PURSUING HAPPINESS
PURSUING HAPPINESS
Two scholars explore the fragility of contentment.
by JOHN LANCHESTER
It is the year 100,000 B.C., and two hunter-gatherers are out
hunter-gathering. Let’s call them Ig and Og. Ig comes across a new kind
of bush, with bright-red berries. He is hungry, as most
hunter-gatherers are most of the time, and the berries look pretty, so
he pops a handful in his mouth. Og merely puts some berries in his
goatskin bag. A little later, they come to a cave. It looks spooky and
Og doesn’t want to go in, but Ig pushes on ahead and has a look around.
There’s nothing there except a few bones. On the way home, an
unfamiliar rustling in the undergrowth puts Og in a panic, and he
freezes, but Ig figures that whatever is rustling probably isn’t any
bigger and uglier than he is, so he blunders on, and whatever was doing
the rustling scuttles off into the undergrowth. The next morning, Og
finally tries the berries, and they do indeed taste O.K. He decides to
go back and collect some more.
Now, Ig is clearly a lot more fun than Og. But Og is much more likely
to pass on his genes to the next generation of hunter-gatherers. The
downside to Ig’s fearlessness is the risk of sudden death. One day, the
berries will be poisonous, the bear that lives in the cave will be at
home, and the rustling will be a snake or a tiger or some other
vertebrate whose bite can turn septic. Ig needs only to make one
mistake. From the Darwinian point of view, Og is the man to bet on. He
is cautious and prone to anxiety, and these are highly adaptive traits
when it comes to survival.
We are the children of Og. For most of the time that anatomically
modern humans have existed-a highly contested figure, but let’s call it
a million years-it has made good adaptive sense to be fearful,
cautious, timid. As Jonathan Haidt, a professor of psychology at the
University of Virginia, puts it in “The Happiness Hypothesis” (Basic;
$26), “bad is stronger than good” is an important principle of design
by evolution. “Responses to threats and unpleasantness are faster,
stronger, and harder to inhibit than responses to opportunities and
pleasures.” This is a matter of how our brains are wired: most sense
data pass through the amygdala, which helps control our fight-or-flight
response, before being processed by other parts of our cerebral cortex.
The feeling that a fright can make us “jump half out of our skin” is
based on this physical reality-we’re reacting long before we know what
it is that we’re reacting to.
This is one of the reasons that human beings make heavy weather of
being happy. We have been hardwired to emphasize the negative, and, for
most of human history, there has been a lot of the negative to
emphasize. Hobbes’s description of life in the state of nature as
“nasty, brutish and short” is so familiar we can forget that, for most
of the people who have ever lived, it was objectively true. Most humans
have had little control over their fate; a sniffle, a graze, or a bad
piece of meat, let alone a major emergency such as having a baby-all
were, for most of our ancestors, potentially lethal. One of the first
people to be given penicillin was an Oxford policeman named Albert
Alexander, who, in 1940, had scratched himself on a rose thorn and
developed septicemia. After he was given the experimental drug, he
began to recover, but the supply ran out after five days, and he
relapsed and died. That was the world before modern medicine, and it
would have been familiar to Ig and Og in a crucial respect: one false
move and you were dead.
We can’t be sure, but it seems unlikely that our prehistoric forebears
spent much time thinking about whether or not they were happy. As
Darrin McMahon, a historian at Florida State University, argues in his
heavyweight study of the subject, “Happiness: A History” (Atlantic
Monthly Press; $27.50), the idea of happiness is not a human universal
that applies across all times and all cultures but a concept that has
demonstrably changed over the years. When your attention is fully
concentrated on questions of survival, you don’t have the time or the
inclination even to formulate the idea of happiness. 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.
People who have scant control over their lives are bound to place
tremendous importance on luck and fate. As McMahon points out, “In
virtually every Indo-European language, the modern word for happiness
is cognate with luck, fortune or fate.” In a sense, the oldest and most
deeply rooted philosophical idea in the world and in our natures is
“Shit happens.” Happ was the Middle English word for “chance, fortune,
what happens in the world,” McMahon writes, “giving us such words as
‘happenstance,’ ‘haphazard,’ ‘hapless,’ and ‘perhaps.’ ” This view of
happiness is essentially tragic: it sees life as consisting of the
things that happen to you; if more good things than bad happen, you are
happy.
“Call no man happy until he is dead” was the Greek way of saying this.
