be good moral qualities.
He approaches the idea of “thick as thieves.” It can actually be really bad projects that bring people together, but there’s still intimacy, love and well-wishing — albeit while doing bad things.
He focuses a lot more on that aspect I brought up of how the person is irreplaceable.
That’s what I start with.
In terms of happiness, that is what Aristotle is largely interested in. At least, the word he uses gets translated as “happiness” in the Nicomachean Ethics.
I take issue with that translation because I think what most of us have in mind about happiness is not the same thing that he is talking about.
We might imagine happiness as these momentary, fleeting states.
A video I watched yesterday asked, “What was the last purchase that made you happy?”
That’s a momentary sort of thing.
Aristotle doesn’t think that, if we step back for a moment, that’s truly what we’re interested in. It’s not about how we achieve this pantheon of little moments.
What we want is something that’s enduring.
Those momentary states aren’t enduring, and it can be really disappointing when they go away.
For the Epicureans, this is something they focus on. We spend all this time grasping for things we don’t have. Once we get them, we’re worried that we’ll lose them. This spoils our happiness in that moment.
I think someone like Aristotle understands that’s not really the way people want to live their lives.
I get why they’ve chosen the word “happiness.”
For some folks, the literal meaning of the term eudaimonia — and don’t come at me for the pronunciation, folks pronounce that term differently — is to be possessed by the spirit of happiness.
The way I like to teach it is: We’ve kept that word daimon, but Christians shortened it to “demon.”
Think about the way demon possession works, where it transforms everything about the person in an enduring way. If you don’t do the exorcism, this is just how they’re going to be.
My interpretation is: Imagine that was a state of flourishing that took possession of you, such that this is now your enduring state.
There will be joyful moments, but you’re always looking to grow and develop. Everything is enhancing the quality of your life, even if it doesn’t seem so at the moment — even when there are challenges and obstacles.
It’s going to be an overall state of flourishing, one with a lot of joy in it and one that persists through those difficult, challenging moments.
It becomes your background state, your mood, your mode of moving through the world.
This has to be cultivated slowly over time through healthy habits and supporting friends.
There’s both the individual project of, “How do I cultivate habits conducive to my flourishing?” and developing excellences.
That word gets translated into English as “virtues.” That word has a Christianized meaning, too, which is not exactly what Aristotle is going for.
How do I slowly but surely develop a set of habits so I don’t have to keep thinking through every action I take because I have these healthy habits to lean on?
That’s what he’s going for.
There are probably a lot of us who find ourselves chasing those moments and then experiencing anxiety over losing the moment, or feeling disappointed.
The new car is really great. A couple months later, it’s, “That was a lot of money to spend just for that really brief time.”
How do we get off that hamster wheel?
It does mean doing the hard work.
In the Nicomachean Ethics, this is the importance of developing these habits in childhood so that it becomes easier as an adult.
Jessica Stern
That’s such an interesting point because, again, there have been news stories about how you should spend money on events because that makes you happier.
It’s this view of happiness as: What can spark joy, and how can you keep sparking joy over and over again?
I think that’s such an important point about these different views of happiness and happiness as a sustained sequence of good habits.
It also makes me think about the Declaration of Independence and how it says—
Why am I blanking?
David Donley
[Laughs]
Jessica Stern
Life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness!
There’s not a parallel structure there, right? Why not just say life, liberty and happiness?
Early American historians argue about what the definition of happiness is there.
I think they conclude that it isn’t this kind of “happy, happy, joy, joy.” It’s much like you are describing it.
What are the structures and freedoms that we need to allow us to pursue, largely, lives of virtue?
David Donley
Yeah.
There’s also the idea that it’s not guaranteed in the way that we might be able to guarantee liberty within a political structure.
We’ll give you the chance to pursue it, but it’s this finicky thing.
There are still some residues there of: You could grasp it, but it might be elusive.
There’s lots of money to be made off of people having that disposition. But does it ultimately serve us at the end of the day?
There’s a book called The Top Five Regrets of the Dying. It’s written by a nurse who worked in palliative care.
Everybody who was there, I think in the facility she was at, had something like just a couple of months left to live.
Sadly, folks bring up what they regret about their lives.
