II. Ask What Is Best, Not What Is Popular

A warning against using opinion polls to answer philosophical questions.

When we ask what makes a life happy, we cannot answer it the way you would settle a vote. We cannot say: most people believe this, therefore it is true. When most people believe something about how to live, that is more often a reason for suspicion than confidence.

Think about this honestly. When a person finally stops and sits alone with themselves, really alone, with no distraction and no audience, what do they confess?

They confess that most of what they spent their years pursuing they do not actually value. The things they were proud of embarrass them in quiet moments. The things other people admired turn out to be sources of suffering for those who own them. The enemies they were afraid of are no more threatening than the admirers, because both groups only see the surface.

The man of wealth and reputation sits in the middle of everything that should make him happy and feels, in his private moments, that something is deeply wrong. He cannot name it. He moves to the next goal, hoping that will fix it. It does not.

The happiness we are looking for is not outward. What is outward is always misery to those who possess it, underneath the display.