It was only when someone had passed beyond the vicissitudes of chance,
and reposed honorably in the grave, that one could finally render the
verdict. The original challenge to this idea came from classical
Athens, the first place where men were free and self-governing, and,
not coincidentally, a culture in which a great emphasis was placed on
ideas of self-reliance and self-control. Socrates seems to have been
the earliest person to think critically about the conditions of
happiness, and how one could be happy, and in doing so he caused a
shift in the way people thought about the subject. Socrates made the
question of happiness one of full accord between an individual and the
good: to be happy was to lead a good life, one in keeping with higher
patterns of being.
That basic idea gained considerable traction in the next two millennia;
in one way or another, the philosophical investigation of happiness
from Aristotle to Erasmus and on to Luther was concerned with the
alignment of individual conduct and the heavenly order. McMahon
explores the broad range of these ideas while pointing out the strong
continuities among them. At the time the Beatitudes were written down,
with their mysterious promise of blessing for the weak and the poor,
“the emphasis is on the promise of future reward”; by the time of
Luther, in the sixteenth century, “the experience of happiness on earth
. . . was an outward sign of God’s grace.”
The next big turning point in the history of happiness came with the
Enlightenment, and its vision of the world as a rational place, which
might be governed by laws analogous to the newly discovered Newtonian
laws of physics. In the words of the historian Roy Porter, the
Enlightenment “translated the ultimate question ‘How can I be saved?’
into the pragmatic ‘How can I be happy?’ ” With this came a new
emphasis on the legitimate pursuit of pleasure. In classical and
Christian thought, pleasure was seen as, at best, a distraction from
the worthwhile pursuit of virtue. The Enlightenment gave pleasure much
better press. “If pleasure exists, and we can only enjoy it in life,
then life is happiness,” argued Casanova, who was in a position to
know.
This is the understanding of happiness with which the modern world
begins; it is vividly captured in the second sentence of the
Declaration of Independence, which asserts as self-evident a right to
“Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.” To non-Americans, talk of
“the pursuit of happiness” can seem an amazing mixture of the
simpleminded and the unexpectedly complex. What seems simple is that
happiness is so straightforward that we all have a right-a right!-to
seek it; what seems complex is the idea that what we’re entitled to is,
indeed, a pursuit, something strenuous and not necessarily successful.
Some Marxists have thought that the right to pursue happiness was a
last-minute substitution for a previously drafted right to property,
but McMahon makes short work of that conspiracy theory. He points out
that the Founding Fathers, who queried, crossed out, and haggled over
every line of the Declaration, let the “pursuit of Happiness” stand
unedited and unamended. But he also points out that the
eighteenth-century understanding of “pursuit” was rather darker than it
might seem now. Dr. Johnson’s dictionary defined it as “the act of
following with hostile intention,” and McMahon adds that “if one thinks
of pursuing happiness as one pursues a fugitive . . . the ‘pursuit of
happiness’ takes on a somewhat different cast.”
The legacy of that ambiguity is with us still. We are pursuing
happiness to this day, and it is by no means clear that it is a happy
process. The self-help section in any bookshop is easy to mock-indeed,
it sometimes seems that the titles of self-help books are almost
mocking themselves-but there is nothing to mock about the people
standing in front of the shelves looking for guidance. In fact, the
advice in self-help books is, by and large, pretty good. The trouble is
that it is very difficult to take.
Why is this so? For the first time in human history, it’s possible to
give tentative answers that are based on a scientific account of mental
processes. In addition to the old psych-lab tests, researchers now have
access to technology such as MRI and PET scanners. These can report
where brain activity takes place, and can begin to answer questions
about why our minds work in the way that they do. One example has to do
with emotion, which is regulated in part by the frontal cortex of the
brain, the last part to expand as mammals evolved. The orbitofrontal
cortex, just above and behind the eyes, is “one of the most
consistently active areas of the brain during emotional reactions,”
Jonathan Haidt tells us. “The neurons in this part of the cortex fire
wildly when there is an immediate possibility of pleasure or pain, loss
or gain.” People who suffer damage to the frontal cortex can lose most
of their ability to experience emotion while retaining their ability to
think rationally. But they don’t therefore see the world with
crystalline logic, so that life suddenly becomes simple. On the
contrary, Haidt reports: “They find themselves unable to make simple
decisions or set goals, and their lives fall apart. When they look out
at the world and think, ‘What should I do now?’ they see dozens of
choices but lack immediate internal feelings of like or dislike. They
must examine the pros and cons of every choice with their reasoning,
but in the absence of feeling they see little reason to pick one or the
other.”
