Vincent Trapinaud
Joy is not a trap. What turns it into one, on the Farmers’ map, is its structure: a joy that hangs on the outside world, chased like a dose, produced in reaction and lost the moment it arrives. This is what book II calls Hab-Honey, “the sweetest trap”: a pursuit of happiness that keeps you moving in a better mood, but still in harness. The way out is not to flee joy. It is to inhabit it.
Can joy really be a trap?
The objection rises on its own, and the second chapter of Le Troisième Miel (The Third Honey, book II of a trilogy currently published in French) raises it itself. Fine, suffering feeds the Farm. But joy, laughter, love, gratitude? Surely that is exactly what saves us.
It is the most natural objection in the world, the author replies, and it is precisely the one the Farm is counting on us to make. Ba-Honey catches the desperate; Hab-Honey catches everyone else: the optimists, the bons vivants, the seekers of light, those who have made happiness a project. They believe themselves out of reach, since they are running toward what is beautiful.
Let us be clear: the book asks no one to distrust their joys, or to look at their happiness “with an accountant’s suspicion.” Beautiful hours are beautiful. A child’s laughter is a child’s laughter. (For the overall map of the three honeys, see Ba-Honey, Hab-Honey, the Third Honey; this article goes down to a single floor, the most pleasant one, and therefore the least watched.)
The problem is not joy. The problem is its structure. Hab-Honey always comes from outside: from a face appearing at the door, from recognition, from a project that comes through, from a sky that clears. It is a response, a magnificent one, but a response, to something that happens. Remove the thing and it goes out. And whatever depends on the outside can be controlled from the outside: given, taken back, rationed, promised, then postponed. “A conditional joy,” the author writes, “is a joy that someone, or something, holds on a leash. And a leash, even a golden one, is still a leash.”
Hab-Honey, the fertilizer of a Farm that wants no desperate livestock
The first book, Les Fermiers (The Farmers), defines Hab-Honey as the energy of light emotions: joy, gratitude, love, wonder. Subtler than Ba-Honey, more volatile, and above all far less abundant: moments of pure joy are rare, moments of fear or sadness constant. Why, then, let joy exist at all? Book I asks the question against itself, and gives it two answers that are “not mutually exclusive.”
First answer: fertilizer
The first is agricultural. Exhausted soil produces nothing. A humanity without any hope, without any reason to get up in the morning, would stop producing, and stop reproducing.
Book II sharpens the image. Livestock that is only ever tormented ends up revolting or sinking into apathy: total despair is bad for yield. The animal must taste enough happiness to keep running after the next reward. Hab-Honey is “the fuel of hope.” An intelligent Farm makes people “almost happy”: enough to hold on, not enough to raise their heads.
Second answer: those who feed on it sparingly
The second answer is more speculative, and book I presents it as such. Certain traditions, it says, notably some Gnostic currents and certain readings of anthroposophy, suggest that Hab-Honey has a value of its own for other beings, more evolved ones, who feed differently. The ordinary Farmers consume the dark honey; but higher up the hierarchy there would be beings who consume the light honey “sparingly, frugally, without trying to maximize its production.” Two economies would coexist within the same system, and that coexistence would create an internal tension.
Take it for what it is: a hypothesis on the highest floor of the map, which no observation can settle, and which the rest of the reasoning does not need. The first answer, on the other hand, you can test for yourself: a joy that keeps you moving without ever letting you arrive.
The pursuit of happiness: why the best is always just ahead
The heart of chapter II is the description of a mechanism “of formidable elegance.” You chase something: a job, a love, a house, recognition. The waiting produces tension, and therefore Ba-Honey. You get it: a rush of Hab-Honey, brief, intense, delicious. Then the glow fades, “that is the law of everything obtained,” and the emptiness returns, a little hollower than before. So you pick a new thing to pursue.
Hope, tension, brief joy, comedown, new lack. With each turn, both jars fill up: the dark one during the chase, the light one in the fleeting moment of capture. Hence the most important sentence in the chapter: Ba-Honey and Hab-Honey are not enemies, they are “the two hands of the same milking.” The carrot and the stick belong to the same arm.
