do you believe happiness is only for people too naive to understand how the world really works do you sympathize with the writer of Ecclesiastes when he says vanity of vanities all is vanity are you not only unhappy but proud of it because you're more sophisticated understanding of the world makes you better than a happy simpleton if you have answered yes to any of these questions you may be experiencing what Bertrand Russell has called Byronic unhappiness this is the subject of the second chapter of his book the conquest of happiness and that chapter is the subject for this video for the love of wisdom learn to think for yourself become a critical thinker who relies on reason and evidence to give you some context here Bertrand Russell has divided his book into two sections the first section is causes of unhappiness and the second section is causes of happiness and we're currently dealing with the causes of unhappiness Byronic unhappiness is one of those causes and in the previous chapter in the he covered in general what makes people unhappy and I did a video on that previously you can find a link to it right up here let me point right there and just click on that and it should open up into a new window and when that's finished you can come back here and continue watching this video so Byronic unhappiness comes from the conviction that unhappiness is the only rational response to life and it is better to be rational even if that means being unhappy than to be happy but foolish Russell was certainly in favor of being rational he co-authored the Principia Mathematica which was an attempt to use symbolic logic to prove mathematics he was also an accomplished philosopher Russell's disagreement with this attitude is that he did not think there is any superior rationality and being unhappy he maintained the wise men will be as happy as circumstances permit and if he finds the contemplation of the universe painful beyond a certain point he will contemplate something else instead he also adds that reasonless no embargo unhappiness and those who attribute their unhappiness to their understanding of the world are really unhappy for other reasons of which they are unaware and this unhappiness leads them to dwell upon the less agreeable characteristics of the world he gives three examples of Byronic unhappiness the first example is Joseph wood crutch who is a contemporary of his crutch wrote a book called the modern temper another example is the poet Byron is from Byron's name that he gets the expression Byronic unhappiness and his other example is the author of Ecclesiastes whom He is calling Solomon although he accepts that the author of Ecclesiastes does not actually Solomon now although he's calling this Byronic unhappiness he only quotes a couple lines from byron and i'm not sure he makes a really compelling case that byron himself is guilty of Byronic unhappiness so i'm not going to dwell on byron here and i'm gonna focus mainly on crutch and on solomon and he quotes Livy conclusions from all three of these but it's the quotations from Ecclesiastes that best express what he has in mind Ecclesiastes says I praise the dead which are already dead more than the living which are yet alive yay better is he than both they which hath not yet been who hath not seen the evil work that is done under the Sun now I'm going to add a contemporary example youtuber and Mendham who promotes the philosophies of Ethel ISM and antinatalism both positions echo the sentiments just expressed here by Ecclesiastes antinatalism is the position that people should voluntarily stop having children because it is better to never be born than to live Ecclesiastes has lamented that those not yet born are better off than those who live F ilysm is the position that the world would be a better place if all life were at least all sentient life were snuffed out Ecclesiastes has lamented that the dead are better off than those still living the author of Ecclesiastes even tells us that wisdom increases sorrow Russell quotes him as saying foreign much wisdom is much grief and he that increase of knowledge increase of sorrow the youtuber and Mendham says much the same thing let me bless you get out of life is because your is a product of ignorance and you real comfort or any freedom from worry or fear this is a clear expression of what Russell calls Byronic unhappiness Solomon has also tried to give himself over to pleasure like a fool but he found even that to be vanity Russell quotes him as saying I said in my heart go to now I will prove thee with mirth therefore enjoy pleasure and behold this also is vanity Russell distinguishes between the mood that all is vanity and its intellectual expression Russell says you cannot argue with a mood he has sometimes himself felt that all is vanity but this mood would go away through the need to take action for example that he had a sick child he would be focused on restoring the child to health not on feeling that everything was vanity he also points out that this attitude is more common among those to whom everything comes too easily he says they human-animal like others is adapted to a certain amount of struggle for life and when by means of great wealth Homo sapiens can gratify all his whims without effort the mere absence of effort from his life removes an essential ingredient of happiness the and he continues the man who acquires easily things for which he feels only a very moderate desire concludes that the attainment of desire does not bring happiness and to give an example of something along these same lines there was a time when the Beatles got together with Maha Rishi Mahesh Yogi the Guru who teaches Transcendental Meditation and George Harrison is quoted as saying in this context like we're the Beatles after all aren't we we have all the money you could ever dream of we have all the fame you could ever wish for but it isn't love it isn't health it isn't peace inside is it the thing is being without some of the things you want is an essential part of