Click, Compared to Haybron's Idea of Deception
In his book, Happiness: A Very Short Introduction, Daniel Haybron introduces the idea that it may not be enough for a person to just simply feel happy. He outlines three major areas, where a person may seem happy, but their life is lacking something important. These areas include deception, impoverishment, and deprivation.
I would like to focus on the idea of deception and compare it to the 2006 film, Click. Click, starring Adam Sandler and Kate Beckinsale, shows an average businessman, who spends too much time at work, and not enough time at home with his family. In the movie, he meets a bizarre inventor, who offers him a remote that can control time. Of course, Michael Newman (Sandler), uses this remote to his advantage at first. He skips through the hard, boring moments and presses pause on the good moments. Because he is a man consumed with work, some of these boring moments include time spent with family. He soon learns that he is deceiving himself of what life is really like. He realizes that the remote has taken control of his life. Towards the end of the movie, he sees that the hard times are what shapes him and his family into the people that they are.
In comparison, Haybron explains that by being deceived, we miss out on genuine experiences. Haybron makes a similar connection by including The Experience Machine in his argument. The Experience Machine is a simulation that can allow a person to experience anything they desire. Moreover, Haybron also includes that when we are deceived, we miss out on building a life for ourselves and we deprive our desire to succeed. By having a remote that controls time or a machine that simulates experiences, we are allowing ourselves to be fooled. We miss out on what real life is like. We miss out on the good moments.
Finally, at the end of Click, Michael Newman looks back and cherishes the times that he is able to spend with his family. I think Haybron makes a valid point when he argues that there is a need for more than happiness. What are you thoughts on this subject?
I agree completely with this entire post. I believe its important to cherish every single situation that life throws at you because it builds you into who you are. It reminded me of what we've recently discussed about how De Botton believes that we must go through suffering in order to be successful. I felt as if this movie/story was a testimony of that because he saw that the hard times shaped him and his family.
ReplyDeleteI agree with this post as well because, like I commented on Dr. Rider's original post about erasing the bad memories, if you only focus on the good things that happen and then erase or forget the rest, you'll have nothing to learn from. You can easily become deceived by how good it originally sounds to erase or forget the bad experiences, like Haybron tells us not to do, and miss out on the real experiences that happen, the good and the bad. Sometimes bad things happen so that better things can come from it, and by only relying on the "good moments", I feel like many opportunities will be missed. For example, one of my good friends, didn't get into the graduate school that she initially wanted to get in, this would be a moment that Michael Newman would skip over because it wasn't a happy time, but since she didn't get in, she kept trying and ended up getting into a better school that she never thought she would get into because of it. This is why it's important to not skip over or try to erase the bad memories, because good things can come out of them, and important things can be missed by just relying on the good times.
ReplyDeleteI fully see the point that Haybron makes especially with the comparison your post makes in how if everything is easy we don't experience the harder parts that makes things memorable and better in the end. Especially because the good comes with the bad and Haybron would agree.
ReplyDeleteI agree with the post, and also see similarities between the life of the main character in this film and the examples of impoverished lives in the book by Haybron as well. The main character, in a sense, is impoverishing his life by only going through the moments he deems exciting. Often times, this means he misses out on family time and lives through some of the more exciting work moments, such as getting a promotion. He is, unintentionally, impoverishing his own life by only seeking to go through moments of the endorsement types of happiness. This leads to impoverishment of the relationships that he once had; he even fast forwards through having sex with his own wife, in one part!
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