The Pursuit of Happiness: Is it Worth It?
Our subject is so complex that it’s easy to get overwhelmed or confused about it, so
to give us a context I’ve devised three categories. The first two assume that it’s
worth pursuing; the third explores that issue a bit.
The first is the social factors involved in achieving happiness or avoiding
unhappiness—like financial situation and family relationships. The second is
psychological factors—such as personal attitude. These two categories are the
ones that lend themselves to practical advice for happiness. My third category
is philosophical and introduces a couple of meta-issues: first, whether we should
conflate happiness and virtue; and second, whether we should pursue happiness at
all or resist our natural impulse to pursue it. Nietzsche felt that the pursuit of
happiness is a kind of ruse that stupid people blindly follow, and he didn’t, by the
way, think pursuing it was natural. He felt we’ve only recently fattened ourselves
like pigs in its pursuit. For him, the truly happy man is he whose "preying lion" has
emerged from its cultural constraints. He is brimming w/ confidence, he does not
doubt his right to happiness, by being ashamed in the face of "too much misery." He
knows no guilt or resentment, burdened by no pity or regret (McMahon).
SOCIAL FACTORS
Let’s start w/ the social factors of happiness since they’re the easiest to get a grip on.
They’re also easily studied so the discipline has a lot to say about them. I get this list
from Richard Layard’s book Happiness: Lessons from a New Science. He’s an
economist—the study of happiness for a long time in the last century was the
purview pretty strictly of economists. Recently it’s been picked up by cognitive
scientists, as you’ll see when we get to psychological factors. Okay, here’s Layard’s
list:
Family Relationships
Financial Situation
Work
Community and Friends
Health
Personal Freedom
Personal Values [psychological]
Family Relationships:
Married people are happier than unmarried, and people become increasingly
happier the closer they get to being married and the first year of marriage is bliss
and then the happiness level dips, and this phenomenon is supported by studies of
divorced couples: we are increasingly unhappier the closer we get to divorce and
the divorce year itself is the nadir and then men after a year appear to return to
their base happiness level but not women, who remain more miserable after divorce
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than men do. So married people are generally happier; they get support from each
other, emotional and financial, they generally help one another—and they have
happier sex lives, more of it and it’s more satisfying than unmarried sex is.
Financial Situation:
The main insight from happiness studies concerning income is that poverty causes
misery and a middle-class income makes people much happier, but that once people
reach a middle-income level a greater income has less and less effect on people’s
happiness. The richer you get, the less more money makes you happier. Some
happiness researchers have used this to support taxing the rich, since they’re not
gaining more happiness w/ their extra money.
Work:
We apparently need to be employed, to feel that we’re contributing to society and
providing for ourselves and our families. And we don’t habituate to
unemployment—we’re just as unhappy after two years of unemployment as we
were after one. It seems to help a little if others around us are unemployed, but
unemployment as you can see on the chart is a major blow to happiness, more than
6 pts. on the scale of happiness from 10 to 100.
Community and Friends:
The Greek philosopher Epicurus wrote, “Of all the things that wisdom provides to
help one live one’s entire life in happiness, the greatest by far is friendship.”
And the quality of our community is crucial to our ability to make friends.
Apparently we are happier the more trusting we are of the people around us, and
research shows that this attitude toward trust translates into trusting behavior.
When asked if people can be trusted in general, only 5% of Brazilians said yes
whereas 64% of Norwegians answered yes, and when researchers dropped wallets
in various countries Scandinavians scored the highest in returning them to their
owners. So when we ask people about trust in general we’re learning something
about who can be trusted.
Health
Health is important for happiness, but the main insight from happiness studies
concerning health is that we tend to underestimate how well we can adapt to ill
health (though not to chronic pain or to mental illness). Dan Gilbert, the Harvard
cognitive psychologist, refers to this ability of ours as the mind’s hedonic immune
system. Christopher Reeve believed himself in some ways better off after he became
a quadriplegic, and Lance Armstrong claims he’s glad to have had cancer, and most
cancer patients in general tend to be more optimistic about the future than healthy
people. Gilbert has found that we mis-predict how much ill health affects our
happiness level and misjudge the effects of ill health on others: we’re very skeptical
of Christopher Reeve’s claim—it’s apparently difficult for us to imagine that the
hedonic immune system in other people is as effective as it actually is.