Philosophers have expounded on happiness for a long time, but only
relatively recently have psychologists taken much of an interest. The
study of “positive psychology,” as it is called, was launched by Martin
Seligman, of the University of Pennsylvania, in the late
nineteen-nineties, and began with the realization that the study of
psychiatry had a huge bias toward every form of illness. “The
Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders,” the basic
reference work of the psychiatric profession, was (and is) a chronicle
of everything that could possibly go wrong with the human mind, from
psychosis to schizoaffective disorder to mania-a harrowing catalogue.
But where was the study of the mind when it was working satisfactorily?
Where was the study of a healthy emotional life and successful
adaptation to circumstances? In short, what had psychology to say about
happiness? Haidt is a member of the positive-psychology school, and his
book, which has in its packaging some of the trappings of self-help, is
much more intelligent than it looks from the outside. One of the key
questions-going straight to the heart of the Enlightenment ambition for
us to be happy here and now, in this life-is whether happiness is a
default setting of the brain. That is to say, are we, left to our own
devices, and provided with sufficient food and freedom and control over
our circumstances, naturally happy?
The answer proposed by positive psychology seems to be: It depends. The
simplest kind of unhappiness is that caused by poverty. People living
in poverty become happier if they become richer-but the effect of
increased wealth cuts off at a surprisingly low figure. The British
economist Richard Layard, in his stimulating book “Happiness: Lessons
from a New Science,” puts that figure at fifteen thousand dollars, and
leaves little doubt that being richer does not make people happier.
Americans are about twice as rich as they were in the
nineteen-seventies but report not being any happier; the Japanese are
six times as rich as they were in 1950 and aren’t any happier, either.
Looking at the data from all over the world, it is clear that, instead
of getting happier as they become better off, people get stuck on a
“hedonic treadmill”: their expectations rise at the same pace as their
incomes, and the happiness they seek remains constantly just out of
reach.
According to positive psychologists, once we’re out of poverty the most
important determinant of happiness is our “set point,” a natural level
of happiness that is (and this is one of the movement’s most
controversial claims) largely inherited. We adapt to our circumstances;
we don’t, or can’t, adapt our genes. The evidence for this set point,
and the phrase itself, came from a study of identical twins by the
behavioral geneticist David Lykken, which concluded that “trying to be
happier is like trying to be taller.” Contrary to everything you might
think, “in the long run, it doesn’t much matter what happens to you,”
Haidt writes. Consider the opposing examples of winning the lottery or
of losing the use of your limbs. According to Haidt, “It’s better to
win the lottery than to break your neck, but not by as much as you’d
think. . . . Within a year, lottery winners and paraplegics have both
(on average) returned most of the way to their baseline levels of
happiness.”
Can that possibly be true? Here we run into one of the biggest problems
with the study of happiness, which is that it relies heavily on what
people tell us about themselves. The paraplegics in these studies may
well report regaining their previous levels of happiness, but how can
we know whether these levels really are the same? You can compare
relative happiness in the course of a given day, though that’s not at
all the same thing. Layard cites a study, by the Nobel laureate Daniel
Kahneman, reporting that people’s top four favorite parts of the day
feature sex, socializing after work, dinner, and relaxing. Their bottom
four involve commuting, work, child care, and housework. But our
absolute level of happiness is more elusive. Happiness “is something
essentially subjective,” Freud wrote. “No matter how much we may shrink
with horror from certain situations-of a galley-slave in antiquity, of
a peasant during the Thirty Years’ War, of a victim of the Holy
Inquisition, of a Jew awaiting a pogrom-it is nevertheless impossible
for us to feel our way into such people. . . . It seems to me
unprofitable to pursue this aspect of the problem any further.”
