Happiness Page 3

  It isn’t, of course, that those questions haven’t been asked before. On the contrary. There’s not a civilization in history that has not dealt with those questions on some level — spiritual or philosophical. The difference now is that no civilization has been able to ask everyone in the world the same questions at the same time.

  The results of these studies have a great deal to say to us today about what people think they want out of life, about who they want to be, about what they think is important, about how they define happiness itself.

  At the same time, this kind of universal data also tells us a great deal about ourselves. It shows us our own aspirations in living color. It exposes our real desires for all the world to see. It breaks open our inner ambitions and in doing so reveals our values at the same time. It sends signals to us about how like or unlike we are in relation to the people around us as well as to the people of the rest of our age and time.

  It’s an important question in our own search for the good life: If other people are seeking happiness in far different places and ways than we are, it may be time for us to assess our own ideas about happiness again. If, on the other hand, we are all seeking the same things in our search for happiness and are not getting it, it is surely time to wonder, at very least, where we are all going wrong. What does that mean to all of us together in this new age of human community?

  Most of all, it shines a light on the inner horizons of ourselves. With all I have, if I still want more, I must begin to look into the hidden parts of myself to see what is still waiting for me there to discover. I have to ferret out what it is that I have overlooked or given short shrift in this life of bounty. What we say we want out of life has something to do with the kind of people we are. The real question under all the technical questions is a life-changing one: What kind of person am I — and is what I want worth wanting in the light of the holy grail of happiness? Whatever that is.

  This kind of information is a mirror into our own lives. If I pit my ideas against the ideas of the world about what it means to be happy, I am beginning a journey through my own future.

  Happiness:

  The Universal Quest

  chapter 3

  What Social Data Tells Us

  and What It Does Not

  Everyone, it seems, is measuring happiness these days. The social surveys abound. There are even surveys that analyze blogs to determine not only who’s happy but who’s happy on what days.1

  Whatever else it may say about us and our pursuit of happiness in this day and age, this sort of measurement certainly tells us something about how we respond to life in the here and now. In a media-created environment, what in another day would have never come to light, now, played over and over again, however minuscule, can easily become the center of our lives. Or to put it another way, in a world where events are sparked or obstructed by very small groups of people completely out of the control or the purview of the population they affect, happiness is more precious than ever, and, at the same time, in many ways, more vulnerable than ever.

  Happiness — somebody’s definition of happiness, at least — has clearly become a commodity. It’s become something that can be measured. Something that can be grasped. Something that can be bought or drunk or used or garnered for our comfort and our convenience. And so we must try harder than ever to determine the marrow of it before we are all held captive to both the spells or the whims of those who impose their own style of it on others.

  On an even more focused scale, for instance, social surveys now measure the comparative happiness of women and men. They report that, contrary to expectations and past history, women now have a lower sense of general well-being than they did in 1972 — despite the rising economic gains for women. What’s more, women indicate a lower sense of general well-being than do men — which is also a reversal of past findings.2

  Not only are these findings consistent over a number of studies, they are also consistent across a number of countries. They are global. The findings are constants: “Greater educational, political, and employment opportunities have corresponded to decreases in life happiness for women as compared to men,” they tell us. But numbers alone do not tell us why.

  They do not tell us what’s happening under what’s happening. They do not give us a hint of how it is that women are not only less happy now than they were in 1972 but are less happy than men in general — despite the gains made by the women’s movement. What’s being missed here about the nature of happiness that rising economic indicators do not seem able to cure? The technology has discovered an issue that is at the base of family life.

  On the other hand, the surveys leave other questions to be answered that, in the end, can be crucial to us all. What do men have that, even with the social gains made by women, eclipses a woman’s sense of well-being? If there is some understanding of happiness that women have not discovered yet, it behooves us all to know what it is. If women are looking for something that men either do not have or do not want, we ought to know what that is, too. What is material like this saying to us all — men and women — on the personal level?

  Like most of us, I have taken dozens of surveys during my life. The questions they asked have been almost as enlightening as the answers they got. I have found out, for instance, what parts of life I have missed that other people seem to value more than I do. I have discovered not only what I do have but what things I don’t have that others consider indispensable. I have even learned what priority I give to what things in life as compared to the rest of survey-taking humanity. But I have yet to recognize most of what they talk about as anything I would put in a sentence about the nature of happiness.

