Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness
The Fourth of July is a day of celebration, with cookouts, parades, fireworks, and a lot of red, white, and blue to commemorate the adoption of the Declaration of Independence—the key word being independence.
We—the United States of America—wanted our freedom from Britain. We didn’t want to be told how to think or how to act. Our forefathers were wise enough to create a document that would establish our country as a separate nation, equal to Britain and fully entitled to our independence. Our autonomy was guaranteed because of a certain set of unalienable rights: life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. As we prepare to celebrate our nation’s birthday, I invite you to reflect with me on this powerful phrase.
Life. On a basic level, we all need oxygen, water, food, shelter, and sleep. But on a deeper level, life is more than just those five things. Life, true life, is in how you live. And what constitutes living depends on whom you talk to and what they value. This could be experiences, the people closest to them, or even what they are surrounded by materially.
The pursuit of happiness. What is happiness? Another vague term, just like “life,” yet a term that has been debated in philosophical circles for centuries. Eudaimonia, a Greek term for happiness, clearly illustrates the debate; Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle all took their turns trying to identify what constitutes happiness and the path to achieving it. The meaning of the term was even debated in 1776, when the Declaration of Independence was created. But with an idea as broad as happiness, I would be willing to argue even that you and I seek to obtain happiness differently.
Liberty is the crucial word tying this concept together. Luckily, we live in a country that values liberty—we are allowed to pursue our hearts’ desires in our own ways. That is a gift I take for granted. Freedom grants us numerous basic rights that many have been stripped of: the freedom to choose what and where to eat, the freedom to choose what and how to dress, and the freedom to have a voice to express our opinions and beliefs. Freedom is the key to living and to pursing our own ideas of happiness.
So, maybe the real argument shouldn’t be what happiness is, but that we are each entitled to our own version of it. Isn’t that the essence of the Declaration of Independence?
This Fourth of July, I hope you will celebrate the precious gifts of life and liberty we have been granted that allows each of us to pursue our own version of happiness.
