Untroubled by the need for meaningfulness, some happiness theorists respond by simply including it among the criteria for personal happiness. But this response misses the point. If one performs unselfish actions for selfish gain, they are not unselfish actions. Genuinely unselfish actions may (or may not) result in happiness, but to be unselfish in the first place, personal happiness cannot be their purpose. In much the same way, if one aims for meaningfulness as a source of pleasure, one is aiming for pleasure, not meaningfulness. There are some things one cannot get by striving for them.

Tolstoy was not the only great writer to have confronted the idea that life is about happiness, an idea that in ancient philosophy was called Epicureanism and that, in some form, is always with us. Great writers have offered at least three objections to this view of life. First, when it comes right down to it, even the most ardent defenders of Epicureanism do not really believe it. There are circumstances in which one would choose something else over happiness. Recall Nathan Hale’s last words (quoted from Addison): “I only regret that I have but one life to give for my country.” Hale wasn’t happy to be hanged. Indeed, sometimes people sacrifice themselves for others and then—oddly enough—rationalize it by telling themselves they were only being selfish, as their theory demands!

Second, happiness itself is much more mysterious than Epicureans, hedonists, utilitarians, or psychologists of happiness usually allow. Finally, life has presented extreme situations that test the philosophy of happiness, and it usually fails the test. What happens when an Epicurean finds himself in the Gulag?

Tolstoy and other Russian writers often elaborated on Voltaire’s philosophical parables. In Voltaire’s “The Story of the Good Brahmin,” a wealthy Brahmin has everything one could wish for, including great intelligence and vast learning, but is miserable. Outside his palace lives an old woman, who is poor, stupid, ignorant—and happy. The Brahmin asks himself whether he would change places with her: would he agree to become stupid if that would make him happy? He realizes he would not, but cannot say why. After all, if the goal of life is happiness, he should be willing to make the trade without a moment’s hesitation. Could it be that other goods are not mere means to happiness, and that one might choose them over happiness?

The story’s narrator reports that he has posed the Brahmin’s question to many intelligent people but has discovered no one “willing to accept the bargain to become an imbecile in order to be content.” “After having reflected on the matter,” the narrator tells us, “it appears to me that to prefer reason to happiness is sheer madness. How can this contradiction be explained?” Like so many other deep questions, he concludes, this is one we cannot answer.

Dostoevsky sharpened Voltaire’s insight. He asked: imagine you were offered the opportunity to live in a palace where your every wish would be instantly granted. There is only one catch: you can never leave. Gratifying your every wish: that would be your whole life from now on. Would you take the offer?

A modern philosopher, Robert Nozick, has reformulated Dostoevsky’s parable in neurophysiological terms. Suppose that “super-duper neurophysiologists could stimulate your brain” so that you would think you were having experiences while you were actually just “floating in a tank, with electrodes attached to your brain.” This “experience machine,” as Nozick calls it, would insure you would experience supreme happiness for the rest of your life. Like Dostoevsky, Nozick asks: “Would you plug it in? What else can matter to us, other than how our lives feel from the inside?”

If you would not plug it in, then why not? Nozick offers a few interesting answers, which, again, recall some of Dostoevsky’s. “First, we want to do certain things, and not just have the experience of doing them. . . it is only because first we want to do the actions that we want the experiences of doing them or thinking we’ve done them.” Second, we want to be a certain sort of person, but someone floating in a tank is an “indeterminate blob. There is no answer to the question of what [such] a person is like… Is he courageous, kind, intelligent, witty, loving? It’s not merely that it’s difficult to tell; there’s no way [that] he is.” Third, such a machine limits us to a man-made reality, “to a world no deeper or more important than that which people can construct. There is no actual contact with any deeper reality…. Many persons desire to leave themselves open to such contact and to a plumbing of deeper significance.” Sum it all up, and you see that “what is most disturbing about [these machines] is their living of our lives for us. . . Perhaps what we desire is to live (an active verb) ourselves, in contact with reality. (And this, machines cannot do for us.)”

Dostoevsky adds a few more answers. In one sketch, he imagines that some devils have created a socialist paradise, so that, as in the palace of perpetual pleasure, complete prosperity always reigned. Material wealth, inventions, scientific knowledge— all of these would come gratuitously. There would be no obstacles to overcome, no sacrifices to make. Of course, humanity would at first be ecstatic, Dostoevsky opines. But within a generation, the ecstasy would turn to bitterness.

People would suddenly see that they had no more life left, that they had no freedom of spirit, no will, no personality, that someone had stolen all this from them…. People would realize that there is no happiness in inactivity, that the mind which does not labor will wither, that it is not possible to love one’s neighbor without sacrificing something to him of one’s own labor, that it is vile to live at the expense of another, and that happiness lies not in happiness but only in the attempt to achieve it.

But isn’t that a paradox? How could you even strive for something unless you believed that getting it would make you happy? Should you instead strive for the striving? But then the same question arises at one remove: striving for the striving for what?

The modern genre of the dystopia—including works like Eugene Zamyatin’s We and Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World—grew directly, and explicitly, from passages like this in Dostoevsky’s fiction. In Huxley’s novel, the hero escapes from paradise in order to live in a world of risk where choice and effort make a difference. He seeks a world where suffering is an intrinsic part of life. Why?