That isn’t, of course, the view taken by positive psychologists. Then
again, the news that we’re on a hedonic treadmill, so that we end up
where we’re always bound to end up, is so contrary to our fundamental
appetites for exertion and the next new thing, that nobody can really
accept it. So Lykken himself, the fellow who came up with the finding
about the set point, went on to write a book about how to become
happier. (It contained his favorite recipe for Key-lime pie.) Positive
psychology has even devised a formula for how to be happy, where H is
your level of happiness, S is your set point, C is the conditions of
your life, and V is the voluntary activities you do. Ready for the
secret of happiness? Here it is:
H=S+C+V
In other words, your happiness consists of how happy you naturally are,
plus whatever is going on in your life to affect your happiness, plus a
bit of voluntary work. Well, duh. The only vaguely surprising thing
about this is how useful voluntary work can be to the person doing
it-and even that isn’t really news. At the end of the nineteenth
century, Emile Durkheim performed a huge cross-cultural study of
suicide, and found, in Haidt’s words, that “no matter how he parsed the
data, people who had fewer social constraints, bonds and obligations
were more likely to kill themselves.” The more connected we are to
other people, the less likely we are to succumb to despair-a conclusion
that isn’t very distant from the common-sense proposition that lonely
people are often unhappy, and unhappy people are often lonely.
The psychological study of happiness might seem to be something of a
bust. Mainly it tells us things that people have known for a long time,
except with scientific footnotes. In the end, the philosophy and the
science converge on the fact that thinking about your own happiness
does not make it any easier to be happy. A co-founder of positive
psychology, Mihaly Csikzentmihalyi, made people carry a pager, and told
them that every time it went off they should write down what they were
doing and how much they were enjoying it. The idea was to avoid the
memory’s tendency to focus on peaks and troughs, and to capture the
texture of people’s lives as they were experiencing them, rather than
in retrospect. The study showed that people were most content when they
were experiencing what Csikzentmihalyi called “flow”-in Haidt’s
definition, “the state of total immersion in a task that is challenging
yet closely matched to one’s abilities.” We are at our happiest when we
are absorbed in what we are doing; the most useful way of regarding
happiness is, to borrow a phrase of Clive James’s, as “a by-product of
absorption.”
The trouble is that asking yourself about your frame of mind is a sure
way to lose your flow. If you want to be happy, don’t ever ask yourself
if you are. A person in good health in a Western liberal democracy is,
in terms of his objective circumstances, one of the most fortunate
human beings ever to have walked the surface of the earth. Risk-taking
Ig and worried Og both would have regarded our easy, long, riskless
lives with incredulous envy. They would have regarded us as so lucky
that questions about our state of mind wouldn’t be worth asking. It is
a perverse consequence of our fortunate condition that the question of
our happiness, or lack of it, presses unhappily hard on us.
Two scholars explore the fragility of contentment.
by JOHN LANCHESTER
It is the year 100,000 B.C., and two hunter-gatherers are out
hunter-gathering. Let’s call them Ig and Og. Ig comes across a new kind
of bush, with bright-red berries. He is hungry, as most
hunter-gatherers are most of the time, and the berries look pretty, so
he pops a handful in his mouth. Og merely puts some berries in his
goatskin bag. A little later, they come to a cave. It looks spooky and
Og doesn’t want to go in, but Ig pushes on ahead and has a look around.
There’s nothing there except a few bones. On the way home, an
unfamiliar rustling in the undergrowth puts Og in a panic, and he
freezes, but Ig figures that whatever is rustling probably isn’t any
bigger and uglier than he is, so he blunders on, and whatever was doing
the rustling scuttles off into the undergrowth. The next morning, Og
finally tries the berries, and they do indeed taste O.K. He decides to
go back and collect some more.
Now, Ig is clearly a lot more fun than Og. But Og is much more likely
to pass on his genes to the next generation of hunter-gatherers. The
downside to Ig’s fearlessness is the risk of sudden death. One day, the
berries will be poisonous, the bear that lives in the cave will be at
home, and the rustling will be a snake or a tiger or some other
vertebrate whose bite can turn septic. Ig needs only to make one
mistake. From the Darwinian point of view, Og is the man to bet on. He
is cautious and prone to anxiety, and these are highly adaptive traits
when it comes to survival.
We are the children of Og. For most of the time that anatomically
modern humans have existed-a highly contested figure, but let’s call it
a million years-it has made good adaptive sense to be fearful,
cautious, timid. As Jonathan Haidt, a professor of psychology at the
University of Virginia, puts it in “The Happiness Hypothesis” (Basic;
$26), “bad is stronger than good” is an important principle of design
by evolution. “Responses to threats and unpleasantness are faster,
stronger, and harder to inhibit than responses to opportunities and
pleasures.” This is a matter of how our brains are wired: most sense
data pass through the amygdala, which helps control our fight-or-flight
response, before being processed by other parts of our cerebral cortex.
