Happiness Page 12

Some people spend years trying to understand the meaning of life. Unfortunately, that is no way to find it. These people, bereft of a sense of overarching purpose — a reason big enough to live for — depressed by the routines of the day, low on spirit and lacking in direction, go through the motions of it all simply because they do not know how to do otherwise. These people, incidentally, come in all ages. They are young people who live in a world moving so quickly that they are reluctant to choose a direction because it may change. They are the middle aged who, having chosen a direction in life, have felt it change under their feet to the extent that they are no longer sure whether there is point to it or not. They are the older generation in society who wonder what happened to the world as they knew it and whether what they did in life ever really had any value to it at all.

  Young people who see no future waiting for them too often get trapped in a present that guarantees little and promises less. Women and men in their middle years, dissatisfied with the point to which they have come, settle with a sigh for where they are and give in to the anesthetic of choice — drink, sleep, television, withdrawal. Old people grow sadly quiet while life goes grey around them.

  Clearly this is not “happiness.” This is not contentment. This is not satisfaction with life well lived.

  The question is, has life failed these people? In fact, does life fail us all? We grow up on a diet of rainbows and pots of gold, believing in a success we translate as money, assuming that adulthood confers on us all “the good life.” But, if what people tell researchers about what makes them happy is correct, the chapter that has been left out of these scenarios is, in fact, the one that is key to it.

  The truth is that happiness is not something we get from life. Happiness comes from what we give back to it. The logic of life is a clear one: we are, indeed, social beings. No one is given a gift for themselves alone. A gift is what we get to justify our presence in the human race. It is a promise we make to the rest of humanity to do our part in making life worthwhile for everyone. We are given it to fulfill it.

  Happiness comes from discovering what the world needs that we can give it, from finding our purpose in life and living up to it. And that, at least in some degree, must obviously be to make life better for others with the gifts we ourselves have been given.

  In a small village in Ireland, where people’s small cottages in the middle of small fields are flung miles away from one another, the local taxi company is one old man in one old car. The locals call him to take them back and forth between house parties and family celebrations. “I hope you won’t be having too many rides tonight, Micky,” the American customer said. “We’ll be coming back early so you’re not up too late.” Micky sniffed a bit. “No, no, it’s not a problem,” the old man said. “It’s the purpose of me life.”

  Having a sense of purpose and meaning in life ranks high in the cluster of the commonplaces of happiness. No matter where we are on the economic chart, it’s knowing what we exist for that counts. No matter how mundane our gifts may seem to be, even to ourselves, the world will be the poorer without them, and we will be poorer, too, for not having given them as best we can. My life has meaning to every life I touch. It’s knowing that and living accordingly that counts.

  Clearly, the key question of life is a simple one: If I really want to be happy, is what am I part of larger than myself? What can I give to this world, this project, this question, this problem that will be meaningful to others? Where does the world I’m in right now need me right now? Then, when I know that I am about something bigger than myself, money and status and personal ambition all pale in the face of it — and in the morning, I wake up happy. I wake up knowing that I have done what I am here to do. I know, too, what to do with myself, my gifts, my life.

  Clearly, life does not give us meaning. Life has only the meaning we give it. Without a reason larger than myself for which to get out of bed in the morning, I am losing my life one day at a time, like water drops in an ocean, without so much as a ripple to show for it.

  It’s one thing for a person to realize too late that they have lived for no great purpose and so will die with little impact. It is entirely another, however, to live with the discomfort of knowing that we are living in vain, that we do nothing for no one that has meaning to anyone. But a sense of purpose and meaning, an understanding of why we are doing what we do, has the ring of immortality to it. Then we suddenly come to realize that we are leaving something of value behind us. Then we can be happy for having lived at all.

  As the Chinese proverb puts it:

  If you want happiness for an hour — take a nap.

  If you want happiness for a day — go fishing.

  If you want happiness for a year — inherit a fortune.

  If you want happiness for a lifetime — help someone else.

  chapter 24

  When Unhappiness Washes

  over Us, What Then?

  Scientists tell us that thanks to our genes, if nothing else, each of us has a kind of happiness thermostat that regulates the outside extremes of our emotional responses. We function between the extremes most of the time — a plus or minus 5, for example — but we have moments that either exceed or dip below the margins of our normal happiness quotient. Moments when we’re either “over the top” — as the Irish say — or “down in the doldrums” — as my mother said.

  Fatigue alone can take a toll. We’re too tired to nurse another baby, to take an extra job to pay for the house I really didn’t want, to bear the loss of the promotion, to be moved away from our circle of childhood friends. And we certainly cannot bear the pain of having to do two of these at once.

  Sickness can wear us down to the point where we give far from bland responses to what we would normally consider very bland experiences: the regular slamming of a swinging door, the barking of a dog, the loss of the television schedule.

