One of the most meaningful things we can do with our lives is to search for the place where all the joy comes from. Consider for a moment your earliest memory of deep and heartfelt happiness. You may remember a birthday party, or a holiday, or a game. Perhaps you had a new experience you’ve never forgotten, or you laughed until your sides ached; maybe it was a gift, or a sense of achievement, or a view, or a hug. Now ask, Why do experiences of happiness like that exist? What is it about the world that means delight, enjoyment, and pleasure are found within it? It wouldn’t seem to be a necessary feature of a physical world. Gladness isn’t something you’d expect rocks or oak trees to experience, and plenty of animals survive perfectly well without laughing or rejoicing or gazing in wonder at the mountains. So why are we not among them? Where does happiness come from? Problem of Superfluous Happiness One common answer is that we experience enjoyment because it helps us to survive. Food is enjoyable because we need to eat, comfortable clothes and furniture are enjoyable because we need shelter and rest, sex is enjoyable because we need to reproduce, friendship is enjoyable because we need to collaborate to survive, and so forth. That makes sense as far as it goes. Lots of delights in this world are indeed useful or even vital to us in some way, and you can see why the release of “happy hormones” when we encounter them would be to our advantage. The problem is that many other delights—including many of my favorites (and probably yours)—serve no useful function whatsoever. Take flowers: Few things in creation have the capacity to lift my spirits like a forest covered in bluebells, or a field of bright yellow sunflowers, or the aroma of lavender. I recently asked my wife what her happy place was, and she reminded me of a garden of water lilies we visited in southern France. Even small children can be captivated by the fragrance of a rose, the curvature and alignment of its petals, the intensity of its color. But why? We don’t eat them. (Many of the most beautiful flowering plants are indigestible or even poisonous to us.) We don’t use them for shelter or clothing. We don’t need them for reproduction or bonding with other humans. They’re utterly useless to us (a phenomenon that puzzled Charles Darwin). The joy they generate isn’t a product of their utility but of something deeper and more mysterious. This becomes even clearer when we think about comparative beauty. Why are daffodils so much more beautiful than potatoes, when they’re incalculably less beneficial? Why do we enjoy the song of blackbirds but not the snuffling of pigs, when from a survival perspective it should be the other way around? Why do we derive so much more pleasure from the appearance of horses than donkeys, tigers than toads, birds of paradise than birds of poultry? Why are some things so much funnier than others? Why is anything funny at all? We’re dealing here with what I like to call the problem of superfluous happiness. (It’s the mirror image of the much more famous problem of evil, which contemporary people are generally more aware of.) Put simply, there’s a lot more joy in this world than there needs to be. READ MORE ABOUT OUR ULTIMATE HAPPY PLACE | 
