Nozick’s Experience Machine And The Limits Of Happiness

In his classic work of Political Philosophy Anarchy, State, Utopia (1974), the Philosopher Robert Nozick first introduced his thought experiment of The Experience Machine. Imagine that there is a machine that you could plug into that would make you feel exactly how you want to feel, including all variety of experiences, for the rest of your life. Would you plug into this machine?

Utilitarians who believe that happiness is the only thing that matters are committed to plugging in. But Nozick argues that for most of us our first intuition is that we wouldn’t plug in. Why? Nozick points out that this intuition suggests there is more to life than happiness or feelings. While it’s great to feel happy and successful, we want these things to be real, founded in reality, not only in our minds. It matters if our feelings are a proper and fitting response to reality or delusions. Why?

I think the answer is that what we really want isn’t happiness but fulfillment and meaning. That is, we don’t just want positive feelings but what Ernest Becker, author of The Denial of Death and Escape From Evil, called Cosmic Significance. We want our lives to matter somehow. And the irony is that our lives will lack meaning and significance from the inside if everything is easy and given to us. What gives us the feeling of meaning and fulfillment is accomplishing difficult things. That means that effort and struggle are inseparable from a fulfilling life.

Life is difficult. The Buddha used the term Dukkha which the Buddhist Psychiatrist Mark Epstein translates as “hard to face”. Tragically, in some cases it’s too difficult and the forces people face overwhelm them. But without challenge and struggle, even a plethora of positive feelings would feel hollow. We think that money, things and fame will bring us what we want. But the truth is that fulfillment and meaning in life are a spiritual achievement that come from a creative response to one’s facticity – all the facts and circumstances that one is born into and are out of one’s control. This response will be different for different people facing different circumstances. But the common denominator for a meaningful life is the effort and struggle to overcome the challenges we all face and transcend them.

Freud wrote: “One day, in retrospect, the years of struggle will strike you as the most beautiful.” I have that quote framed and hanging over my desk. The soft life will prove inevitably unfulfilling no matter how much pleasure it’s filled with. Nowadays, we want a pill to solve our emotional problems or an app or a robot to do the work for us. But it’s through doing our work – whatever that is for each of us – that we create a good life for ourselves. At the end of his long and productive life, the great British Philosopher John Stuart Mill called out to his stepdaughter from his deathbed: “You know that I have done my work!”

Nietzsche cryptically wrote: “Become who you are”. I’m not going to get into the details but Nietzsche had a difficult life that ultimately ended in insanity. But I think what he was getting at is that it’s in facing up to the challenges each of us has and doing our best to meet them creatively that we become who we are and fulfill our destiny.