I finished re-reading Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World not long ago. I first read it in high school, and the only thing I remembered was how society had five classes of people (Alpha, Beta, Gamma, Delta, Episilon), which amused me because that’s exactly how my middle school structured their academic track. Strangely, the English curriculum for us ‘Alphas’ consisted chiefly of ancient mythology and dystopian literature. Catcher in the Rye and Mark Twain were forbidden, but fantasy novels about hedonistic societies that revolve around casual sex and drugs? Your reports are due next week!
While Brave New World teems with heady ideas about society, it also explores personal happiness. Huxley creates a world where everyone is purportedly happy. The high-tech, consumer-oriented society is prosperous, peaceful, and free of institutions that can be a source of anxiety, like family, love, religion, war, poverty, and culture. But that’s not what makes people happy. In fact, it forces everyone to find solace in soma, a drug that induces instant mindless happiness and makes users amendable to their empty existence. Soma is the ultimate happy pill, and the Brave New World thrives on it.
‘Happy pills’ are an intellectually repugnant notion. Except for the severely depressed, most of us feel that happiness should not be derived artificially, but from living a fulfilling life. Yet research on happiness has shown that ‘creating’ happiness is very difficult to do. Similar to how we have genetic set points for our weight, we are born with a capacity to experience happiness. Certain events like winning the lottery or buying a new car may temporarily raise our happiness, but eventually it will fall back to our set point.
Most of us bump up our happiness temporarily with our chosen ‘happy pill’, which are pursuits that enrich no one except the participant. Eating, drinking, smoking, sun-tanning, exercising, watching sports, driving fast, buying shoes, watching TV, praying, reading, listening to music – humans take happy pills all the time. And when we’re not taking happy pills, we’re giving ourselves reasons to take happy pills.
There’s nothing wrong with it. Huxley wasn’t rallying against drugs (this was a man who was injected with LSD on his deathbed. Last words: “LSD, 100 micrograms I.M.”) but rather making a point about the importance of the freedom to choose our own happy pills. And hopefully, we will ingest happy pills that won’t turn us into oblivious fools like soma, but that will enrich our lives by making us grateful to be here, to be alive, to be a part of a human race capable of profound beauty, complexity, craftmanship, kindness, and happiness.
