June 2006
Happiness
The gift for the culture that has everything
By Andi McDaniel
I t says so in the Declaration of Independence — you have a right to pursue happiness. So go on, grin away. As a scolded seventh grader would say, with an irreverent cock of the head, “It’s a free country.” What are you waiting for?
If you’re like me, you’ve been pursuing happiness for much of your life. Our aspirations aren’t novel; the quest for the ultimate contentment is ancient and infamously lacking resolution. But now, in addition to Buddha, Ronald McDonald and Bobby “Don’t Worry, Be Happy” McFerrin, modern science wants us to be happy too.
That’s right; researchers in the growing field of “positive psychology” are doing what scientists do best —conducting experiments, gathering evidence and proving theories. Their hypotheses just happen to center on humanity’s most heartfelt desire.
Some of their findings confirm what many of us have already surmised: that money can’t buy happiness (though it doesn’t stop us from trying) and that truly happy people are less likely to, say, steal candy from babies. But “positive psychology” — a term coined by famed psychologist Abraham Maslow, whose theory of human motivation evolved into what we know as self-actualization — has its own nuggets of wisdom to contribute.
To make sure their discoveries reach those who need (or at least desire) them most, the “happiness experts” are taking their findings outside of the lab — and into the classroom. With over 100 happiness classes popping up on college campuses across the country, they’re spreading the gospel with surprising efficiency.
If Happiness 101 sounds like a blow-off class, you might be surprised. Harvard’s version, one of the venerable institution’s most popular courses, is no easy “A” — and heck, we could all stand to try a few of the assignments. After all, everyone, the experts would assert, wants to be happy. And who can argue with that?
Happiness, a History
It might seem a little irresponsible for science to be chasing after happiness — rather than, say, a cure for schizophrenia. Thanks to psychology’s long-established obsession with the dark side of the mind, we’ve made considerable advances in treating diseases that were formerly considered a one-way ticket to the asylum. But, positive psychologists assure us, happiness research is not a detour from psychology’s noble quest; it’s just a different way of attacking the problem. Rather than focusing on what’s gone wrong with the mind, positive psychology focuses on what really makes it hum.
Nonetheless, when I first started researching the topic, I couldn’t help but feel a little bit silly. Self-consciously navigating the self-help section of the bookstore, I hid behind a tower of titles like You, Too, Can Be Happy! and Climb Your Stairway to Heaven. Frankly, I would have felt less conspicuous burying my nose in a Tantric sex manual.
But when I dug into Matthieu Ricard’s book, Happiness: A Guide to Developing Life’s Most Important Skill (Little, Brown and Company), I realized my skepticism was mostly a matter of semantics. Ricard had me pegged: “Changing the way we see the world does not imply naïve optimism or some artificial euphoria designed to counterbalance adversity.” Gulp. So, the brazen pursuit of personal happiness isn’t just for narcissists and navel-gazers?
Ricard and a number of other authors go on to clarify that happiness and pleasure are not synonymous. Chasing after pleasure, according to Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, author of the bestselling Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience (Harper Perennial), is an evolutionary reflex. But it shouldn’t be regarded as “the true voice of nature speaking.” As he explains, our culture tends to mistakenly believe, “If something feels good, if it is natural and spontaneous, then it must be right. But when we follow the suggestions of genetic and social instructions without question, we…become helpless playthings of impersonal forces.”
But that doesn’t mean happiness can’t be pleasurable. Tal David Ben-Shahar, the professor pioneering Harvard’s “happiness class,” defines happiness as the intersection between pleasure and meaning. “Experiences can be either meaningful or pleasurable or both,” he says. “Lying on the beach may be pleasurable but it’s not meaningful. Working in politics may be meaningful but not pleasurable…Happiness is the overlap of the two.”
Wherever happiness is, there seems to be a consensus that we’re all looking for it. As Ricard concludes, “We all strive, consciously or unconsciously, competently or clumsily, passionately or calmly, adventurously or routinely to be happier and suffer less.” Okay, okay. So maybe we do want to be happy. Now show us how.
It’s Not about “I”
The altruist. Surely you know the type. She spends Friday nights at the soup kitchen, Saturday mornings mowing her neighbors’ lawns — and you’d probably resent her if she weren’t so irrepressibly lovable. Studies have consistently shown that people who are concerned with the wellbeing of others are happier themselves. The findings confirm what Buddha first surmised under the banyan tree so many years ago: compassion and happiness have a symbiotic relationship.
But do-gooders aren’t happier simply because they’re putting in their time; they’re just not confined by individualistic notions of what it means to be happy. Sharon Salzburg, a Buddhist meditation teacher and founder of the Insight Meditation Society in Massachusetts, writes in her book Lovingkindness: The Revolutionary Art of Happiness (Shambhala Classics), that the urge for happiness is “a yearning for union, for overcoming our feelings of separateness… We long to be one with our own lives and with each other.” According to Buddhist philosophy, a strong sense of “me” and “other” is breeding ground for competitiveness, envy and defensiveness about one’s beliefs — on both personal and global levels. The Buddhist practice of metta, or “lovingkindness,” is a tool for cultivating the opposite: an unshakable sense of compassion. The practice involves wishing for the happiness and wellbeing of oneself and all beings, without preference or exception. Salzburg clarifies that it “allows us to connect to everything around us, so that we can see quite clearly the oneness of all that lives. We see that all beings want to be happy, and that this impulse unites us.”
