I’ve mentioned before that I’m very, very glad that I decided to read the Harry Potter series as an adult. For one thing, to paraphrase a high school English teacher of mine, “The best books have always been about middle age people and the problems of middle age.” And now that I find myself, if not squarely inside, than at least rapidly approaching, the boundary of middle age; I’m most inclined to see the truth in that statement. And while Harry and the other children in the books grow and change over the seven books, the most interesting characters to me were most frequently the adults: Lupin, Snape, Mrs. Weasley, Narcissa Malfoy, Sirius Black, and Peter Pettigrew to name but a few.

They all to varying degrees and in their charateristic ways make complex decisions about not just life and death stakes, but more usefully to the adult reader, tradeoffs about happiness. And ultimately, though Hallows ends by telling us “All was well”, the larger questions about happiness and satisfication are left ambiguous. I think Rowling makes the correct point that happiness is both fleeting and not perhaps what one should pursue in their life.

I also finished another book since I last updated; that was Sapiens, by Dr. Yurval Harari. The book starts out very strong. But then it peters out around the Scientific Revolution, with bold pronouncements and sweeping generalizations becoming the norm. One thread continues throughout the book, and it is worth mentioning here: that evolutionary success at the population level does not equate to happiness at the individual level.

It’s just simply naive to think in terms of a happiness-suffering continuum that way, and I’ve been jaded a bit here by the excellent chapter on what we actually want as shown by neuroendocrinology in Behave. That more subtle point is that “it is not happiness but rather the happiness of pursuit our brains are wired for.” In other words, satisifaction means more to us than does happiness.

Behavioral economics seems to bear this out too. Daniel Kahneman concluded in an interview last year that:

“Altogether, I don’t think that people maximize happiness in that sense…this doesn’t seem to be what people want to do. They actually want to maximize their satisfaction with themselves and with their lives. And that leads in completely different directions than the maximization of happiness”

Additionally, researchers at Harvard Business School gave people on the street $5 and asked them how they would spend it, and how they felt after doing just what they said they would do. Basically, people who spent it on themselves felt like them selves, and people who spent it on others felt better. There are many reasons why that could be the case, but allow me to offer one of my own: The narrative they constrcuted about what giving meant to them made them feel better.

This is not to poo-poo giving; merely that above all else, we’re experts at telling ourselves stories.

The same researchers looked at what marginal spending increased happiness the most, since after a certain income level, self reported “happiness” stays basically constant. Spending on experiences, vacations especially, increased self reported happiness. And again, this makes sense too - there are all kinds of biases that incline people to remember vacations more and more fondly than they might have actually been.

All this to say, that reading the Potter books is a good thing because you don’t encounter many happy characters - you don’t even encounter that many hedonistic ones. What you do encounter are a lot of characters pursuing satisfaction of one form or another. And after and above that, explicitly Rowling tells us that the “true master of death… accepts that he must die, and understands that there are far, far worse things in the living world than dying.”

This is important. If fiction is, as David Foster Wallace put it, “about what it is to be a fucking human being,” then you can’t get much clearer instruction than that. Living as an adult is choosing, and the Potter books provide so many useful examples of choices gone tragically wrong for one reason or another (Regulus Black sticks out).

Rowling actually inserts a full on fairy tale to make that point in the piece. And us jaded adults sometimes forget that those stories persist through the generations for a reason…

Just as importantly, the Potter series gives almost as many examples of good choices, and often those characters die by the end too (LUPIN AND TONKS 😭). But as said in many ways throughout the series, the attitude with which we meet death, and the act we were performing when we meet death, are perhaps the most important things about our lives.