Happiness Read online

  Nor is the weight of that insight simply a modern psychological fad. Admit it or not, we have always known that it is relationship — the ability to bond and to feel, to care and to love — that is of our very essence.

  It didn’t take long to discover that we couldn’t kill elephants and tigers alone, that we couldn’t grow and harvest food alone, that we couldn’t build and defend cities alone. With all our intelligence, we simply could not live a full life without doing it in conjunction with the rest of the human community. What we set out to do, we must do together. We live in groups. We work in groups. Our identity comes from being in a group — familial, national, social, political, racial, religious, genetic, gendered. Our very life source lies in the relationships we form that carry us from one end of life to the other.

  But the emotional implications of bonding and growing, becoming and developing may well be the most important of all. Of all the human properties most clearly related to happiness, the capacity for relationship is a constant in every survey, every study, every psychological paradigm. Our very self-image is the product of the way other people define us. We grow up hearing from the people who are most important, most significant, most powerful in our lives that we are “smart” or “shy” or “loving” or “feisty,” and we live into those qualities all our lives — accepting them or resisting them, maybe — but marked by them, nevertheless. Not surprisingly, then, it is the way we relate to others and others to us which, in the end, marks and maintains the comfort levels of our entire life. We are simply not made to be autonomous. But to our own peril, we far too often try.

  The willingness to form faithful and long-standing relationships is neither a burden nor a sacrifice of self. It is the very foundation of life. It is our security in times of trouble and our companion in joy and times of success. When we cut ourselves off from the rest of the human community, instead of assuring our own development, we lessen it. Without those others in our lives, we do not really know ourselves or trust our world.

  It is the other who becomes a well of wisdom in the face of our own uncertainty. It is the other who becomes the light we lack in dark times. It is the other who becomes our strength when we have exhausted our own. It is the other in whom we are able to see a high water mark of our own development.

  To lack this kind of relationship in life is to throw us back on our own puny resources, both physical and spiritual. When we fail to reach out to others, we become captive to our own limitations. Without relationships to model a way of living for us, to guide us when we do not know the way, to warn us of the pitfalls ahead, to laugh with us as we go, we trap ourselves within ourselves with all that implies of ignorance and insensitivity and lack of human development.

  The fact is that, just as we need others, the rest of the world needs us. To fail to respond to others, then, is to deny ourselves the fullness of our own existence. We become spiritually turpid, lacking in feeling, only a pale and empty profile of what it means to be a full human being. We spend our lives feigning happiness under the guise of acquaintanceship and weekend parties with strangers rather than friends.

  With no one to love and no one to be lively with, with no one who cares about us and no one who is willing to care for us, with no one to care about except ourselves, we lose the very stuff of happiness: warmth and security, care and attention, fun and fullness of life.

  The irony of it all is that my happiness depends on having someone to share it with, someone to seek it with, someone to examine it with, someone to survive it with, someone with whom to share the heavy lifting of life, and someone with whom to celebrate its memories. Otherwise we cannot possibly become everything we are meant to be. Otherwise, our lives can never become as full as they are meant to be. There is no great happiness that can possibly be either achieved or delighted in alone.

  Other people are the key to our own happiness. To fail to realize and to develop that is to doom ourselves to half a life and only a grey ghost of happiness.

  “We are shaped and fashioned,” Johann Wolfgang von Goethe wrote, “by what we love.” The people we love or care for are the glue of life: without them happiness is, at best, only a mirage, a feigning of the wholeness of what it means to be truly human.

  chapter 21

  Competence

  Someplace in grad school, I read a therapeutic case study that has stayed with me ever since — both for what it does not say as well as for what it does.

  The case revolved around a client whose major life-changing moment happened when he was about eight years old. It was his birthday party, and, with all the delight of a child, he was opening gifts at a great rate and trying all of them at once. The last gift, a dart board, he got from his father. The child squealed in delight, hung the board against the basement wall, tore the darts off the cardboard packaging, aimed at the board, flung the first dart with wild abandon, and — all odds to the contrary — made the first bull’s-eye of his life.

  The parents were astounded. He aimed and threw again. Another bull’s-eye. The crowd screamed in awe.

  He aimed a final time, threw — and by some fluke of fate — hit his third bull’s-eye in a row while parents and crowd proclaimed his genius, applauded his talent, prophesied his great success in life, and prodded him to decide his future, then and there, immediately.

  But, as much as the parents tried over the years to coax and cajole that boy into demonstrating his talent again, the therapist said, he never threw another dart as long as he lived. The very thought of it, the young man reported later, made him ill.

  Terrified of failure, unprepared to meet the great expectations that had been built up around him at an age when he was too helpless to protest the unreality of them, he lived his entire life under a shadow of false success. Of a luck he could not control. Of expectations he could not repeat. Of promises he could not fulfill.