Anticipation outshines possession
There is a refinement in this cycle that everyone has lived without naming it. The trip planned for months gives more joy in imagination than in reality, and once there you catch yourself already thinking about going home. The dinner you looked forward to all week was “only” good. The promotion you hoped for so badly becomes the new normal within three days, and you are already eyeing the next rung. The peak of Hab-Honey, the book concludes, is almost never in having: it is in pursuing. And pursuit is tension. We believe we live for the summits; we live in the perpetual climb, which is to say in perpetual secretion.
What research describes, without saying anything about the Farmers
Book II notes that this phenomenon “has a name in the laboratories”: hedonic adaptation. After a gain as after a loss, well-being tends to drift back toward its usual level. The most cited study, published in 1978 by Philip Brickman and his colleagues, compared lottery winners with people who had become paraplegic; the winners did not report being much happier than average. Later work has qualified this result, adaptation is neither complete nor the same for everyone, but the overall movement is solid: we get used to what we have obtained.
Neuroscience adds a complementary light, to be stated with care: the brain’s reward circuits, in which dopamine plays a part, seem more closely tied to anticipation and to wanting than to the pleasure of the thing obtained. This is not proof of the Farm. It is the description, in another vocabulary, of an apparatus that makes us run more readily than it lets us savor.
Addicted to happiness: the pleasure hit and the wait for the next one
Our era, says book II, has brought this art to unprecedented perfection. The little red heart under a post is not happiness: it is “a microgram of Hab-Honey, calibrated, delivered at unpredictable intervals.” And it is the unpredictability that makes the device irresistible: we have long known that a random reward hooks more firmly than a certain one. It is the principle of the slot machine, now the principle of our pockets. We check, not for the joy it gives, which is tiny, but for the chance that there might be some.
The same mechanics extend to the object that stops delighting us almost as soon as we own it, to other people’s staged lives, whose displayed happiness becomes the measure of our lack. Book II calls the whole thing a “refinery”: it produces not happiness but the lack of happiness, resold in small doses. Hab-Honey is the bait; Ba-Honey, the real yield (see social media, anxiety and anger).
And it must be said clearly, as book I does: this logic needs no conspiracy. Nobody needs to want your dependence. All it takes is a system that optimizes, without knowing it, for whatever brings you back.
Marc, or the perfectly harvested man
The book gives all this a face. Marc is thirty-six and succeeds at nearly everything: a promotion, a car, an apartment with a view, vacations worth photographing. With each acquisition comes a real joy, vivid, almost electric. But it never lasts. The day after the promotion, he is thinking about the next one. On vacation, he refreshes his like counter more often than he looks at the sea right in front of him.
Marc is not shallow, the author writes: he is “a perfectly harvested man.” He mistakes the peak of getting for happiness and, since that peak always falls, he concludes that he needs a higher one. The day there is nothing left to conquer, an empty Sunday, a convalescence, he grows anxious without understanding why. Deprived of the carrot, he discovers the bottom he was running from, and immediately invents something new to desire so he does not have to look at it.
If this portrait speaks to you, do not blame yourself: it is the ordinary state of a being trained to run.
Toxic positivity: why mandatory positive thinking dries up nothing
Against Ba-Honey, the best-selling remedy of our time is to produce Hab-Honey on demand: see the glass half full, put out good vibes, keep a gratitude journal the way you fill a quota. Book II gives a clear warning about it.
The tension keeps flowing underneath while you smile on top: a producer who suffers and forbids himself to see it “produces twice.” What we now call toxic positivity is not an excess of joy. It is joy turned into an obligation, and therefore one more tension: the fear of not being happy enough, the shame of not managing it.
The book does not condemn gratitude. The real kind “is not something you order yourself to feel; it is something you notice,” when you are present enough to feel it rise on its own. In one case you manufacture; in the other you observe.
The same trap has its inner version: the quest for the self turned into endless consumption, workshops, books, serenity turned into a trophy. This, says book II, is “exactly the Hab-Honey cycle, only dressed in spirituality.” The carrot has simply changed its name.
Conditional love, the most delicate case
The chapter dares to take up a case we would rather leave aside. Love is the most beautiful source of Hab-Honey and, when it is conditional, the strongest of harvesting bonds. A love that depends on what the other gives, reflects back, approves, produces summits when all is well. Let it be threatened, and the same relationship turns into jealousy, fear of abandonment, a devouring need for reassurance. There was only ever one thing: “a joy hanging on a condition, and therefore a suffering held in reserve.”
