Guest Column Contemporary culture is obsessed with happiness, and a very subjective concept of happiness at that. This understanding of happiness focuses on an individual’s tastes and preferences that make them feel happy at a given time, but what makes some people happy might be horrific and immoral. There are people who take pleasure in every manner of depraved behavior. So we either need to jettison the language of happiness as a goal in life, or recapture a better understanding of what true happiness is. In the ancient Greek and Roman world, the word “happy” signified a community’s judgment on the quality ...