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Personal Freedom
As Layard writes, we in the West take for granted two factors that are lacking in
much of the globe, personal freedom and peace. People in countries with more
political freedom are typically happier than those living under more oppressed
governments. The list of factors includes the following: rule of law; stability and lack
of violence; voice and accountability; the effectiveness of gov’t services; the absence
of corruption; and the efficiency of the system of regulation. Having a voice is a
major factor: in one study of different regions in Switzerland, the difference in
happiness level of those living in regions that had the most rights to referendums
and those who had the least rights to referendums were equal to what it would be if
the first group made twice as much money as the second.
It goes w/out saying that the social ill that causes the greatest misery is war.
PSYCHOLOGICAL FACTORS
Personal Values
Research shows that people who appreciate what they have, no matter what it is,
are happier than those who don’t and that people who do not compare themselves
with others are happier than those who do. It appears to help to have the skills and
resources to discipline our minds and moods, such as talk therapy, meditation, or
church-going. One finding that appears often in research is that those who believe in
a god are happier than those who don’t. Many non-believers tend to feel that they’d
rather live an enlightened unhappy life than an unenlightened deluded one, and that
their enlightenment should compensate for the loss of happiness believers gain
from their belief. But as Bertrand Russell, a famous atheist himself, argued, it’s
dangerous to be proud of one’s unbelief or one’s dour perspective of the human
condition in general. It’s generally wiser, he argued, to be happy as circumstances
permit, and if a contemplation of the universe is painful we should think about
something else. He argues that those who attribute their sorrows to their views
about the universe are putting the cart before the horse: the truth is, Russell writes,
“they are unhappy for some reason of which they are not aware and this
unhappiness leads them to dwell upon the less agreeable characteristics of the
world in which they live.” But Russell also argued that a great deal of unhappiness
derives from living in “sin,” by which he meant in battle w/ one’s own conscience
which was likely indoctrinated by old religious values one was brought up by. He
argues that we would be much happier as rational adults to discard those repressive
values we were taught as children.
But to conclude my remarks on personal values, most studies show that those who
care about others are happier than those who are more preoccupied with
themselves. As Layard writes, “More anxiety comes from striving to “do well” for
yourself than from striving to do good for the rest of the world.”
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Stumbling on Happiness: how our own psychology gets in our way of our
pursuit of happiness
Those prescriptions about personal values presuppose that we’re rational beings,
and that our psychology works according to our will. Daniel Gilbert has emerged
recently as the leading researcher in the field of the cognitive psychology of the
pursuit of happiness. His recent book Stumbling on Happiness charts the various
ways that our logical processing errors prevent us from being able to predict what
will make us happy in the future. I’ll list two or three of his main insights and then
discuss briefly what he suggests we can do to remedy these shortcomings
First, we tend to have a built in mechanism for dealing with major setbacks in our
lives, but not for minor ones (the “hedonic immune system”). So although we might
think we’d rather have a slight hitch in the knee as opposed to a broken leg, in
reality we would adjust or even forget the pain we experienced from the broken leg.
The classic example of this phenomenon is the common finding that women forget
or minimize the pain of childbirth. [Perhaps this handicap prevents us from doing
things that we want because we think it may cause a major setback, not taking into
account how easily we would spring back from that setback if it did occur.]