This sense of interconnectedness transforms one’s ethic of care from a matter of self-preservation to a concern for all beings (a population which just so happens to include oneself). As Ben-Shahar points out, this truth is written into the Golden Rule, Do unto others as you would have them do unto you. The adage “presupposes self-love,” he explains. “You are part of society and other people are part of society…others’ self-fulfillment is the other side of the same coin.”
Just as we are allied in our desire for happiness, so are we united in our suffering. In an article for Psychology Today, psychiatrist Mark Epstein recounts a well-known Buddhist story about a woman who has just lost her one-year-old son. Holding his lifeless body in her arms, she goes from house to house pleading desperately for someone to revive him. Eventually, she comes upon the Buddha, who says he can give her the medicine she needs. He instructs her to acquire a handful of mustard seed from a house where no child, husband, parent or servant has died.
As you might expect, she can find no such house — a lesson in the impermanence that afflicts us all. The woman’s story, says Epstein, “resonates…because we all, like her, feel that our situation is unique and that our emotional pain requires relief.” And yet, in one of life’s strangest ironies, the very pursuit of escape from pain impedes our ability to attain happiness. “As long as we continue trying to eliminate all displeasure and preserve only pleasure for a prolonged sense of wellbeing,” Epstein explains, “no lasting happiness is possible.”
Have a Great Day! (The Cult of Cheerfulness)
Perhaps all of us know, deep down, that there’s no such thing as a heartache-free life. But our culture does its darndest to convince us otherwise.
“Especially in the US,” Ben-Shahar explains, “there is almost a cultural admonition to be cheerful, to put on a happy face, to smile, to look happy.” The problem is, a diet of cheerfulness-for-every-meal leaves individuals ill-equipped to deal with life’s unavoidable dark side — the uniquely human experiences of grief, anger, envy, sadness and fear. “The paradox is that when we allow these [dark] emotions in, when we don’t suppress them, fight them, that’s when they release their hold on us. When I allow myself the permission to be human…that’s when, paradoxically, I open myself up to happiness.”
As Christina Kotchemidova, author of From Good Cheer to “Drive-by Smiling”: A Social History of Cheerfulness (Journal of Social History, George Mason University), points out, the pressure to be perky is uniquely American, a holdover from early capitalist emphasis on eagerness and self-sufficiency. But in the modern western world, where the typical kitchen cabinet is stocked well beyond basic needs, we’re facing an epidemic our ancestors wouldn’t have dreamed of: Depression afflicts 18.8 million Americans a year. It begs the question — would this article, a rumination on happiness, have relevance anywhere but here?
According to Julie Norem, a psychology professor at Wellesley College and author of The Positive Power of Negative Thinking (Basic Books), the pursuit of happiness may be universal, but “there are differences between cultures — not just in what makes them happy, but in how relevant happiness is to their goals in life.”
You might not be so concerned with enlightenment, for instance, if you were fighting off malaria, or living in constant fear of violence. In fact, I’m all too aware while I write this that the very act of pondering happiness is a privilege. As John Lanchester writes in The New Yorker, “You have to begin to feel that you have some control over your circumstances before you begin to ask yourself questions about your own state of mind.” Then the question evolves to become, “Are we, left to our own devices, and provided with sufficient food and freedom and control over our circumstances, naturally happy?” Based on personal experience, I’d guess no. In fact, a mentor of mine once pointed out that we tend to become neurotic — not happy — once we’ve stopped worrying about our basic survival.
Happiness studies, such as those conducted by Richard Layard, author of Happiness: Lessons from a New Science (The Penguin Press HC), show that money can in fact make you happier — up to a point. People living in poverty report great benefit from an increase in income, but it’s not long before the emotional impact of increased wealth tapers off. As Layard points out, while living standards in the United States have more than doubled since 1950, the growth has not incited a corresponding increase in the number of happy people. He sums up the stats this way: “When people become richer compared with other people, they become happier. But when whole societies have become richer, they have not become happier — at least in the West.”
Find Your Happy Place
Perhaps the most startling, and paradoxical, truth about happiness is that we basically know how to achieve it. We at least claim to recognize that money, youth and even education provide only transient satisfaction. And yet, in spite of ourselves, we chase these false gods and feel surprise and dismay when they remain just slightly beyond our grasp.
The idea of achieving happiness in the midst of sorrow or pain seems inconceivable — we’re practically hard-wired to head in the opposite direction. But it’s funny what happens when you simply observe your reaction to unpleasant feelings. Through mindfulness meditation, I’ve learned that emotional pain, just like an itch, will go from dull to acute, cresting and then fading away. To wait out an itch is to accept that nothing — not even the pleasant feelings — will stay the same.
If it’s true that being happy is better for all of society, then it’s worth continuing to explore these questions. It’s also worth approaching the issue from the other way around — as in, how could our society be more conducive to happiness? How could our work life, our government, our cities and our farms become less hostile to our sense of wellbeing? I have a hunch that a country built around happiness would be less of a hassle to defend. Then again, isn’t that how America began? Perhaps it’s time to renew the pursuit of happiness. We have a right.
Andi McDaniel is a freelance writer living in Minneapolis. Her articles on the environment and sustainable living have appeared in Ode, Utne and Experience Life magazines.
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