  The story presents two great facts of life: first, to succeed without trying makes trying a risk, and second, to be put into situations that are above our essential competence is to court emotional disaster. People who aspire to more than they can naturally achieve set themselves up for failure, of course. But, most of all, they set themselves up for unhappiness, for a prevailing sense of inadequacy, of public bankruptcy, of virtual dissimulation, that tortures all their days.

  Happy people, studies find, are those who feel confident in their ability to perform what is required of them in the area in which they aspire. Getting into something we can’t do, but still insist on wanting to do, dooms us to eternal failure. It means that we can never really be satisfied with who we are, that we insist on wanting to be what we are not, what others are instead.

  Good chefs who would prefer instead to be managers run the risk of losing credibility even for what they do best as one business after another fails with them at the helm. Good history teachers who go into computer science because the salaries of computer scientists are higher than those for history teachers choose stress over contentment.

  It’s being in something we do well that gives us the confidence — and the opportunity — to take the next step on the way to self-fulfillment. “Starting at the bottom” of something is actually a very good way to succeed at the rest of life. What I do well here, in this position, marks me as a clear candidate for the next level up. I get respect as well as responsibility. I get real knowledge of my own real abilities. I find out not only where I fit but what I’m fitted for. Then, if I go through life grasping for an unreachable brass ring on the merry-go-round of achievement, I go knowledgeably. Then, if the next step up doesn’t work, I still have the assurance that I am not a failure, that I am simply misplaced. Happiness is made of knowing where I fit and getting there.

  There is, however, another dimension of competence that affects our level of happiness, as well. In this situation, it is not so much being underprepared for a position that stresses us. It is being too prepared for the position
we’re in that stands to sabotage our satisfaction with life.

  Professional recruiters learned long ago that hiring someone who was over-prepared for a position was as likely to jeopardize both the success of the firm and the mental health of the employee as hiring someone who was not prepared to do what the position required. Boredom has a stultifying effect on the human soul. Not only are people who are bored inclined to do less, but they are more than likely to do it poorly.

  Worse than the propensity to boredom by the over-prepared, perhaps, is the loss of creativity that comes with being asked to do less than we’re able to do. To watch others around them feeling excited about their work, being rewarded for it, being considered important to the community as a whole marginalizes a person in the group whose strengths have been flying under too low a ceiling to be able to be demonstrated well. Then social relations, the very life breath of the human condition, suffer, as well.

  Worse, when leadership figures themselves, caught in the grip of false grandeur, suffer from the idea that their ideas are the only and the best ideas in the group, the gifts of the rest of the group are smothered — and the whole span of creativity within the group is smothered with it.

  In either situation, being too prepared for the position we have or too little prepared for the position we want, basic happiness is jeopardized.

  In these conditions — when the goal we seek is not the goal we can reach — people are most likely to detach from the situation. They absorb the failure, they swallow the feeling of loss that comes from it, and silently, sadly, they forego life for the motions of life. Then disinterest sets in and the fire of excitement that comes with knowing the depth of one’s own creativity turns to smoke. People pick up the paycheck every week but the amount on the check does little or nothing to raise the declining happiness level that comes from being in a position they cannot fulfill or do not want.

  The sense of competence that comes with being in a position we want and doing work we can do, on the other hand, is the fuel of energy. It gives a person a reason to strive, to achieve, to become a co-creator of a better life for everyone. It gives both purpose and meaning to life. Then, no matter who applauds us, we are satisfied with ourselves. We’re giving everything we’ve got and doing everything we can to make this world a better place than it was when we got here. Then we know that we are on the verge of becoming everything we were ever meant to be. Then we know what it is to be happy.

  chapter 22

  Autonomy

  If psychological testing has uncovered the major elements of happiness correctly, one thing is certain. Relatedness — an identification with people and groups that extend our horizons and support us as we move toward them — is a major factor in a person’s happiness level. But so is autonomy. So is the consciousness that we ourselves are in charge of our own happiness and that only we can do anything about it.

  At first glance, the two poles of relatedness and autonomy may seem to be opposites. They look contradictory. They may even seem contradictory sometimes when the people in my life are counseling me to do one thing and I myself am intent on doing another. That analysis, however, fails to take into account that even real relatedness requires the autonomous choice of one person for another.

  If I’m not relating to someone, it’s because I didn’t choose to relate to them, for whatever reasons known only to me: because I don’t love them, because they make me feel dependent on them, because I feel exploited by them, because even with them I feel lonely, because I’m too naive to recognize their love for me.

  Sometimes I refuse to admit that, even to myself. Which is when the two dimensions of happiness get confused.