And Gilbert found that we’re able to adjust to the consequences of decisions, but not
to non-decisions. We appear to need something to work with to rationalize our new
condition. This leads Gilbert to conjecture that if the character Elsa in the famous
Humphrey Bogart movie Casablanca had chosen at the end of the movie to stay w/
Rick (Humphrey Bogart) instead of w/ the Nazi resistance leader Victor Laslow,
whom she did not love, Elsa would’ve been just as happy, because she would’ve
rationalized her decision. Her non-decision, however, doesn’t give her psyche much
to work with. This cognitive error appears to be an argument for being bold in our
actions, since we’re able to rationalize the outcome when it’s a result of acting, but if
we don’t act we don’t have anything to rationalize.
Our rationalizing talents are also forgotten when we think we’d like more freedom
in our choices. We forget that we’re able to rationalize our way to contentment with
what we have. So we think we would like to have more choices, underestimating our
ability to make do w/ what we are given—we could say we are foolishly infatuated
w/ freedom, blind to the satisfaction that inescapability provides.
We also tend to let our moods overly influence our decision-making. And we seem
to be unable to learn from our past experience that something that strikes our fancy
when we’re in one mood may not be nearly as appealing to us in the future, when
we’re no longer in that mood.
As you can see, there’s a pattern here in our behavior: we are able much more than
we think to adjust to certain conditions, but we seem unable to learn from this
remarkable talent of ours, so we make the same mistakes repeatedly. We continue
to think that something we want will make us happy, unaware again and again, that
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once we attain this object of our desire we adjust to it and return to a “base” happy
level. This behavior is most conspicuous in our buying habits. We think that we just
have to have those shoes—forgetting that we felt the same way about a very similar
pair of shoes just six weeks ago that are now sitting unappreciated in our closet.
These are just a few examples of the various ways we mis-predict what we think will
make us happy and don’t learn from our repeated mis-predictions.
Gilbert argues that to overcome these psychological shortcomings of ours we should
seek out other people’s opinions in making decisions about what we think will make
us happy. Gilbert discusses some reasons we typically resist this strategy; one of
them is that the highly subjective nature of experience very convincingly deludes us
to believe that others’ experiences are nothing like our own, so we’re skeptical that
others’ experience will be relevant to us. Recent neurological studies show that this
phenomenon is generated in a certain region in our brain, and exacerbating this
delusion is our internalization of a belief system that I would call hyperindividualism, which further exalts our subjective selves. And scholars of intellectual
history would trace the origin of hyper-individualism to the 18th century. This
argument is made convincingly by Lynn Hunt in her book Inventing Human Rights: A
History. Though few of us would object to the development of human rights that has
emerged from this phenomenon, it’s safe to say that as a result of this development
we’ve come to believe that we are more individualistic than we actually are, which
ironically creates problems in our pursuit of happiness. If we can overcome this
hyper-individualism, Gilbert argues, we would more likely wisely base our decisions
on the knowledge gained by others’ experiences.
So far we’ve talked about social factors of happiness and the psychological
factors that prevent us from accurately predicting what will make us happy,
and now we’ll turn our attention to some broader philosophical issues
concerning our topic.
META-ISSUES
One of the main debates in this category of “meta-issues” is whether or not
happiness involves living morally, such that we can tell how happy a person is by
observing his or her moral behavior? This position is nicely articulated in the double
meaning of the phrase “the good life.” The phrase implies that if you’re living
morally, then you’re happy. This is a position that I’ll call classical—it’s the position
Aristotle held. Now, the good life according to Aristotle would include living by
certain standards of achievement and refined tastes. For him, for example, pursing
knowledge was the greatest and most worthy enterprise one could engage, so it
would follow that those who pursued knowledge would most likely be the happiest.
An illiterate slave would not be a candidate for the happy life, as he wouldn’t have
access to those pre-requisite skills for pursuing knowledge.
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A virtue of this perspective, I might add here, is that it avoids an objection that you
may have anticipated about this whole enterprise of pursuing happiness. In most
versions of this classical perspective, happiness is not a goal, but more a natural
consequence of a certain way of living, a certain way of viewing the world and
yourself in it. I say this aspect is a virtue because it seems wiser to think of
happiness as a consequence of being, as opposed to an objective goal. Something
about the existential nature of existence seems to be left out when thinking of
happiness as a goal to pursue, as if happiness were something outside of the gritty
moment to moment reality of existence. Perhaps, as Terry Eagleton conjectures in
his gem of a little book called The Meaning of Life, it is impossible to generalize
intelligently about human life because in order to do so we’d have to step outside it.
