An excellent question, it is important to reflect upon the things we invest our lives into. I think there are three very different concerns you might have about investing life into these activities:

1: Perhaps, these activities aren't happiness at all, but merely distract you from genuine happiness.

2: Perhaps, these activities are genuinely good to a degree, but distract you from more important things that are more central to happiness.

3: Perhaps, these activities are genuinely good because you find them pleasurable (or fulfill your desires). And pleasure (or fulfilled desire) is the only thing that is genuinely good, but these ways of pursuing pleasure are only effective short-term and are likely to undercut your total amount of long-term pleasure.

Since you ask whether there is any value in these things at all, you seem to be more concerned about the first potential problem. However, the good news for you is that Plato's view is a minority view (even among philosophers) since it presupposes that something like virtue or wisdom is the ONLY genuinely good thing in life. He thought that other things were so irrelevant to 'true' happiness that 'no one could harm the good man' even if they unjustly executed the good man.

However, problems two and three are also very real potential problems. For problem two, assume that there are a variety of things that are genuinely good and contribute to happiness... things like physical pleasure, experiencing beauty, authentic relationships, knowledge, virtue, fulfilling desires, spiritual experience, etc. (feel free to modify the list by adding or subtracting things that appeal to you). Well, in this case there is a risk that you might lead an unbalanced life and miss out on important things because you are overly preoccupied with one or two things on the list. So, to take an extreme example suppose you play video games and do drugs so much that you never experience genuine undrugged authentic friendship, you might miss out on something truly great in life.

Finally, suppose something like pleasure is the only genuinely good thing in life that constitutes happiness. Well, the things that you are involved in certainly bring you pleasure. Yet they still might distract you from something even more pleasurable like authentic friendship or certain types of knowledge. Also, suppose that drugs are damaging to your health or psyche in some way that makes it difficult for you to maximize your pleasure long term. In either of these cases, you need to consider whether you are undermining your long term happiness.

That being said, I think that things like video games and creating and listening to music are certainly enjoyable to those who prefer them. For these activities, it is simply a question of balancing them with other pursuits. I'd be more concerned about the long-term effects of drugs (though I admit I'm not an expert on their effects). It does seem to me that addictions of all sorts are significant threats to long-term happiness on all accounts of happiness.

The four major views of happiness (aka subjective well-being) are that happiness is constituted by:

1) Pleasure (and the absence of pain)

2) Fulfilled Desires

3) Virtue

4) A number of different sources that form an objective list of some sort: usually including things like pleasure, fulfilled desire, virtue, but also friendship, knowledge, or beauty.

Of course, this list of theories is an oversimplification since each of the theories has a number of variations. I'm not aware of any correlation between gender and preferred theories. I think theories one and two are the most dominant theories among philosophers and psychologists. Theory four seems to be the 'common-sense' theory that most people intuit...(but academics are often drawn to theories one and two because they attempt to reduce all the sources of well-being posited in theory four to a single value). Theory three enjoys a lot of classical support and still has contemporary supporters as well.

I should also point out that there is an ambiguity in what you might mean by needing to 'act' in order to be happy. The older thinkers like Aristotle meant that we needed to '(act)ualize' our human potential in order to achieve happiness. I'm not sure that concept 'maps on' to what we currently think of as being 'active'. An interesting variation of Aristotle's theory was advance by Maslow several decades ago.

You might also be interested in my forthcoming book, The Prudence of Love, which argues that there is a connection between possessing the virtue of love and subjective well-being on all four of the above theories.

Your comment on Peter Smith's claim, "utterly preposterous," doesn't sound like rigorous argument to me, but more like contemptuous dismissal. I'm glad panelists aren't displaying more of your style of rigor!

The consideration you do offer seems to misunderstand Smith's claim. What you quote him as saying is that if our actions are guided by beliefs that have been irrationally formed, it's likely that those actions will not promote our ends. I can see why he says this: if you think (1) that irrationally formed beliefs are as likely as not to be false and (2) that actions guided by false beliefs are not likely to get us what we want, his claim follows. Your observation – that we sometimes take pleasure in beliefs even if they have been irrationally arrived at – seems correct but beside the point: it speaks neither to the truth of (1) nor to that of (2).