happiness because this provides an impetus to action that does not exist when things are within too easy reach when I was once at a Baptist youth retreat we were asked what we wanted in heaven I said challenge challenge is an essential ingredient to happiness without it life becomes listless and boring the challenge in getting what we want is one of the things that makes life rewarding and it's not just a challenging what we want but then challenge of selling problems as well this takes care of addressing the mood the mood that all its vanity can be done away with by doing something that requires effort struggle or challenge and Russell now turns to intellectual arguments Ecclesiastes has mentioned that there is no new thing under the Sun Russell mentions that there are now skyscrapers airplanes and the broadcast species of politicians and since he'd wrote this book in 1930 we now have comic books television nuclear power artificial satellites space travel personal computers portable music players the internet e-readers and more change may have been slow going a psalmist time but it is not anymore however mr. crutch who is Russell's contemporary complains that there are many new things Under the Sun Russell replies if either the absence or the presence of novelty is equally annoying it would hardly seem that either could be the true cause of despair the author of Ecclesiastes states that he resents toiling for the man who will come after him Russell points out that it is not such a bad thing from the errors perspective that people leave things to heirs indeed the author of Ecclesiastes was probably someone else's heir and that made things better for him than if he had to start life from scratch there is also a degree of self-absorption here if he does not care about leaving anything for his heirs and if you watch the previous video you'll remember that I was talking about self absorption in that video and how that can lead to unhappiness and so there may be an element of self absorption in Byronic unhappiness Russell thinks that the author of Ecclesiastes is making the mistake of finding the meaning of the present entirely in the future since everything comes to an end this would imply that nothing has any meaning that all is vanity but if the future is to give any meaning to the present future moments must be meaningful in themselves and a future moments can be meaningful in themselves why not present moments my life is significant right now here in this moment not just because of what I will do in the future as for mortality itself Russell says if I live forever the joys of life would inevitably in the end loser savor as it is they remain perennial afresh so he doesn't take mortality to be a cause of pessimism and I'll mention here of course I don't want to die many people don't want to die and the important thing here is that even though I don't want to die I don't look forward to the time when I will die the fact that I will die should not change the fact that right now while I'm living my night my life is meaningful and significant and I can feel happiness right now in my life the ending of something good does not have to make something bad just because something good is finite so my life is finite does that does not mean my life is bad because it is finite my life can still be good but eventually come to an end and now we move on to another argument Russel quotes crutch as saying we have grown used to a godless universe but we are not yet accustomed to one which is loveless as well and only when we have so become shall we realize what atheism really means he seems to understand crutch to have lost a belief in love Russel maintains that he does believe in love and he mentions some of the things he values love for he values love as a source of delight he values it because it enhances all the best pleasures he values love because I was able to break down the hard shell of the ego any values love because it is the first and communist emotion leading to cooperation and bear in mind these are just some of the reasons he values love that he could think of while he was writing this chapter there may be other reasons why he values love there could be even more important reasons why he values love and if you can think of other reasons why you value love please share them down below in the comments Russell also brings up crutches thoughts on tragedy but we won't dwell on that here I expect to address Ethel ISM and antinatalism in future videos what I'll say about them right now is that Ethel ISM and antinatalism both make a big deal about how bad suffering is but they discount the significance of feeling joy and pleasure which are also parts of life if you like this video please let others know about it by favoriting it or sharing it or liking it which you can do down below and if you would like to see more videos like this please subscribe to for the love of wisdom which is my youtube channel and let me show you some of the previous videos I've made first we have chapter 1 of what the conquest of happiness this is the first video in this series and I will show you a little excerpt from that you ever feel unhappy without really knowing why you know there's no major calamity in your life at the moment and your loved ones are around you maybe doing well in your job or at school and yet somehow you just don't feel right and here we have the previous video I made on Byronic on happiness the video that you just watched is part of a rebooted series on the conquest of happiness back when I had inferior equipment and a 10 minute time limit on videos I made a previous video so here's a bit of that hello there is an objection to studying philosophy which is that gaining wisdom can make us jaded can make us less sensitive to the pleasures in the world and so actually more prone to unhappiness and it won't be all that good for us we'll just become jaded sophisticates who have a blasé attitude towards the world it's it's think of chill think of say adults versus children