  Worst of all, perhaps, we lose patience with the routines of life. The job has gone stale and there are no others to choose from. We find ourselves despondent over the pattern of reversals that a weak economy can bring. We see our world begin to slip out from under us: the insurance is too high, the value of the house has dropped, the trip will cost twice what was budgeted, the scholarship does not come, the job has been eliminated and I can’t afford to keep the car that will enable me to go looking for another one. Or even harder to bear, everything — all of it — is suddenly simply too much. We don’t know how or why we got into the situation we’re in, and we can’t begin to see a way out of it.

  Then there begin to be twitches of an idea that frightens us. “I’m not happy anymore,” I hear myself thinking, “not the way I used to be.”

  At that point, we have to begin to take stock. Is one of the building blocks missing? Are my remarks to other people more negative than positive? Do I hear myself criticizing things I wouldn’t have even noticed before? Is everything “wrong,” or “not right,” or “not worth it”?

  Are we allowing our own life to go stale by refusing to step out of the routine, to take a few risks, to try something new?

  Have we begun to ignore our friends, our very lifeline to good feelings, good laughs, good fun, despite the fact that we know that being around happy people is the best tonic there is for depression.

  Are we working so hard at people-pleasing, for whatever reasons, that we find ourselves suppressing our own likes and dislikes in order to keep the people around us happy? Have we, then, lost control of our schedule or our leisure time or even our very life goals?

  Have we said yes to something we’re not really interested in doing and so living with the stress of it day after day after day? Or, on the other hand, are we working in a dead end job that lacks both challenge and opportunity?

  Are we involved in some question, some project, big enough to be worth spending our time on? Is our life about anything meaningful both to us and to the world around us — whether the
world around us really knows it or not? Are we doing something that we know can and will build a better world for the next generation than the one the last one gave to us?

  Those are questions that can never be answered only once in life. As soon as the inner light begins to go dim, those questions need to be reopened before the inner light goes out. When life begins to drag on without focus, without energy, we have begun to sabotage our own happiness. It is not that there is nothing to do. It is not that we are not needed in life. The truth is that there are innumerable things around us that need to be done — Meals on Wheels, Big Brother and Big Sister programs, ecology projects, peace movements and legislative initiatives, grass cutting for the old woman down the street, volunteer work at every agency in town — things too numerous to count. They cannot be done without us. And we cannot live a really meaningful life without them. Our own happiness, our own sense of purpose and meaning, depends on our doing them.

  But there are other levels of unhappiness not as serious, perhaps, but just as dangerous over the long haul. In these cases, we slip into a permanent twilight zone emotionally, more dull than dark. It colors our lives just enough to take the luster off our personalities. It even depresses the level of life in those around us, as well, until all of us are “depressed” and barely know why. In these cases, researchers tell us, there are ways to prime our hearts before the negative, the “neurotic,” becomes more the character of life as I live it than light is.

  In one of these studies, for instance, researchers discovered that four simple actions were effective in raising the happiness thermostat.1 First, the researchers measured the happiness quotient of a group as determined by the group’s individual responses to a common testing instrument. Then, they divided the group into five segments and gave each one of them a task for the week.

  The first segment of the research group was charged simply to smile more — at strangers, when being spoken to, when they saw something they liked. It was a kind of random happiness signal, a connector to the rest of the world. It said, I don’t know you but I smile at you and in the smiling we make a connection that is real, human, and supportive.

  The second group was instructed to spend some time every day remembering three things they were grateful for in their current life. The process turns the human mind in another direction. An exercise like this requires me to realize consciously the continuing degree of gratuitous good that invades my life, too often unseen or unacknowledged, day after day after day.

  The third group was told that when they were feeling stressed they should stop and remember one good thing that had happened to them the day before that gave their lives a fresh and unusual burst of happiness. Here, the memory of past good things gives rise to the hope that this day, too, will provide the resources needed to make it good for me.

  The fourth group was required simply to think about things they liked — whether immediate or past. Flooding the brain with the little things that make life good — the smell of coffee in the morning, the feel of the breeze on a beach, the nights spent with friends telling stories and renewing old affections for them — keeps open the doors of the heart to life in general when the particular weighs it down.

  The fifth and final group did no special task at all.

  The results of the experiment give shocking proof of how easy it is to feel happy, if we only allow ourselves the right to be what we want to be: happy. Participants in the first four research groups raised their happiness thermostats. Those in group five, who did nothing additional to view life positively, did not. These results invite us to look carefully at our own tendency to allow the negative elements of life to swamp us simply by failing to look consciously at the positive elements in life. It isn’t that we shouldn’t face reality, should never admit that we’re in a black spot in life right now. But it is equally real, every bit as true, that we’ve been in bad places before and survived them all, often in better spirit and shape than we were before they happened to us.