Jennifer Church points out a couple of types of a case where irrationally formed beliefs (or degrees of belief, in the over-confidence case) can promote our welfare. Sure there are such cases.

But that doesn't affect the original point at stake. There being a few cases doesn't undermine the point that in general false beliefs (because of their content!) are unlikely to lead to successful action,* and so irrationally formed beliefs -- being likely to be false -- are not in general likely to lead to actions which get us what we want. And that is enough to explain why we should in general care a lot about forming our beliefs in a rational way. Which in turn is enough to counter the original questioner's worry that philosophy "uses as its main tool a mechanism [rational thought] that is the opposite of what is most important to us": in general, rational belief-formation matters for getting whatever is important to us.

*Indeed, some attractive views about ascribing content to belief-states, such as Ramsey's success semantics, make that point pivotal to the theory of content.

This discussion has (so far) generated more heat than light. Let us all remember a crucial maxim: attack the argument, not the person. (Rationale: the latter is an ad hominem fallacy).

Now about the philosophical issue. Perhaps I can first try to clarify what has been said so far (as far as I can tell). The original post argued that philosophers are in an awkward position, since they rely upon their reason, even though human beings are driven by an irrational fear of death. Professor Smith responded by clarifying (a point muddled in the original post) that beliefs are rational or irrational, rather than facts. He also ended his post by noting that we should not rely upon irrational beliefs, because they cannot get us what we really want. Then there was a reply which maintained that irrationally formed beliefs can sometimes get us what we want, provided that we want to be happy, etc. Then there was a back and forth about who is missing the point.

In all of this, an interesting question got lost: Suppose it is the case that we come to believe, presumably through some kind of irrational process - such as Freud's pleasure principle or what cognitive psychologists call "motivated irrationality" - a false proposition which flies in the face of our available evidence. This is what philosophers normally describe as "self-deception". A standard case involves a wife who continues to believe that her husband is faithful, even though he repeatedly comes home late at night, smelling of perfume, etc. Now the question on the table is this: What if she is happier with this false belief? The wife does not want to believe that her husband is unfaithful. And self-deception gives her what she want. (I believe that there was recently a paper published about this question: Kirsch, J., 2005, “What's So Great about Reality?”, Canadian Journal of Philosophy, 35/3: 407-428).

This is a huge topic that deserves all of our attention. It raises an interesting question: Is it really the case that the wife wants to believe that her husband is faithful? One might say that what she really wants is that her husband actually is faithful. Moreover: it would seem that the false belief that he is faithful will do nothing to help bring it about that he really is. There is a lot more, obviously, to say about this topic. But we won't get anywhere unless we agree to respect each other more.

What's crazy about your thinking? I see nothing crazy about it. You are following an extremely plausible moral principle--that you shouldn't cause serious harm to other creatures for trivial reasons. I think you should stick by that principle, and in fact recommend it to others!

Now about the lawn. If it bothers you to have a shaggy lawn, you might want to think through how your altogether plausible moral principle applies in this case. Do you really cause serious harm by mowing the lawn? You might also want to think about how trivial it is to want a nicely groomed lawn.

On the first question, it will be relevant to delve into the nature of insects. The lawnmower would do them more harm if they suffered pain or had goals or desires. But do they? Some do think so, but some don't. If you conclude they don't have such sophisticated mental states, there might still be harm (in some sense) in killing them, but mowing down insects might be like mowing down dandelions. If so, then even a pretty trivial reason would justify you in mowing the lawn.

You'll also want to look at your lawn-mowing desires. Are you a champion croquet player, missing out on Sunday games? Do you have a hoarde of kids who are being forced to stay inside, for fear of the insect-infested lawn?

After all due reflection, you may find yourself mowing the lawn again, without feeling bad about it.