The feeling that a fright can make us “jump half out of our skin” is
based on this physical reality-we’re reacting long before we know what
it is that we’re reacting to.
This is one of the reasons that human beings make heavy weather of
being happy. We have been hardwired to emphasize the negative, and, for
most of human history, there has been a lot of the negative to
emphasize. Hobbes’s description of life in the state of nature as
“nasty, brutish and short” is so familiar we can forget that, for most
of the people who have ever lived, it was objectively true. Most humans
have had little control over their fate; a sniffle, a graze, or a bad
piece of meat, let alone a major emergency such as having a baby-all
were, for most of our ancestors, potentially lethal. One of the first
people to be given penicillin was an Oxford policeman named Albert
Alexander, who, in 1940, had scratched himself on a rose thorn and
developed septicemia. After he was given the experimental drug, he
began to recover, but the supply ran out after five days, and he
relapsed and died. That was the world before modern medicine, and it
would have been familiar to Ig and Og in a crucial respect: one false
move and you were dead.
We can’t be sure, but it seems unlikely that our prehistoric forebears
spent much time thinking about whether or not they were happy. As
Darrin McMahon, a historian at Florida State University, argues in his
heavyweight study of the subject, “Happiness: A History” (Atlantic
Monthly Press; $27.50), the idea of happiness is not a human universal
that applies across all times and all cultures but a concept that has
demonstrably changed over the years. When your attention is fully
concentrated on questions of survival, you don’t have the time or the
inclination even to formulate the idea of happiness. 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.
People who have scant control over their lives are bound to place
tremendous importance on luck and fate. As McMahon points out, “In
virtually every Indo-European language, the modern word for happiness
is cognate with luck, fortune or fate.” In a sense, the oldest and most
deeply rooted philosophical idea in the world and in our natures is
“Shit happens.” Happ was the Middle English word for “chance, fortune,
what happens in the world,” McMahon writes, “giving us such words as
‘happenstance,’ ‘haphazard,’ ‘hapless,’ and ‘perhaps.’ ” This view of
happiness is essentially tragic: it sees life as consisting of the
things that happen to you; if more good things than bad happen, you are
happy.
“Call no man happy until he is dead” was the Greek way of saying this.
It was only when someone had passed beyond the vicissitudes of chance,
and reposed honorably in the grave, that one could finally render the
verdict. The original challenge to this idea came from classical
Athens, the first place where men were free and self-governing, and,
not coincidentally, a culture in which a great emphasis was placed on
ideas of self-reliance and self-control. Socrates seems to have been
the earliest person to think critically about the conditions of
happiness, and how one could be happy, and in doing so he caused a
shift in the way people thought about the subject. Socrates made the
question of happiness one of full accord between an individual and the
good: to be happy was to lead a good life, one in keeping with higher
patterns of being.
That basic idea gained considerable traction in the next two millennia;
in one way or another, the philosophical investigation of happiness
from Aristotle to Erasmus and on to Luther was concerned with the
alignment of individual conduct and the heavenly order. McMahon
explores the broad range of these ideas while pointing out the strong
continuities among them. At the time the Beatitudes were written down,
with their mysterious promise of blessing for the weak and the poor,
“the emphasis is on the promise of future reward”; by the time of
Luther, in the sixteenth century, “the experience of happiness on earth
. . . was an outward sign of God’s grace.”
The next big turning point in the history of happiness came with the
Enlightenment, and its vision of the world as a rational place, which
might be governed by laws analogous to the newly discovered Newtonian
laws of physics. In the words of the historian Roy Porter, the
Enlightenment “translated the ultimate question ‘How can I be saved?’
into the pragmatic ‘How can I be happy?’ ” With this came a new
emphasis on the legitimate pursuit of pleasure. In classical and
Christian thought, pleasure was seen as, at best, a distraction from
the worthwhile pursuit of virtue. The Enlightenment gave pleasure much
better press. “If pleasure exists, and we can only enjoy it in life,
then life is happiness,” argued Casanova, who was in a position to
know.
This is the understanding of happiness with which the modern world
begins; it is vividly captured in the second sentence of the
Declaration of Independence, which asserts as self-evident a right to
“Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.” To non-Americans, talk of
“the pursuit of happiness” can seem an amazing mixture of the
simpleminded and the unexpectedly complex. What seems simple is that
happiness is so straightforward that we all have a right-a right!-to
seek it; what seems complex is the idea that what we’re entitled to is,
indeed, a pursuit, something strenuous and not necessarily successful.