What a horrifically tragic situation to be in — to know you only have so much time left and this is how you’re feeling.
One of the top five regrets is, “I wish I spent more time with friends.” Another is, “I wish I’d worked less.”
But the number one, if I remember correctly, is to the effect of, “I wish I had lived a life true to myself and not the life that others had wanted me to live.”
To me, that’s a way of saying, “I regret my whole life. I wasted it. I didn’t really do what I thought mattered most.”
For some of us, I think there’s this inkling that buying these things or doing these one-off things to get that moment leaves us longing for something more.
I don’t know how to describe it.
For me, that’s one of the benefits of studying philosophy and history. You get a wider vocabulary to express the ideas you already have in you. You just don’t know how to put them into words.
Then you read it and you’re like, “Yes! This is what I’ve been missing.”
I understand that.
I have this distinct memory as a kid. Actually, my parents — this will be the first time they hear this one.
I remember having all my toys, and I knew how much they had sacrificed to pay for them because they had a small business and I would go to work with them. I saw the 12-hour days.
The truth is, the toys did not make me happy, and I felt bad about it. I thought something was wrong with me, that I didn’t take joy in these things.
Then I encountered someone like Aristotle and I went, “There’s nothing wrong with me. This is just not where it’s to be found.”
These are nice things, and there was joy in the moment of pulling them out of the box and all of that.
But it wasn’t lasting.
And the solution was not more toys.
That’s an all-too-easy trap to fall into.
For Aristotle, it’s this larger project of: How do we live up to our potential?
That’s what I take from that top regret, too: I didn’t live up to my potential.
That’s one of the worst things to realize toward the end.
For those of us who are not there yet, yes, there’s the time spent. But with the time that’s left, how can we focus more intentionally on this?
By the way, Socrates might have phrased this as: “You spent all this time on your appearance today. How much time did you spend on your character today?”
We’re obsessing over things that aren’t unimportant, but are they really the most important thing if we look inwardly?
Jessica Stern
We recorded with one of your colleagues, Professor Bridges, about Henry David Thoreau.
You and I had started talking about this question of why one might go into isolation in order to find happiness.
One of the things he pointed out to us is that Walden Pond is actually pretty close to town. Thoreau wasn’t necessarily eschewing all social interaction.
Though he did feel like he had to really deliberately figure out: What is the meaning of life and how do I live life?
I’m reminded of what you’re saying about the importance of careful reflection on developing your character and deciding how to live deliberately.
David Donley
Yeah, “deliberately.” That’s Thoreau’s phrase.
One thing to put next to that is his book The Maine Woods.
He talks about this hike he does to Mount Katahdin, and here he has this revelation. He feels this spiritual transformation happening within him.
For a lot of folks who follow in this tradition of “I’m going to leave society,” that’s what they want.
They want that moment of spiritual clarity, that something is revealed to them that’s different from what the dominant culture has shown them.
At least in American culture, there’s a long history of this.
Thoreau is definitely one of the central figures, but you get someone like Jack Kerouac. His book Desolation Angels — I think that’s the one where he does a fire watch for the summer.
Whichever novel it is where he does that, that’s what he—
Jessica Stern
Wait. What’s a fire watch? What does that mean?
David Donley
Before you had helicopters and satellites to monitor forests, you had these watchtowers that sat above the tree line, and people would get paid to live there all summer during fire season.
Jessica Stern
Oh, wow.
David Donley
I think there are a handful left. I’ve thought that would be a great way to spend the summer, to go to one of these last places.
Up until that technology, this was common. Sometimes when you go to national parks, you can see the ruins of the towers.
He takes that job knowing, “All right, I’m going to have three or four solid months of solitude here.”
He wants this moment to come, and it never comes.
Revelations happen from the outside to you.
That’s the thing. You don’t get that at Walden necessarily because he’s intentionally doing this. It has to be happenstance that it occurs.
There’s an intention for it to occur, but you’re not trying to manifest it explicitly. It’s going to happen at the moment you least expect.
This draws off religious traditions. Moses goes up into the mountains for 40 days, and there, too, he has this revelation. God reveals to him the Ten Commandments.
It’s grafting off this idea that there’s something about society that is lacking in purity. It may be morally bankrupt.
