Last fall, I took Peter Singer’s “Practical Ethics” class, and he told us that happiness was the ultimate way to measure good. If you want to do good for others, you have to make them happy. You can frame it as helping people achieve certain goals or meet certain needs or access certain rights, but all of those things are about giving people the requisite conditions to pursue happiness. So, when faced with a decision, the “right” choice is the choice that creates the most happiness.

Going to Princeton is insane and surreal and in some ways deeply disturbing. I forget about other people—not my friends, not my family, not the day-to-day importance of trying to be kind, but I forget that the outside world is full of human beings. I think about the future as my future. The “right” choice is the choice that creates the most happiness for me. And I’m surrounded by so many choices, and they all feel like they matter, and some of them do. When I skip one lecture to get one coffee with a friend, I worry that this is a statement. Do I care more about how many people like me, or about how many points I get on an assignment? I slept through French class yesterday. All my money is going towards fall seasonal beverages. It’s rainy and humid and my hair is frizzy and I really don’t know what I’m going to do with my life.

The way Peter Singer taught us his worldview felt like a trap. He showed us these lecture slides that said happiness was the most basic good, that everyone was equally deserving of it. Those were easy to agree with. He said a lot of other things like that, and then suddenly, you were supposed to swear to go vegan and become an investment banker who lives in a tiny studio apartment and donates all of your (considerable) income to malaria relief funds. This is apparently what one human being can do to create the most happiness for the world. And this is where a lot of people lose him. How could we owe the world such an odd, specific, miserable-sounding lifestyle? I can’t exist that way. The class became a collection of thought experiments, rather than a legitimate proposal for how to live. But I never found a hole in the argument. I never figured out how to justify waking up and buying a seven dollar latte and donating absolutely nothing to malaria relief funds. I just do it. I can feel the dissonance if I really think about it. 

There are lots of other things to think about instead, though. I have several pairs of earrings that look essentially the same. Every morning I think someone might notice the ones I choose to wear, and when I decide to buy new ones, I think that they will make me happy. I think this over and over again. I stay up late doing my politics readings, which I do not enjoy, because I will feel more anxious and upset about having not done them than I will feel bored and exhausted doing them. I am deciding whether to be religious again. I grew up going to Sunday school and I really think I could make myself believe anything if I thought that it would make me happy. I’m just not sure what to believe will make me happy, and I spend so much time wondering, and everyone around me seems equally consumed by this question. I do have a couple friends who think they know what they want. They might. I’m glad, and I’m jealous.

I did try to beat Peter Singer’s argument—not in any way that would hold up to rigorous philosophical scrutiny, just in some way that I could live with. This is all that I came up with: he says there is a moral imperative to be a vegetarian because the extent of animal suffering certainly outweighs whatever joy we feel eating a hamburger. This is very difficult to argue with, but it’s hard to be a college student who eats well and eats enough as it is, and avoiding meat seems like too much. It is hard to be financially secure and have a work-life balance as it is, and trying to find a genuinely altruistic career seems like too much. It is hard to be kind and good to the people I love in the way they deserve as it is, and figuring out how to be kind and good to the whole world seems like too much.

I am trying to decide what major to declare. The difference between what I will do in and after the politics department versus the philosophy department is probably very small. I want my career to make me happy. I’d like it to be exciting enough that I want to do it all the time, and I want it to pay well enough that I don’t have to do it all the time. What happens if I hate my job? I think about living in New York City and getting dinner with my friends and taking the subway home to a tiny studio apartment. It’s hard to imagine that that wouldn’t be enough, but then, it’s also hard to understand why this—right now—doesn’t feel like enough. Maybe constantly questioning what will make me happy, happier, means evading contentment. Someday, I want to feel like nothing has to change. 

There are parts of Peter Singer’s philosophy that I can discard without feeling guilty. If a train was barreling towards ten people tied to the tracks, and I could flip a switch to make it trample my best friend instead, he would want me to do it. I know I wouldn’t do it. I get that that’s technically wrong, but it’d kind of suck to be Peter Singer’s best friend. The best I can do is to meet him in the middle on this. I don’t think there is anything wrong with caring more about the people you love than you do about the world in general. But I should still think about the world in general from time to time, and I guess I can start there.

It just gets kind of scary. Everything is scary. I don’t know how the machines work at the gym, or how to fall in love, or if someone can teach me that second thing the same way they can teach me the first. How can you ask that of other people, anyway? Can you ask other people for anything? If I decide that I owe a lot to everyone around me, do I get to believe that they owe me things, too? 

It’s rainy and humid and my hair is frizzy, and I really don’t know.