Culture or Lack of Culture: Happiness?

Since its creation, humanity has searched for peace, but hasn't always found the right path to it. Sometimes people have looked for happiness in what they possess, sometimes in what they escape from, sometimes in what they forget. Societies, like individuals, live through cycles of joy and anguish. At the center of these cycles, most often, lies culture. Because culture is how humans understand the world, position themselves within it, and relate to others.
This raises a fundamental question: Is culture the source of happiness for individuals and societies, or is it a state of simplicity freed from culture? Put another way, does humanity find peace through culture, or does culture become a chain that burdens them? To answer this requires thinking through what culture actually is, what the absence of culture means, and what happiness consists of.
Culture isn't just art, literature, or tradition. Culture is the totality of how a society reasons, its hierarchy of values, its understanding of shame and virtue, its conception of time and labor, its attitude toward authority, and the meaning it assigns to life itself. Even a person living in complete isolation produces a kind of culture, because thinking itself establishes order. Societies stand upright through culture. Culture doesn't teach people what to believe, but how to believe. It doesn't dictate what to love, but what to consider worthy of love. In this sense, culture is an invisible constitution: unwritten but binding on everyone.

The crucial point here is this: culture has value as long as it serves humanity. When humans become servants of culture, it becomes a burden instead. This distinction matters enormously but gets overlooked constantly. The question isn't whether culture exists or should exist, but what relationship people maintain with their culture, whether culture remains a living tool or calcifies into dead weight.
At first glance, culture appears to guarantee happiness. It gives people a sense of belonging. When someone knows where they belong, they feel secure. Traditions, rituals, shared memory, collective values all reduce the individual's sense of isolation. From this angle, culture is a refuge for the human soul, a shelter against the fundamental loneliness of existence.
But when culture rigidifies over time, it narrows the space for human movement. Values that once served as guides become absolute rules. People stop asking "why is it this way?" and settle for "that's how it's always been." At this point, culture multiplies obedience rather than producing happiness. The relationship between culture and happiness isn't linear; it's conditional. Culture nourishes happiness when it remains flexible, meaningful, and alive. When it hardens, it suffocates.
I've observed this dynamic across different societies and historical periods. There's usually a phase where cultural norms genuinely serve communal wellbeing, where traditions embody accumulated wisdom about how to live together successfully. People follow these norms not from blind obedience but because they make sense, because they solve real problems, because they create conditions for flourishing.
But then something shifts. The norms outlive the conditions that made them useful. What once solved genuine problems now gets perpetuated simply because it's traditional. And because culture has authority, because it carries the weight of ancestors and collective identity, questioning it feels like betrayal. So people continue observing customs whose original purpose has been forgotten, following rules that no longer serve their supposed aims, maintaining forms that have lost their substance.
The absence of culture initially feels like freedom. Liberation from traditions, norms, expectations lightens the burden on individuals. In the modern age, many people seek happiness in exactly this kind of rupture. "Be unlike anyone else," "fit no mold," "live in the immediate pleasure of the moment." These become the fundamental mottos of cultural rejection.

Yet the absence of culture, over the long term, leaves people rootless. A tree without roots might stay green briefly, but the first storm topples it. The cultureless individual lives in the moment but can't construct meaning. Pleasure divorced from meaning produces not satisfaction but exhaustion, not fulfillment but emptiness.

At the societal level, the absence of culture means losing common language, common conscience, common purpose. In such societies, people live side by side but don't live together. Happiness gets compressed into individual moments; lasting peace never emerges. There's activity but no coherence, sensation but no significance, presence but no community.

This is where things get complicated, because both excessive culture and insufficient culture produce unhappiness through different mechanisms. Too much culture imprisons; too little culture atomizes. The question isn't choosing between culture and no culture, but finding the right relationship with culture, the right degree and kind.