You want this purification of your soul, and the only way to get that is to leave behind the corrupt society.
Maybe you come back as a changed person, or you just continue on in that sort of existence.
More recently, there’s the story of Chris McCandless and the book and film Into the Wild.
He wants this sort of experience, too. It’s not clear whether he has it.
A lot is made by Jon Krakauer of this annotation in one of his books: “Happiness is only real when shared.”
There are a couple things that could be happening there.
One is that it is the “aha” moment, so I’m writing it in the margin. Or you’re saying, “I think this is the main point the author is making. I’m going to note that.”
Sadly, since he passes away, he’s not here to tell us.
But if you want to go with Krakauer’s interpretation, then what he’s missing is friends.
What’s interesting in that journey is all these folks want to be his friend. They want that deep, intimate friendship with him.
They like him for his good qualities, but he’s on this solo journey, so he pushes them all away.
It’s clear that he made a huge impression on them because when they’re interviewed years later by Krakauer, they vividly recall all of this.
If there’s no one to share that with, then it becomes a solo project and you can find yourself on the outside looking in.
One wonders, if Chris had lived, what would he have done? Would he have come back into society?
In philosophy, this view that society is corrupt and you should move away from it has been there for a long time.
For Plato, Socrates was somebody who tried to stay in society and transform it, and they put him on trial and killed him.
I think this understandably traumatizes Plato, and he says, “Nope, I’m not interested in that project.”
He builds his school outside of that society. But the goal was to train future leaders. It was to transform society.
He just thought that during his time it was too corrupt. This wasn’t going to happen.
If you don’t have the right environmental conditions, everyone who grows up in it will grow up under this normalized sense of corruption.
So let me provide the pure place outside of society.
Stoics also thought you could transform things from the inside. You get Marcus Aurelius — he’s emperor — but even he realizes how limited he is in doing this.
Then you have the Cynics, who are like, “No, forget it. There’s nothing to salvage there.”
They poke fun at it from the outside. They don’t want anything to do with it.
We see that range of opinions.
I think that’s filtered into religious views of similar things.
Then you get these folks, some of whom are religiously inspired, with this idea that, “If I’m going to find true happiness, if I’m going to find my authentic self, I need to strip all of that away.”
They reject that they’re a socially constructed being. They want to know, “When you strip all that away, who am I really?”
I’m the wrong person to ask that one. I’m more focused on how we are socially constructed, and I think that is where meaning comes in.
I’m not sure what is there when you strip all of that away.
Jessica Stern
What I see as a place to tie it up is that true character friendship and all the great attributes that come with friendship really are most possible when two people come pretty sure of who they are and comfortable sharing who they are.
So it’s after those two people come down from the mountain that they’re best poised to maybe be friends.
David Donley
Yeah. You get a sense of what you really want.
I’m glad you pointed that out because when I think of my friends, we actually are all introverted. We have spent a lot of time alone reflecting, sometimes hiking alone.
My version of this is every night I go walking by myself. Most folks are inside, and that’s good enough for me. I don’t need to get a second house somewhere.
But then you’re sure of who you are.
If you’re always doing something, if you’re always busy, that may not occur, and it might not be clear to you: What do I have to offer?
You both can say, “We want to meditate alone,” and then afterwards, “What came up? What arose for us?”
I wish there were more folks in that tradition who emphasized the view of, “I just need some time alone to figure things out, but I want to come back.”
We’ve really glorified the individuals who just go on these very solo projects.
That’s the good thing about the criticism of Thoreau: Every day, he was seeing other people. Every day, he was retreating to solitude, but it was a balanced life that he was living there.
Jessica Stern
Thank you so much for helping us understand friendship and happiness and these philosophical traditions.
For students who want to learn more from you, what do you regularly teach?
David Donley
I’m doing Science in Modern America with the American Studies Department. It’s not so much on friendship, but some of these other things that are related we touch upon.
For Philosophy courses, Ancient Greek Philosophy — that’s where you’re going to learn a lot more of this.
They also have a class called Meaning, Purpose, and the Good Life. When I used to teach that, that’s where this stuff always came up regularly.
If these are topics you’re interested in from those perspectives, I recommend taking them.
Jessica Stern
Wonderful.
David Donley
Thanks for having me.