Here’s Gilbert’s argument against the modernist perspective:
For two thousand years philosophers have felt compelled to identify h.
w/ virtue because that is the sort of h. they think we ought to want. And
maybe they’re right. But if living one’s life virtuously is a cause of h., it is
not h. itself, and it does us no good to obfuscate a discussion by calling
both the cause and the consequence by the same name.... Happiness is a
word we generally use to indicate an experience and not the actions
that give rise to it. (p. 39)
The modern perspective is that happiness is a highly subjective state, to be
measured by self-reports. The virtue of this position of course is that it allows
researchers to measure it easily: you simply ask people. Another virtue of this
perspective is that if fits our egalitarian vision of humanity. It doesn’t discriminate—
you’ve been fused to another human being since birth and you claim yr happy? hey,
that’s your right. We like this, even though we may have trouble actually believing it,
as Gilbert found in his studies. Gilbert found that we have a hard time believing that
conjoined twins are really as happy as the rest of us are, as their happiness scores
suggest, or, as I say above, that Christopher Reeve was happier as a quadriplegic
than as a movie star. It appears we are default classicists when it comes to this
debate, perhaps because, as Gilbert conjectures, we are too close to our own
experience to fathom that people can compensate in their lives for significant
disabilities.
Critics of this modernist vision argue that with subjective standards for happiness
we’re basically choosing to live in the matrix, that if one is truly happy merely by
believing oneself to be happy, then one can be “happy” in a state of absolute
delusion about the real state of affairs in our lives, or as a result of any number of
arbitrary factors. There might also be a moral problem w/ the modernist position:
are we really going to agree that it’s legitimate for the masochist to claim that he’s
most happy when he’s torturing someone? Are we really going to let any behavior
be the source for happiness?
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Critics of the classical approach argue that apart from being elitist, objective criteria
for determining happiness are utterly arbitrary. Where does it end? Just because the
classical pianist enjoys the gift of a refined skill does it necessarily follow that he or
she’s happier than a mediocre amateur rock guitarist? Who decides what standards
are necessary for this “higher” state of being that the classicist argues is important
for happiness? And what do we do w/ people who cross the boundaries of our
stereotypes, such as an illiterate highly skilled martial artist?
against happiness
then there are those who argue, as Nietzsche did, that those who pursue happiness
are being facile, disregarding the rich nature of human experience, reducing it to an
insipid smiley-face, wallowing in a tv sitcom version of life complete w/ a prerecorded laugh track. These people argue that life is too rich for such a pursuit.
These are usually classicists who—in one version of it—exalt the richly-textured
contributions of melancholy to one’s life. Sadness, these people will argue, should be
indulged as an antidote to the vapidity inherent in our post-capitalist consumerridden culture. Cut up your credit cards, these people will argue, turn out your
lights, light up the opium of your choice, and dwell for a while in the darkness of
your own existential mire. Mankind is nothing to celebrate, or if it is it’s to be
celebrated in an altered consciousness while listening to Cassandra Wilson or Joni
Mitchell. Only then are you really living, really alive.
Now, Nietzsche didn’t exactly prescribe sadness—in fact, he wanted us to be
vivacious, and joyful in our vivaciousness—he called himself an Epicurean because
he liked Epicurus’s bold materialism (don’t fear death b/c when yr dead you won’t
care about anything), but he didn’t like Epicurus’s passive conception of happiness
as merely freedom from anxiety. But Nietzsche was in agreement w/ Epicurus’s
Buddhistic insight that it’s often our own desires that trip us up: we walk around
like the proverbial donkey w/ a carrot contraption on our backs—in my version of
this picture, to accommodate our consumerist tendencies, the carrot isn’t even a real
carrot—it’s plastic. Nietzsche felt that instead of happiness we should pursue strife,
which he felt makes us more authentic human beings.