To understand happiness, we need to distinguish its types. First is temporary happiness: pleasure, entertainment, consumption, success, applause. These arrive quickly and depart quickly. The absence of culture produces this kind of happiness abundantly. There's no shortage of immediate gratification available to people freed from cultural constraints. You can pursue whatever feels good in the moment without worrying about tradition or propriety or long-term consequences.
But this produces a particular kind of life, one that I've seen play out in various contexts. It's marked by constant pursuit of the next pleasure, the next distraction, the next hit of dopamine. There's a frantic quality to it, an underlying anxiety that shows up as soon as the pleasure stops. Because pleasure that isn't embedded in meaning can't sustain wellbeing. It's like eating candy for every meal: initially satisfying but ultimately depleting.
The second type is lasting peace: meaning, value, purpose, belonging. This kind of happiness requires patience, demands effort, needs continuity. Culture, when it exists in the right form, makes this peace possible. It provides the frameworks within which people can build meaningful lives, the narratives that connect individual experience to larger purposes, the communities that offer genuine belonging rather than just proximity.
So the issue isn't which produces happiness, culture or its absence, but which culture, in what measure, toward what end. A culture that serves human flourishing looks very different from one that demands rigid conformity. The former adapts to changing circumstances while maintaining core commitments. The latter treats all change as threat and all deviation as sin.
Culture produces morality, but not all morality produces happiness. Oppressive cultures value obedience above all. They see questioning as sin, difference as threat. In such cultures, individuals prioritize external conformity over internal peace. There's an appearance of order, but internal rot sets in. People learn to present acceptable faces while hiding their authentic selves. The gap between public performance and private reality widens until it becomes unbridgeable.
I've noticed this particularly in societies undergoing rapid change, where traditional culture has lost legitimacy but nothing coherent has replaced it. You end up with this weird mix: people still mouthing traditional values they don't actually believe in, performing rituals they find meaningless, maintaining forms everyone knows are hollow. It's exhausting in a particular way, this constant performance of belief you don't hold.
In contrast, cultures centered on justice make the individual a moral agent rather than just a rule-follower. They treat people as beings capable of grasping meaning, not just following commands. In such societies, happiness arises from consciousness rather than fear, from genuine commitment rather than coerced compliance. People internalize values because they understand their purpose, not because they fear punishment for deviation.
Throughout history, societies follow a cyclical pattern: foundation, rise, saturation, dissolution. During foundation, culture is alive because it responds to real needs. In the rising phase, culture gains power and coherence. During saturation, culture becomes sacred, untouchable, beyond question. In dissolution, culture proves inadequate to explain or navigate contemporary life.
At this dissolution point, people split into two paths: either they reinterpret culture or they abandon it entirely. Societies that abandon culture experience short-term relief but long-term disintegration. Those that renew culture transform and endure. The distinction is crucial: renewal isn't the same as preservation, and abandonment isn't the same as transformation.

What does cultural renewal actually look like? It means returning to core principles while releasing outdated forms. It means asking what purposes the culture was meant to serve, then finding new ways to serve those purposes under changed conditions. It requires distinguishing between the essential and the accidental, between what matters fundamentally and what was merely convenient at a particular historical moment.
This is extraordinarily difficult because culture doesn't come with labels indicating which elements are essential and which are contingent. Everything feels equally important to people immersed in it. The dietary restrictions seem as fundamental as the moral principles. The dress codes feel as crucial as the commitments to justice. Distinguishing among these requires both deep knowledge of the tradition and enough distance to see it clearly, a combination that's rare and hard to maintain.
Societies that successfully navigate cultural renewal usually do so during periods of crisis that force clarity. When the old ways demonstrably aren't working, when the problems become too severe to ignore, there's an opening for questioning and transformation that normally doesn't exist. But crisis renewal is risky because it happens under pressure, without the leisure for careful thought. Some societies manage it successfully; others collapse entirely or transform into something unrecognizable.

