This article explores the nature of human happiness in the pursuit of perfection. It compares people who approach perfection in two different ways – with the help of biotechnology and through personal effort – and analyzes the types of happiness they experience and the possibility of true happiness.
I want to be better than others at everything I do, because if I could be perfect, I would be happy. I don’t care what others think of me, but I want to be better than others at what I do. But I don’t think I’m happy in the process, so what about everyone else? Are they happy or unhappy? First of all, how do we define perfection and happiness? What is perfect and what is happy? My mind races and I keep asking questions. One by one, I tried to define them, and I wondered, are people who strive to be perfect happy? I’ll try to draw my own conclusions.
What is perfection? According to the dictionary definition, it means “complete without defect”, hence the name of the flawless marble. What does perfection mean in the context of human society? A perfect person is someone who meets or exceeds the standards of every activity that humans think they are capable of doing. In other words, when humans make judgments based on their own standards, something is not perfect if it falls short of those standards, or if there are deficiencies.
Human standards can be divided into two types. They are tangible and intangible. Tangible things are things that can be seen with the naked eye, such as strength and weakness, good looks and ugly looks, and you can make your own standards regardless of objectivity. Intangibles are all other criteria that cannot be seen with the naked eye, such as love, indifference, and cuteness.
The aforementioned human perfection is determined by human beings’ own standards, and in the following discussion, I will only discuss the perfection that satisfies all tangible standards. In other words, I will express my own thoughts about people who pursue perfection in a state where all physical requirements are satisfied, and whether they are happy or unhappy.
Before we get into the discussion, let’s take a look at what tangible perfection looks like. Let’s take the 100-meter dash as an example. Let’s say there are only three people on the planet, and each of them runs a 100-meter dash in a few seconds, which is perfect according to their own standards. Let’s say that each of the three people can run 100 meters in 3 seconds, 5 seconds, and 7 seconds. To be perfect for all of them, you need to have the ability to run 100 meters in at least 3 seconds or less. In this article, being able to satisfy all of these many physical criteria is called perfection.
But what is happiness? What makes a person happy? There are many different types of happiness. There’s hedonic happiness, fulfillment happiness, and wholeness happiness. What is hedonic happiness? Hedonic happiness is happiness that is experienced through the direct stimulation of the pleasure center. This is the kind of happiness that is dependent on appetite, sex, drugs, alcohol, etc. and is fleeting. They correspond to what philosophers call the primordial emotions. Second, achievement happiness is the kind of happiness that comes from doing something you love and are good at, not from stimulating your pleasure centers. It’s like the happiness of a musician who succeeds after years of practicing, or the jubilation of a high school student who passes the exam after a long struggle. These are the people who live happily and joyfully because they get what they want by showing their aptitude and potential through hard work. Finally, there is complete happiness. Complete happiness is the joy that comes from realizing the virtues, values, and meanings that society or humanity universally strives for through one’s life, rather than just achieving happiness.
This is my own definition of perfection and happiness. Are people who seek such perfection happy in the process? How do people who seek to become perfect do so? In other words, we can divide people who seek to perfect their physical abilities into two types. The first one is the one who wants to reach perfection without effort through biotechnology, and the second one is the one who wants to reach perfection through their own efforts without the help of biotechnology.
Let’s apply the above analogy to people preparing for a marathon and divide them into two groups. To run a marathon well, the higher the number of red blood cells in the blood, the better. This is because the higher the number of red blood cells, the better the oxygen supply and the longer you can run. There are two ways to increase your red blood cell count. The first is to use EPO (a hormone produced by the kidneys that stimulates the production of red blood cells). The second is to increase red blood cell count through intense training at high altitude, where oxygen is scarce. The first is a way to get closer to perfection with the help of biotechnology, the second is a way to get closer to perfection through hard work. In this article, I’m not going to judge the ethical right or wrong. It’s not the ethics that matter, it’s whether they’re happy.
To get back to the point, let’s assume that these two groups compete in a marathon with people from all over the world and become the best runners on the planet. Are they happy because they are the best runners and are one step closer to perfection?
