What Alain's "On Happiness" Taught Me About Building My Own Happiness at 66

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Alain's On Happiness (Iwanami Bunko edition) is the book behind this record of what I've actually started doing at 66. I had known Alain's name for years without ever actually reading him. What finally brought me to it was a single line I happened to see on a bookshop shelf: "Pessimism belongs to mood; optimism belongs to the will." Alain was born in France in 1868 and spent forty years teaching philosophy at lycées while writing a short daily column called a "propos" for newspapers. This book collects ninety-three of them. Living alongside the changes age brings to the body, I found this book written nearly a century ago speaking to me with surprising directness.

A study on a rainy day, a fountain pen resting on an open notebook beside a steaming cup — evoking the forty years Alain spent writing a short "propos" every day.

Mood comes from the body, not the other way around

In a chapter called "Sad Marie," Alain describes a woman whose mood flips every week like clockwork. A psychologist who examined her blood found a pattern: her blood cell count dropped during her happy weeks and rose during her sad ones. Mood, it turns out, wasn't a matter of reasoning at all, but of the body's condition.

There is more tough, resilient will inside happiness than people tend to think. — Alain, On Happiness

On mornings when I wake up with stiffness in my joints, I used to just tell myself "today's a bad day," as if my mood had settled the matter. Now I try to remember that this is a temporary state of the body, not a verdict on who I am. On those mornings, I put the kettle on and apply a small moxa cone to whichever part of my foot feels cold. Trying to talk myself into a better mood rarely works as fast as sending the body a small, concrete signal — something this book has made much clearer to me.

Learning to hold the "other handle"

Alain writes that just as every jug has two handles, every event has two ways of being seen.

Every jug has two handles. In the same way, every event has two points of view. — from the same book

Reading this brought to mind the Buddhist idea of impermanence — that nothing, including mood, the body, or even the view from the garden, ever stays fixed. Because of that, I no longer feel obliged to keep gripping the painful handle. I can simply choose the other one. When I was younger, I thought facing age meant enduring without complaint. Now I think choosing which handle to hold today is the more honest and practical wisdom. This isn't giving up on endurance — it's the very concrete habit of looking at the same event from a different angle, at least once.

Building my own happiness, rather than waiting for it

In a chapter about misers, Alain draws a striking contrast.

Happiness is, in essence, a kind of poetry, and poetry means action. People rarely care much for happiness that simply falls into their lap. What they want is happiness they've made themselves. — from the same book

I took this less as a warning about money itself than as a comment on where happiness actually comes from. I've been investing in stocks and property since long before retirement, but I've noticed that watching an account balance rarely gives my heart much satisfaction. What does is the process — keeping my own monthly records, thinking through how to rebalance things myself. It's the same with the ten-odd varieties of English roses I keep in the garden: left alone, they simply don't bloom. Pruning them, checking for pests, feeding the soil — that time-consuming care brings a kind of happiness that buying cut flowers never could.

An English rose garden with a pair of secateurs and a watering can set down among the blooms — evoking the idea that the time spent tending them, by hand, is itself a happiness one builds.

Action itself is happiness

Quoting Aristotle, Alain writes that work itself is the source of joy.

A true musician is someone who enjoys music; a true statesman is someone who enjoys politics. Pleasure is the mark of capability. — from the same book

Life split between the UK and Japan is far from effortless. Even so, writing this blog in both Japanese and English feels close to what Alain means by "action." Carrying a little of British daily life to Japanese readers, and a little of Japanese literature and haiku to readers here — that's work nobody else can do for me. Japanese has a word, ikigai, that doesn't quite translate but roughly means "a reason for being." When Alain insists that action itself creates happiness, he seems to land, quite by accident, on almost the same spot as a concept he never knew existed. It's oddly delightful to see a French philosophy teacher and an everyday Japanese word shake hands like that.

A line connecting the UK and Japan across a globe, alongside a sheet of writing paper and a pen — evoking the act of bridging the two countries through this two-base life.

Boredom is the real enemy, and happiness is a duty

In a chapter called "The King Is Bored," Alain argues that a king who already has everything he wants has no happiness left to find.

Happiness, I think, always presupposes some anxiety, some passion — a point of pain, so to speak, that wakes us up to ourselves. — from the same book

Since retiring, I've noticed that the days when nothing at all is asked of me are, oddly, the ones that leave me feeling flattest. That's why I now deliberately keep a few small deadlines and minor inconveniences in my life. Alain also writes that if you don't will yourself to be happy, you will never be happy — and that becoming happy is, in fact, a duty toward others. That sounds like a demanding standard, but lately I've come to think of it differently: I'm just keeping my own record here, but if it turns out to be some quiet company for someone else, walking a little way beside them, that would make me glad. Staying in good spirits isn't only for oneself — it's a small gift to the people nearby.

The act of recording is itself a practice

For forty years, Alain wrote his daily propos without fail. As I notice my own memory and concentration aren't quite what they used to be, this fact is quietly encouraging. Writing, I'm beginning to understand, isn't about mourning what I can no longer hold onto — it's about continually re-editing my own thinking. There's no need for a tidy conclusion. Writing down what I understood today, in today's words, is enough. That, it seems, is how a life keeps being edited.

What On Happiness Points Toward

On Happiness keeps returning to one idea: happiness isn't something you wait for, but something you build. Mood comes from the body. Every event has two handles. Happiness only comes from one's own action. Boredom is the real enemy. None of these may be groundbreaking discoveries, but at 66, they're exactly the ideas I want to keep testing in my own daily life.

The book I mentioned here:

Alain, On Happiness (Japanese edition, Iwanami Bunko)

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About Alain

An early twentieth-century French townscape with a lycée cloister, an old fountain pen and stationery — evoking the era in which Alain lived and taught philosophy.

Alain's real name was Émile-Auguste Chartier. He was born in 1868 in Mortagne-au-Perche in northwestern France and died in 1951 in Le Vésinet. After studying at the École Normale Supérieure in Paris, he spent forty years teaching philosophy at lycées, mentoring students who would go on to become notable in their own right — the writer André Maurois and the philosopher Simone Weil among them. Alongside his teaching, he wrote a short philosophical column almost daily: for the newspaper La Dépêche de Rouen from 1906 to 1914, and for Libres Propos from 1921 to 1936. He wrote each piece in a single sitting, rarely revising afterward — a habit that likely accounts for the light, practical rhythm running through this book.

Alain lived through an era still marked by the memory of the Franco-Prussian War, under France's Third Republic, and he experienced the enormous violence of the First World War firsthand. In 1914, at 46 — well past the age of conscription — he volunteered anyway, serving as an ordinary soldier and then as an artillery gunner at the front. Here was a philosopher who refused to settle for theory alone, insisting instead on testing his ideas with his own hands and feet, and that stance runs straight through On Happiness and its central claim that action itself creates happiness. Reading this book, I found myself struck, again and again, by the weight of a philosopher who had seen the extremity of war firsthand and still insisted that becoming happy is a duty.