“Getting what you want in life — that’s happiness, bro,” Saxon Ratliff tells his younger brother in the latest season of “The White Lotus” on HBO. Helpfully, he lists his essentials: sex, money, freedom, respect (in that order). A jacked dude-bro, constantly slamming foul-tasting protein shakes, Saxon is determined to steer his brother away from their sister Piper’s budding interest in Buddhism. It’s a creed for people afraid of life, he scoffs.
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Piper, meanwhile, is demurely rebelling against a life that’s all privilege, no purpose. “Lately, it’s felt like everything is pointless,” she tells the head monk at a Buddhist monastery near the lavish Thai resort where the Ratliffs are staying. “And the things my family cares about, I just don’t care about.” When she tries to explain this existential ache to her mother — a woman seemingly made out of exfoliating serum and oblivious narcissism — Piper puts it as simply as she can: “I need to figure out what makes me happy, OK?”
So each sibling is chasing happiness, but in opposite directions: Saxon through acquisition; Piper through renunciation. And neither fully understands the cost of those choices. In fact, the season unfolds like a sly symposium on the many meanings of happiness in an age of TED Talks, best-selling manifestoes and podcasts that chirp endlessly about self-optimization and the elusive “best life.” Happiness, it turns out, is more Rorschach than road map. Is it found in the ultraluxe wellness center or the austere monastery? Does it come from getting what you want or wanting less?
These aren’t merely personal questions but philosophical ones, and they’ve been asked — and answered differently — throughout history. Once, happiness was understood as a communal project tied to justice and shared flourishing. But over time, it evolved from an expansive ideal into something individual and small. Now the challenge seems clear: to reclaim a deeper, more demanding vision of what it means to live well in a fractured world — and restore happiness to its proper scale.