The author insists: he is not saying that love is a trap, but that a love entirely suspended from the outside functions as one, however sincere it is. And he lets another way of loving show through: a tenderness that is not a demand, a bond that gives without holding hostage.
The ancients had seen it, each in their own language. Epicurus, so often slandered, distinguished pleasure in motion, the rush that comes with a satisfied desire and immediately awakens another, from the stable pleasure of a soul at rest, which depends on almost nothing. Twenty-three centuries before us, book II notes, he had already separated the honey that gets harvested from the honey that does not.
Harvested joy, inhabited joy: the difference that changes everything
What, then, are we to do with this honey? Book II rules out two symmetrical mistakes: chasing it like a madman, or fleeing it like a soured ascetic. Whoever runs after joy produces tension; whoever refuses it produces resentment. The way lies in how it is lived.
It is, the author observes, the same gesture as before Ba-Honey: do not fight, do not identify, watch it pass. For the only fact that changes everything, for the dark honey as for the light, is the presence of someone watching the honey flow. As long as no one is watching, joy and sorrow alike are harvested in the dark. This is the door to the Third Honey, which is not one more emotion but a way of feeling while knowing that you feel, what the first book calls lucid non-reaction.
The book’s test
To tell the two joys apart, book II proposes a “merciless” test: does this joy survive the disappearance of its cause? If it goes out the second the compliment falls silent, it was a conditional joy. The bouquet wilts as soon as it is cut from its root. There is another tone, calmer, that depends on no particular event and therefore passes through losses without collapsing.
Careful: inhabited joy is not a more intense joy. Book II files the spiritual ecstasy people chase all their lives under Hab-Honey in disguise. Presence, it says, “does not dazzle; it lights gently.”
A man sitting on the steps
The example the book offers is perfectly ordinary, and that is what makes it precious. A man worn out by months of running sits down one evening in front of his house, too tired to take out his phone. He does nothing. And suddenly the late-day light on the wall across the street appears to him, truly: the color, the warmth, the way it fades. A blackbird sings. He is crossed by something that is neither joy nor sadness, a presence so full that tears come to his eyes. “I was just there, for once. And it was enough.” He has won nothing, obtained nothing. And he knows he has just touched something more real than everything he was chasing.
Compare this with Marc facing the sea, thumb on his counter. On one side, a joy waiting for confirmation from outside; on the other, a presence that waits for nothing. The second is not more virtuous: it is of another nature, and it cannot be harvested.
How do you leave the pursuit of happiness without giving up joy?
No miracle method here, and the book steers clear of one too: turning the exit from the race into a new race would mean falling back into the trap. Just a few gestures of attention, to try the next time a joy arrives.
- When joy comes, stay with it. When good news arrives, notice where it settles in the body: the chest opening, the breath lengthening, the face relaxing. Stay there a few seconds longer than usual, before telling anyone, taking a photo or thinking about what comes next.
- Spot the moment of the comedown. This is the instant when Hab-Honey reveals itself. What comes right after the joy: an emptiness, restlessness, the need for the next thing? Do not try to fix it. See it.
- Apply the book’s test. Would this joy hold if its cause disappeared? There is no wrong answer: knowing that a joy is conditional does not spoil it, it only keeps you from hanging on it.
- Watch your checking. Before looking at a counter or a message, feel the small tension that comes before the gesture: that is the race, in miniature.
- Welcome the empty moments. The Sunday with no plans, the wait without a phone, the convalescence. That is where Marc grows anxious, and that is also where the man on the steps saw the light. What rises in those moments deserves to be looked at rather than filled.
Hab-Honey in the cards of the Atanor
In the Atanor, the deck of 24 cards born from this universe, one card bears the face of Hab-Honey almost feature for feature: card 15, A Success. Its edge words read “Reward, Champion, Narcissism.” “It is said of you” that you are succeeding in what you undertake: this is the rush of getting, Marc’s vivid joy. And the card invites you to “be careful not to rest on your laurels.” Read alongside the Farmers’ map, the invitation takes on a precise meaning: do not fall asleep at the peak, nor run toward the next one already, but notice what this success does in you, and what remains when it fades.
The card predicts nothing and does not judge success. It gives sight, never power. The second book, Le Troisième Miel (in French), unfolds this path in full, and its thesis on joy fits in a single sentence: taste it when it comes, fully, without demanding that it stay, and let it go when it goes, without collapsing.
