"Happiness is an imaginary condition, formerly often attributed by the living to the dead, now usually attributed by adults to children, and by children to adults"
About this Quote
Szasz treats happiness less like a feeling than a rumor: something always located safely in someone else’s life, preferably someone who can’t contest it. The line is built like a neat little relay race of projection. Once, the living sentimentalized the dead - “at least they’re at peace” - a consolation that flatters survivors with the idea that suffering ends in a tidy moral afterlife. In modern secular culture, he argues, the fantasy gets reassigned: adults mythologize childhood as a prelapsarian zone of uncomplicated joy, while children imagine adulthood as total freedom, money, and agency. Nobody gets to stay in the present tense.
The intent is characteristically Szaszian: to puncture comforting psychiatric and cultural narratives that rebrand dissatisfaction as a problem to be diagnosed, treated, and managed. By calling happiness an “imaginary condition,” he’s not denying pleasure exists; he’s attacking the way “happiness” becomes a social alibi. If it’s always elsewhere, then your own restlessness can be framed as personal failure, or medical defect, rather than a rational response to constraint, grief, monotony, or politics.
The subtext is cynical but surgical: idealization is a form of avoidance. The dead, the child, the adult - each becomes a screen for adult anxieties about meaning and responsibility. The quote works because it makes a bleak observation feel almost playful, using symmetry and timing to expose the scam: we keep moving the goalposts so we never have to admit that ordinary life is messy, and that “happiness” is often just a story we tell to make that mess seem temporary.
The intent is characteristically Szaszian: to puncture comforting psychiatric and cultural narratives that rebrand dissatisfaction as a problem to be diagnosed, treated, and managed. By calling happiness an “imaginary condition,” he’s not denying pleasure exists; he’s attacking the way “happiness” becomes a social alibi. If it’s always elsewhere, then your own restlessness can be framed as personal failure, or medical defect, rather than a rational response to constraint, grief, monotony, or politics.
The subtext is cynical but surgical: idealization is a form of avoidance. The dead, the child, the adult - each becomes a screen for adult anxieties about meaning and responsibility. The quote works because it makes a bleak observation feel almost playful, using symmetry and timing to expose the scam: we keep moving the goalposts so we never have to admit that ordinary life is messy, and that “happiness” is often just a story we tell to make that mess seem temporary.
Quote Details
| Topic | Happiness |
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