This perspective on the pursuit of happiness may give rise to a rather cynical
conjecture as to the political motivations of our founding fathers’ use of happiness
as a carrot in the United States constitution: that they knew that the pursuit of
happiness is a Sisyphean effort and used it to entice the lower classes to work hard,
knowing full well that the labor of the working class is necessary to maintain the
riches of the status quo, of which they themselves were members. David Hume and
the father of modern capitalism, Adam Smith, both of whom were read by our
founding fathers, remarked on how economically productive is the deception that
money provides happiness.
To conclude, the possibility of attaining happiness is a very modern concept,
corresponding to the rise of the middle class in the 18th century, and it may be true
that the same forces that drive us to attain a modicum of comfort function to
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prevent happiness, striving and striving as we do, such that the efforts to
accumulate capital takes on a life of its own and keeps us distracted from the goal
we set out to achieve with the striving. And it appears—judging from Dan Gilbert’s
work—that our default psychology reinforces that tendency of capitalism to value
capital as an end in itself. Studies show that the more money we make the more
money we think we need to be happy. One hope of researchers of happiness studies
is that those psychological traps of ours can be avoided by our being made aware of
them.
SO...If you think happiness is worth pursuing, these are some prescriptions
from researchers and philosophers
--live in a country where there’s no war, and where you feel you can contribute to its
governance, and whose government is efficient and free of corruption
--try to make a little money to keep from living in poverty, but not much more than that
--marry, have lots of “marry” sex
--appreciate what you have and don’t compare yrself to other people and what they have;
don’t assume that what you don’t have will make you much happier than you are because it
won’t (you will habituate to that new acquisition and then just want something else that you
think will make you happy—studies show that the more money we make the more money
we think we need to be happy)
--cultivate friendships and family relations; be more involved in others than in yrself
--stay healthy but don’t assume that major health problems will make you miserable
--ask people who’ve achieved what you want if it made them happy and heed their advice
--cultivate a belief in god (This prescription is problematic if we believe anti-theists like
Richard Dawkins and Sam Harris, who would argue that any measurement of well being
caused by a belief in God must take into account the violation to well being that violent or
oppressive religions cause millions of people around the world. It may be wise to
distinguish a belief in God from an adherence to violent religious dogma, though Harris,
who promotes empirical study of meditative practices, argues that a belief in God interferes
with a healthy secular study of spiritual meditation: “There is clearly no greater obstacle to
a truly empirical approach to spiritual experience than our current beliefs about God.” But
in defense of religion he has this to say: there is "nothing irrational about seeking the states
of mind that lie at the core of many religions. Compassion, awe, devotion and feelings of
oneness are surely among the most valuable experiences a person can have".)
--Perhaps learn to take happiness as it comes because it may be that life is simply too large
and complex to fit the label “life,” too multifaceted for us to step outside it and pronounce
ourselves happy or unhappy. Perhaps it’s wiser to think of happiness as something that
may, if we’re lucky, manifest not from something you do but from something you are, from a
habitual way of being in the world, engaging actively with others and the world around you.
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And yet, one would not want to dismiss the role melancholic introspection might play in
that engagement; it may play an important part in one’s ability to be in touch w/ oneself
enough to engage in the world in a way that fosters happiness.
--“Don’t aim at success—the more you aim at it and make it a target, the more you are going
to miss it. For success, like happiness, cannot be pursued; it must ensue, and it only does so
as the unintended side effect of one’s dedication to a cause greater than oneself or as the byproduct of one’s surrender to a person other than oneself. Happiness must happen, and the
same holds for success: you have to let it happen by not caring about it. I want you to listen
to what your conscience commands you to do and go on to carry it out to the best of your
knowledge. Then you will live to see that in the long run...success will follow you precisely
because you had forgotten to think of it.” Victor Frankl, in Man’s Search for Meaning.
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