Some Marxists have thought that the right to pursue happiness was a
last-minute substitution for a previously drafted right to property,
but McMahon makes short work of that conspiracy theory. He points out
that the Founding Fathers, who queried, crossed out, and haggled over
every line of the Declaration, let the “pursuit of Happiness” stand
unedited and unamended. But he also points out that the
eighteenth-century understanding of “pursuit” was rather darker than it
might seem now. Dr. Johnson’s dictionary defined it as “the act of
following with hostile intention,” and McMahon adds that “if one thinks
of pursuing happiness as one pursues a fugitive . . . the ‘pursuit of
happiness’ takes on a somewhat different cast.”
The legacy of that ambiguity is with us still. We are pursuing
happiness to this day, and it is by no means clear that it is a happy
process. The self-help section in any bookshop is easy to mock-indeed,
it sometimes seems that the titles of self-help books are almost
mocking themselves-but there is nothing to mock about the people
standing in front of the shelves looking for guidance. In fact, the
advice in self-help books is, by and large, pretty good. The trouble is
that it is very difficult to take.
Why is this so? For the first time in human history, it’s possible to
give tentative answers that are based on a scientific account of mental
processes. In addition to the old psych-lab tests, researchers now have
access to technology such as MRI and PET scanners. These can report
where brain activity takes place, and can begin to answer questions
about why our minds work in the way that they do. One example has to do
with emotion, which is regulated in part by the frontal cortex of the
brain, the last part to expand as mammals evolved. The orbitofrontal
cortex, just above and behind the eyes, is “one of the most
consistently active areas of the brain during emotional reactions,”
Jonathan Haidt tells us. “The neurons in this part of the cortex fire
wildly when there is an immediate possibility of pleasure or pain, loss
or gain.” People who suffer damage to the frontal cortex can lose most
of their ability to experience emotion while retaining their ability to
think rationally. But they don’t therefore see the world with
crystalline logic, so that life suddenly becomes simple. On the
contrary, Haidt reports: “They find themselves unable to make simple
decisions or set goals, and their lives fall apart. When they look out
at the world and think, ‘What should I do now?’ they see dozens of
choices but lack immediate internal feelings of like or dislike. They
must examine the pros and cons of every choice with their reasoning,
but in the absence of feeling they see little reason to pick one or the
other.”
Philosophers have expounded on happiness for a long time, but only
relatively recently have psychologists taken much of an interest. The
study of “positive psychology,” as it is called, was launched by Martin
Seligman, of the University of Pennsylvania, in the late
nineteen-nineties, and began with the realization that the study of
psychiatry had a huge bias toward every form of illness. “The
Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders,” the basic
reference work of the psychiatric profession, was (and is) a chronicle
of everything that could possibly go wrong with the human mind, from
psychosis to schizoaffective disorder to mania-a harrowing catalogue.
But where was the study of the mind when it was working satisfactorily?
Where was the study of a healthy emotional life and successful
adaptation to circumstances? In short, what had psychology to say about
happiness? Haidt is a member of the positive-psychology school, and his
book, which has in its packaging some of the trappings of self-help, is
much more intelligent than it looks from the outside. One of the key
questions-going straight to the heart of the Enlightenment ambition for
us to be happy here and now, in this life-is whether happiness is a
default setting of the brain. That is to say, are we, left to our own
devices, and provided with sufficient food and freedom and control over
our circumstances, naturally happy?
The answer proposed by positive psychology seems to be: It depends. The
simplest kind of unhappiness is that caused by poverty. People living
in poverty become happier if they become richer-but the effect of
increased wealth cuts off at a surprisingly low figure. The British
economist Richard Layard, in his stimulating book “Happiness: Lessons
from a New Science,” puts that figure at fifteen thousand dollars, and
leaves little doubt that being richer does not make people happier.
Americans are about twice as rich as they were in the
nineteen-seventies but report not being any happier; the Japanese are
six times as rich as they were in 1950 and aren’t any happier, either.
Looking at the data from all over the world, it is clear that, instead
of getting happier as they become better off, people get stuck on a
“hedonic treadmill”: their expectations rise at the same pace as their
incomes, and the happiness they seek remains constantly just out of
reach.