  Autonomy is the awareness of myself as an independent adult. I am a self-initiating moral agent. What I do has consequences. That alone is enough to make everything I do or refuse to do both real and significant. Autonomy is what makes it possible to do anything moral at all. Without it, I am at best a pawn in someone else’s life. Without it, real happiness — the sense of having come to the wholeness of myself, of having made choices that make happiness possible — is impossible.

  Lloyd George may have said it all when he wrote: “liberty has restraints but no frontiers.” Or, to put it another way, freedom has natural limits, true, but brings with it unlimited opportunities, as well. No, we are not free to do everything we would like to do. Being “free” to choose a profession in life does not mean that I can go into any profession I choose. My skills may not be good enough to get me this particular position. I may not have enough money to support myself while I train for a position like this one. I may not have the computer experience the company is looking for in this position. This particular company may not be hiring for the position I want. But, whatever the present restraints, I am still free to pursue a position if I make choices that resolve all those issues. If not here, then in limitless numbers of other places.

  If we are autonomous, we are, at the same time, free to take responsibility for ourselves, free to become all that we can be.

  To the person who is truly autonomous, the capacity to take responsibility for one’s own decisions becomes the measure of adulthood. At this point of development, I go beyond exploration to commitment. I become, as the poet says, “the master of my fate, the captain of my soul.” Now there is no one to blame for what I do but me. And doing it will require both the confidence to choose my paths in life and the courage to meet the demands of them.

  When that moment comes, what I achieve in life, what I seek in life, what I strive for in life falls to myself alone. I stop performing like a child under pressure of approval or punishment and begin to wrestle with life like a lone warrior on the plain of possibility I have chosen for myself.

  Now there are no false frontiers to obstruct my own development. I am no longer living my father’s life or my mother’s dreams. I have accepted the right to design my own life. I have gotten to the point where I dare to dream my own dreams. And now I must take responsibility for them. “I’m really not happy doing what I do,” the young stock broker told me. “I ­really wanted to be a teacher.” “Then why did you go into finance?” I asked. “Because,” he said, “my father wouldn’t pay for my degree unless I went into business. Teachers, he said, didn’t get paid enough.”

  True, perhaps. But what happens to the child grown to maturity who is thrust into the now as the bearer of someone else’s vision of life? Now what happens to the continual desire for autonomy in the one who must go on being continually frustrated by the consequences of their lack of it? Now what happens to “the pursuit of happiness” for those who find themselves both let free — and not let free — to pursue it. Whose responsibility is it to get beyond “I’m really not happy but . . . ?”

  Autonomy is not only the right to choose; it is, as well, the summoning up of the strength it takes to decide between possibilities. We are free as long as we live to choose again. The question is, what do you yourself really choose now?

  Unless that final choice is made, we doom ourselves to live in the past rather than design our own present. Even if that means choosing to do exactly what we’re doing rather than change it, the important thing is that we finally choose it ourselves.

  Possibility is not only the freedom to do something; it is also the freedom not to do something. Autonomy brings choices with it that change things — for myself, of course, but for others as well. Once I begin to make my own decisions and decide my own fate, to face the consequences of my decisions and take responsibility for them, I take my place as one of the co-creators of life. Then we become moral adults, and every act of ours becomes a moral act. We become agents of change in a society. We take our place in the world as models of conscience, exemplars of character.

  Now I can no longer claim “luck” as the reason for my situation in life. I am where I have decided to be, and I will now have to make the choices that make the best of it, that make me m
ore of the self I am capable of becoming.

  There is a security in dependence that is seductive. As long as I am willing to give my will over to the designs of another and call it “obedience,” I am free to be unfree. I become a moral automaton. My soul is an android of someone, some system, beyond myself. I may know that I have surrendered, but I tell myself that the surrender of personal choice, personal analysis, personal decision-making is itself moral. We begin to hear ourselves say, “I was only following orders . . .” or “they told me to . . .” or “what else could I do . . .” or “I didn’t know . . .” or “we couldn’t get permission to. . . .”

  But that is a false security. It carries away the part of me that is yet to be developed but forever waiting to be. When that part goes, my last chance for happiness goes — the part that comes when I know not only that I am doing what is right but that I am doing what I know is right for me.

  As William H. Hastie put it, I have finally grown into “a sense of becoming rather than merely a sense of being.” I am not only alive; I am adult.

  Those who go through life being less than the arbiter of themselves will never know the happiness of making their own mistakes, the glory of reversing them, or the joy of developing them. They will be a shadow, a phantom, of someone else: a piece of film half developed; a flower spike without a bud; a beginning with no known end.

  No doubt about it: the person who has grown into autonomy, like one Olympian after another, can say, “I may not have won the race, but I did not fail. I did what I did on the way to glory and I’m proud to have tried.”

  chapter 23

  Meaning