I love this question and have often pondered it myself. I don't think sufferings need to be compared with one another. All human pain is of moral concern and deserves unique respect.

Utilitarians like to quantify pain. Even if one does this, and thereby compares different pains, it does not follow that we need to devote our psychological attention to the place/person with the greatest quantity of pain. Utilitarians, do, however, think that our moral concern (but not our psychological attention) should be directed to where we can relieve the most pain or bring about the most happiness. Perhaps the audience to your suffering is telling you that they are more obligated to relieve suffering in African than to help you feel better. (I hope for your sake that your friends are not such utilitarians. Care ethics is a better moral framework for this kind of case.)

As for "stop moaning," I think this is often psychological advice. Often, we feel better when we consider others who are in much greater pain than we are i.e. "there but for the grace of god go I." Personally, I have found that this consideration works when I am suffering a bit, but not when I am suffering a lot.

Also, depressed people are often obsessed with themselves (this is a descriptive fact, not a rebuke from me!) It turns out that becoming concerned with the needs of others is often helpful, not only for those others, but also for the depressed person. (a kind of cognitive psychotherapy)

You're pretty clearly right. What's going on around us matters for our happiness, and though how we look at things makes a difference, it's not all. There may be some people (a fully enlightened being such as the Buddha supposedly was, perhaps?) who are able to maintain their equanimity in all circumstances, but for the rest of us, this would be a superhuman achievement. Moreover, it's not entirely obvious that it would be desirable to have that kind of detachment.

That said, there's a point to the saying that no one can make you happy. Making others responsible for one's own happiness is not a mark of wisdom, and not likely to succeed.

It's a nice question, and one that' s been discussed before in various versions. You've put particular emphasis on the idea that without negative emotions, we couldn't really be happy.

Let's suppose you're right. As your own way of putting things suggests, it doesn't follow that there couldn't be such a thing as eternal happiness. The reason is that the kind of happiness that's at issue isn't best thought of as an emotion or mood but as some more global feature of our lives. In fact, your own point is that negative states can be part of, well, our happiness.

We could also spend a bit of time on whether "negative states" that we enjoy (the frisson of "horror" we pay good money for at the movies, for example) really are negative states. But let that pass. I think the partisan of eternal life would probably object to being tied to the word "happiness." Some talk, for example, of "eternal bliss." But whatever state that's meant to pick out, it may not be quite the same as the one we describe as "happiness." This isn't to disparage happiness; it's just to say that there might be more than one kind of condition that we'd want to think about if we were thinking seriously about eternal life.

And while we're at it, we might want to query the word "eternal." Should we think of eternal life as unending? Or as outside time altogether? If eternal life is atemporal life, then our usual ways of thinking about what it is to be happy may not be up to the task.

Of course, the idea of life outside time might seem too paradoxical to take seriously, though the idea that God is outside time has a long history in theological thought. But the larger point here may allow us to dance around the question: if there is such a thing as eternal life, it seems a reasonable bet that we're not in a very good position to imagine what it's like.

Needless to say, the fact that we have trouble imagining something isn't a reason for believing that it's true. But the fact that we have trouble imagining something isn't always a good guide to whether it's possible either.

A couple of further points. The first is that I'm not particularly inclined to believe that something like eternal happiness awaits us, but that's not because I think the idea is incoherent. The second is a bibliographic note: there is a well-known paper by Bernard Williams, in which he argues, roughly, that anything that could count as one's own endless life would be intolerably boring, and that any sort of endless "life" that escaped this fate wouldn't be one's own. (Williams means to raise a problem about personal identity here; you can chase down the essay, which is called "The Makropoulos Case: Reflections on the Tedium of Immortality." It's in his Problems of the Self, Cambridge University Press, 1973.) I find William's arguments singularly unconvincing, but you might feel differently. John Martin Fischer offers a reply called "Why Immortality is Not So Bad," in International Journal of Philosophical Studies, 1994 pp. 257-270. And you can read an interesting discussion by Tim Chappell here.