First, let’s determine if they are happy based on hedonic happiness. We can see that both groups are happy based on hedonic happiness. This is because their brains have not changed, even if they have increased their red blood cell levels through EPO or high-intensity training at altitude. Since the structure of their brain hasn’t changed, if you make them feel happy through chemical stimulation, of course they will feel happy.
But do they have achievement happiness? A person who receives EPO treatment may or may not be happy. In other words, there may be a sense of accomplishment happiness as a result of being the best runner in a marathon, but there is no accomplishment happiness that comes from the process of getting there. And happiness that comes without effort, happiness that comes easily with the tools of biotechnology, is short-lived. This can be easily seen in the anecdotes of Kim Hak-sung’s mother and Choi Sul’s mother during the Sukjong Dynasty. These two anecdotes contain the lesson that “easy fortune is the same as disaster”. Our ancestors already knew that easy things are not good.
So, do people who have increased their red blood cell count through hard work experience achievement happiness? In this case, they have already succeeded and fulfilled the conditions for achievement happiness. Achievement happiness, as mentioned above, is the happiness that comes from getting what you want through hard work, using your aptitudes and potential abilities. They are happy because they have worked themselves to the bone to get to the top of the marathon. Both the process and the outcome make them happy.
Finally, did the two groups experience total happiness? Consider the case of the people who received EPO injections in the same way: they hardly experienced achievement happiness, so they would not experience total happiness, which is a step up from achievement happiness. So, can the second group of people who experienced achievement happiness experience total happiness? Like achieving happiness, we can’t say yes, because the process they perfected through the marathon only meets the standards of achieving happiness. We don’t know if they’ve strived to pursue higher values after reaching the top of the marathon. In other words, if they used their abilities to help people in need around the world, they would have felt fulfilled in the process, but if they were satisfied and complacent with the status quo, they would not have felt fulfilled.
The above is based on the assumption that they were successful. Both groups would feel hedonic happiness, but not fulfillment or wholeness, because they have nothing to show for their efforts. They wouldn’t feel the next level of happiness, which is fulfilling and complete happiness, either, because they wouldn’t have accomplished anything. So are these two groups no different in the end? Actually, no. The difference between the EPO group and the effort group is the experience of what they did to become the best they could be. The EPO group will have had the experience of getting what they wanted easily and without effort. The second group will have had the experience of having to work hard to get what they wanted. The difference in their experiences is clear.
How does this difference affect them? It will have a huge impact on their behavior going forward. Let’s say two groups of people quit running marathons and start a new job. The first group is likely to fail without the power of biotechnology because they want to take things easy and make it easy for themselves. Because they rely on biotechnology to get them where they want to go, they don’t have the power to achieve their goals through their own efforts. Not having the power to achieve is the same as not having the potential to feel fulfilling happiness. They won’t be able to feel happiness, let alone complete happiness. What if they get frustrated by failing at the marathon and that stops them from starting the next thing? It doesn’t matter. Almost no one would consider failing at something they didn’t try to do to be a setback in life. For them, failing a marathon is more of a minor heartbreak than a setback.
What about the second group? They are the people who have worked hard to reach the perfection they want. We can divide this group into those who are frustrated by the failure of the marathon and those who are frustrated but overcome. The first group of frustrated people are those who don’t have the willpower to accomplish new things. They can’t feel fulfilled and completely happy about new things. But overcomers are different. They are the ones who are more likely to perfect a new task through their previous experience with it, so they will feel fulfillment and happiness in the process. If they get closer to perfection in that area, they will also feel fulfillment in the end.
In this way, we tried to determine whether people who strive for perfection are happy or not. Those who tried to reach perfection with the help of biotechnology rarely felt achievement happiness, whereas those who tried, failed, and overcame setbacks could feel achievement happiness, and were likely to feel full happiness. By categorizing happiness into these three levels, I realized that full happiness is really hard to achieve. This is because it’s not just about achieving your goals, but thinking beyond them, which is not something that everyone can do easily.