Better would be ongoing cultural metabolism that happens before crisis forces it, a constant process of adaptation and renewal that keeps culture alive and responsive. But this requires institutional mechanisms for legitimate reform, which themselves are culturally determined. How do you change culture using tools that culture itself provides? It's a bootstrapping problem without clean solutions.
There's another dimension to this that deserves attention: the relationship between cultural complexity and happiness. Very simple cultures, whether traditional or modern, offer the appeal of clarity. Everyone knows what's expected, what's valued, what constitutes success. There's little ambiguity, which reduces anxiety. But simplicity also constrains. Not everyone fits the template, and those who don't face harsh choices: suppress themselves or face exclusion.
Complex cultures offer more room for individual variation, more paths to recognition and belonging, more ways to live a good life. But complexity brings confusion. Without clear guidance about what matters and how to live, people struggle to construct meaningful lives. They have freedom but lack framework. Choice proliferates but meaning dissipates.
So there's a tension between the clarity that comes from cultural simplicity and the flexibility that comes from cultural complexity. Neither extreme produces optimal conditions for happiness. Too simple and culture becomes prison; too complex and it becomes chaos. Somewhere between these extremes lies a zone where culture provides enough structure to support meaning-making without so much rigidity that it crushes individual authenticity.
Finding and maintaining that zone is the work of every generation, because conditions change and what worked for ancestors may not work now. The culture that perfectly balanced structure and flexibility in one era becomes either too rigid or too loose in another. This means cultural work is never finished; it requires constant attention and adjustment.
But most societies aren't very good at this. They either cling to inherited forms long past their usefulness or abandon tradition entirely in pursuit of novelty. The middle path of conscious adaptation is harder than either extreme because it requires both reverence and critique, both respect for the past and willingness to depart from it, both honoring ancestors and serving descendants.
What I've come to understand is that happiness exists neither in pure culture nor in absolute absence of culture. Happiness emerges where culture doesn't crush individuals but individuals consciously carry culture. Culture should be a tool that orients people, not a definition that confines them.

The absence of culture can free people from chains, but it also leaves them without compass. Culture provides compass, but sometimes becomes chains. Wisdom lies in maintaining balance between these poles. People shouldn't live entirely in the past, but neither should they live entirely without past.

Happiness hides in a life philosophy that has roots but reaches branches toward sky. It requires being grounded enough to draw nourishment from tradition while remaining flexible enough to grow in new directions. The tree metaphor is apt: healthy trees need both deep roots and expanding canopy, both stability and growth, both connection to earth and reach toward sun.

This isn't a comfortable position because it satisfies neither traditionalists nor modernists. Traditionalists want full embrace of inherited culture; modernists want complete liberation from it. The middle path appears to both sides as half-hearted, as failing to commit fully to either position. But the middle path, properly understood, isn't compromise between two positions so much as transcendence of that binary.

Because the real question isn't how much culture but what kind of relationship with culture. You can be deeply immersed in cultural tradition while maintaining critical perspective on it. You can honor your inheritance while transforming it. You can belong to a community while retaining individual authenticity. These aren't contradictions; they're complementarities that become visible once you stop thinking in either/or terms.
The societies and individuals who achieve lasting happiness tend to be those who've figured this out, who've found ways to be simultaneously rooted and growing, traditional and innovative, individual and communal. They maintain connection to cultural inheritance without being imprisoned by it. They adapt to changing circumstances without losing continuity with the past. They create space for individual expression within frameworks of shared meaning.
This isn't easy, and there's no formula for achieving it. The specific balance that works in one context may not work in another. Cultural forms that serve wellbeing in one historical moment may become obstacles in another. The work of finding right relationship with culture is ongoing, contextual, never finished.
But the pursuit matters because the alternatives are worse. Either imprisonment in rigid tradition that no longer serves life, or atomization into disconnected individuals pursuing fleeting pleasures without meaning. Between these extremes lies the possibility of genuine flourishing: lives that are simultaneously free and connected, individual and communal, rooted in tradition and reaching toward future, carrying culture consciously rather than being carried by it unconsciously.
That's where happiness lives, in that dynamic balance. Not in any fixed state but in the ongoing practice of maintaining right relationship with culture, neither enslaved to it nor completely divorced from it, using it as tool for meaning-making rather than treating it as inescapable fate or disposable trivia. The path isn't easy, but it's the only one that leads to lasting peace.