According to positive psychologists, once we’re out of poverty the most
important determinant of happiness is our “set point,” a natural level
of happiness that is (and this is one of the movement’s most
controversial claims) largely inherited. We adapt to our circumstances;
we don’t, or can’t, adapt our genes. The evidence for this set point,
and the phrase itself, came from a study of identical twins by the
behavioral geneticist David Lykken, which concluded that “trying to be
happier is like trying to be taller.” Contrary to everything you might
think, “in the long run, it doesn’t much matter what happens to you,”
Haidt writes. Consider the opposing examples of winning the lottery or
of losing the use of your limbs. According to Haidt, “It’s better to
win the lottery than to break your neck, but not by as much as you’d
think. . . . Within a year, lottery winners and paraplegics have both
(on average) returned most of the way to their baseline levels of
happiness.”
Can that possibly be true? Here we run into one of the biggest problems
with the study of happiness, which is that it relies heavily on what
people tell us about themselves. The paraplegics in these studies may
well report regaining their previous levels of happiness, but how can
we know whether these levels really are the same? You can compare
relative happiness in the course of a given day, though that’s not at
all the same thing. Layard cites a study, by the Nobel laureate Daniel
Kahneman, reporting that people’s top four favorite parts of the day
feature sex, socializing after work, dinner, and relaxing. Their bottom
four involve commuting, work, child care, and housework. But our
absolute level of happiness is more elusive. Happiness “is something
essentially subjective,” Freud wrote. “No matter how much we may shrink
with horror from certain situations-of a galley-slave in antiquity, of
a peasant during the Thirty Years’ War, of a victim of the Holy
Inquisition, of a Jew awaiting a pogrom-it is nevertheless impossible
for us to feel our way into such people. . . . It seems to me
unprofitable to pursue this aspect of the problem any further.”
That isn’t, of course, the view taken by positive psychologists. Then
again, the news that we’re on a hedonic treadmill, so that we end up
where we’re always bound to end up, is so contrary to our fundamental
appetites for exertion and the next new thing, that nobody can really
accept it. So Lykken himself, the fellow who came up with the finding
about the set point, went on to write a book about how to become
happier. (It contained his favorite recipe for Key-lime pie.) Positive
psychology has even devised a formula for how to be happy, where H is
your level of happiness, S is your set point, C is the conditions of
your life, and V is the voluntary activities you do. Ready for the
secret of happiness? Here it is:
H=S+C+V
In other words, your happiness consists of how happy you naturally are,
plus whatever is going on in your life to affect your happiness, plus a
bit of voluntary work. Well, duh. The only vaguely surprising thing
about this is how useful voluntary work can be to the person doing
it-and even that isn’t really news. At the end of the nineteenth
century, Emile Durkheim performed a huge cross-cultural study of
suicide, and found, in Haidt’s words, that “no matter how he parsed the
data, people who had fewer social constraints, bonds and obligations
were more likely to kill themselves.” The more connected we are to
other people, the less likely we are to succumb to despair-a conclusion
that isn’t very distant from the common-sense proposition that lonely
people are often unhappy, and unhappy people are often lonely.
The psychological study of happiness might seem to be something of a
bust. Mainly it tells us things that people have known for a long time,
except with scientific footnotes. In the end, the philosophy and the
science converge on the fact that thinking about your own happiness
does not make it any easier to be happy. A co-founder of positive
psychology, Mihaly Csikzentmihalyi, made people carry a pager, and told
them that every time it went off they should write down what they were
doing and how much they were enjoying it. The idea was to avoid the
memory’s tendency to focus on peaks and troughs, and to capture the
texture of people’s lives as they were experiencing them, rather than
in retrospect. The study showed that people were most content when they
were experiencing what Csikzentmihalyi called “flow”-in Haidt’s
definition, “the state of total immersion in a task that is challenging
yet closely matched to one’s abilities.” We are at our happiest when we
are absorbed in what we are doing; the most useful way of regarding
happiness is, to borrow a phrase of Clive James’s, as “a by-product of
absorption.”
The trouble is that asking yourself about your frame of mind is a sure
way to lose your flow. If you want to be happy, don’t ever ask yourself
if you are. A person in good health in a Western liberal democracy is,
in terms of his objective circumstances, one of the most fortunate
human beings ever to have walked the surface of the earth. Risk-taking
Ig and worried Og both would have regarded our easy, long, riskless
lives with incredulous envy. They would have regarded us as so lucky
that questions about our state of mind wouldn’t be worth asking. It is
a perverse consequence of our fortunate condition that the question of
our happiness, or lack of it, presses unhappily hard on us.