  To protect ourselves from becoming constantly negative about the little irritations of life until they become burdens rather than simply passing aggravations, it’s important to remind ourselves of the little gifts of our lives that live on in us yet, that punctuate our every day, and, far too often, that go totally unnoticed.

  It is important to realize that we have a great many good things to remember. They go on around us all the time, every day, every minute of our lives. The problem is that we too often take them all for granted. But the real truth is even greater than that. The fact is that we have so much more even than these for which to be grateful, and if we allow ourselves to routinely forget such things under the pressure of the present, that might well be the real disaster of our ever more negative lives.

  Happiness:

  The Human Dilemma

  chapter 25

  Philosophy:

  The Search for Meaning

  In the scientific and technological environment of the modern world, much of what we know about things has been reduced to formulas and statistics. We count hands and heads and people and polls to decide what’s happening around us. We look to numbers to tell us what people think, what they want, what they say is the right thing — meaning the popular thing — to do.

  But numbers and statistics, experimental data and laboratory studies are not the only way to understand life. In fact, those approaches are at best relatively new and yet to be scientifically evolved and confirmed. They map the territory, but they often fail to explain it. They tell us how many people say they buy a certain kind of soap, but they do not tell us what it is that leads them to it. What it is about this soap rather than that one that attracts people, we don’t know. Better yet, was it the soap at all — or was it the advertising campaign that did it?

  On the other hand, there is yet another way to determine the nature of things and their relationship to us. It has been around for centuries and is still moving hearts and enriching souls. The old way to learn how to think about a thing was to think about it.

  That’s where philosophy and philosophers come in. They set out to help us make sense out of life. They spend their lives thinking about things. They attempt to make the human condition understandable. They look at the ideas under an idea for the sake of explaining not only what it is — though defining something like time or justice or beauty, for instance, is certainly difficult enough — but why it is. They ask themselves what such concepts imply about the nature of life, about society, about what it means to be a fully human human being, as well. Then they pass that thinking on to us — to provoke our own thinking, to act as a beginner’s guide through life.

  Philosophers set out to explain to us the great dynamics of life. They ask, for instance, whether truth is absolute or relative, whether government positions are for the free or for the intelligent, for the wealthy or for males, whether slavery is natural or imposed. They prod us to investigate our own ideas about these things. They lead us to examine the dimensions of life for both their function and their value.

  Philosophers help us to become conscious of the way life works, to see through the obvious explanations of things to the core of things. They bring us to distinguish between the real nature of freedom, for instance, and the attempts of dictators to make slavery look like freedom. They examine for us the real meaning of “the good.”

  The important thing to remember, however, is that philosophy, unlike science, is not a matter of finding the one certain single answer. It is a matter of finding the best of all possible answers, the answer that takes the most of a thing into consideration. Or, more than that, it is not about simply finding answers at all. It is every bit as much about learning to ask the best questions. It is not simply about studying “pleasure,” for instance; rather, it is about asking whether or not pleasure is all there is to happiness.

  Philosophers bring reason and critical thinking to the great questions of life in order to
determine, independently of particular faith traditions but not necessarily antagonistic to them, what life is about, how we ought to live, where the real meaning of life resides, and where it does not.

  It’s not surprising, then, to discover that philosophers, too, have given a good amount of time to the question of happiness. What might be more surprising, however, is that the philosophical analysis of happiness is not only one of philosophy’s oldest areas of concern but one of its newest topics at the same time. The reason for that is itself a study in what happens when we fail to examine all the dimensions of life for ourselves, when we simply assume — however bad life may be — that “that’s the way things are,” when we allow any system to define the boundaries of thought for us.

  Greek philosophers of the fourth century bce, in fact, gave a great deal of attention to the meaning and nature of happiness. The topic was barely opened, however, before differences began to emerge, the tensions of which are yet to be resolved. Eudaimonia, the Greek word for being “in spirit” or under the spiritual guidance of the gods, the Greek philosophers agreed, was an essential element of life. But they did not all agree on precisely what the word meant. Did it mean having “good luck” — a sign of favor from the gods — or did it mean being of good spirit — of good virtue — ourselves? Did happiness mean being immersed in pleasure or steeped in virtue (arete) or being blessed or blissful of soul (makarios)?

  The great philosopher Aristotle concluded famously that happiness — eudaimonia — meant “doing well and living well.”

  But that was, at best, only the beginning of the conversation. The question is, precisely what is implied when we’re told to “do well and live well”? Does “doing well” mean that to be happy we must become wealthy, successful, secure, as in “He did well for himself”? Or does it mean doing what is right, being moral, choosing higher activities like concerts over lower ones like dog fighting?