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How Businesses and Consumers Navigate the Four Levels of Happiness
A new framework for thinking about markets and the satisfaction (and generation) of desire
This is a previously unpublished excerpt of a lecture that I gave at Notre Dame’s Mendoza School of Business, November 8, 2022.
I’d like to present one framework for thinking about desires, both thick and thin, in relation to happiness — and hopefully begin to map René Girard’s ideas about mimetic desire (and this framework of thick and thin desires) onto it.
I am borrowing the image below from the Rev. Robert Spitzer, who has attempted to show the various kinds of happiness that we seek, or desire, at various times in our life. He refers to it as “Four Levels of Happiness.” (I realize that he’s not the only one who has mapped this sort of framework out, but I like his explanation the best.)
Spitzer is simply describing what Aristotle essentially recognized and articulated roughly 2,500 years ago. The Philosopher believed the extent that humans do anything at all, they’re seeking happiness. In other words, at the root of all human desire is…