  The question of happiness fascinates me. Its statistical profile, however, leaves me cold. Why? Because though the numbers leave us more informed, they leave us still unknowledgeable. They raise more issues than they answer. They give us data but not wisdom. They tell us what people think is missing in their lives but not why they want it. They tell us what we can see, but they do not tell us what’s been left out.

  It is all those other things, I think, that we need to eke out over the years of our lives to determine what it is that will truly make life whole for us. For you and me. Right here in the midst of our own small lives and its great, life-giving hopes. It is precisely what is being left out of our own personal definitions of happiness that may tell us what we really need to know about it. And we do need to know.

  chapter 4

  What Makes People

  around the Globe Happy

  Happiness is fast becoming a national as well as a personal goal. As nations, it appears, we want our people to be happy as well as to be safe from external enemies or in command of a competitive GNP. The responses we see from around the world have a great deal to tell us about ourselves.

  Using the personal responses of people across 178 countries, for instance, researchers ranked Denmark as “the happiest country in the world” along with Switzerland, Austria, and Iceland, all of which ranked in the top ten. The U.S., with all its wealth and wizardry, ranked twenty-third, a clear and serious challenge to the whole idea that big is better and force is security. Surveys like this may echo the heartbeat of the world. They may also serve as clear and serious challenges to us all when we ourselves are looking for what could bring more happiness and less politics to our own country, to our own personal lives.

  Most intriguing, perhaps, is the fact that these smaller countries tended to score consistently better than those with the largest populations, in terms of national happiness, whatever their standing in other dimensions of development. China, for instance, ranked 82nd, India 125th, and Russia 167th in terms of citizen satisfaction and evaluation of national well-being.1

  The questions that emerge from those kinds of answers demand far more than arithmetical analysis. Some spiritual analysis of happiness is clearly in order. What do small countries have that is mo
re satisfying for people than geographical greatness, than sizeable mineral deposits, than formidable armies? What exactly does constitute national happiness?

  In fact, largeness itself — the feeling of being lost in the crowds, unseen, unnoticed, invisible, being caught in an economic centrifuge — may have something to contribute to the notion that happiness itself is veritably impossible in contemporary society. If selfness, a feeling of personal autonomy and significance, is a large part of happiness, the problem may well be that to find the self, to develop a self, in an environment that does all but obliterate it feels veritably impossible.

  Wealthier countries scored high on the economic index, yes, and very poor nations ranked very low, of course, but the survey did not include national wealth as an explicit dimension of national happiness at all. How much money people made or how much economic development nations accrued seemed not to matter much when people assessed the things that made them happy on the personal level. But if the task is to define happiness for ourselves, then results like these bear serious scrutiny. What have we been working for all our lives if not happiness? And if having personal and national wealth is not it, then what is it that we should really be pursuing? Really?

  The results, it seems, are simple ones: being healthy, being educated, and being able to earn a decent living, people reported, is far more important than being wealthy. These are telling factors for a world in economic turmoil to consider. How is it possible that people would possibly choose for less than the proverbial pot of gold as the ultimate in life? Are they

  really so far off in their search for happiness as their choices first may seem?

  Being at our best physically makes it possible for us to enjoy what life has to offer. It enables us to move beyond ourselves to find out what the rest of life is about. It allows us to respond to what life has to offer, to find other dimensions of life outside of the four walls that confine us.

  Education not only allows us to hope for a better economic level of life — a level that allows us to experience some of the fringe benefits of a culture that encourages travel and the arts, family fun and new experiences — but it promises a person intellectual stimulation, as well. It allows us to understand what is really happening both to us and to our society, to think the kind of thoughts that bind past and present so that the future can be better for us all.

  Though respondents to the various surveys do not seem to fixate on the amount of money they earn as a measure of their national happiness, they do, tellingly, focus on the poverty index. It is not essential, the data seems to say, that we all have all we can have. But it is essential to everyone in a society that everyone has what it takes to live a dignified life, to have access to what it takes to live a decent human life.

  Poverty is a social sin: it affects not only the poor but the wealthy, too. It creates pockets of need that blight the entire area. It creates geographical areas that become sites for the creation of “easy money” — drugs, robbery, gambling, prostitution. It creates whole segments of a city that become off limits even to the industries needed to rescue the children of these places from malnutrition — and everything that implies for the stunting of the mind as well as of the body. It creates the next generation of unemployed poor who live in empty rooms seeking welfare and soup kitchens just to stay alive.

  There is, indeed, important data on happiness in these figures.

  But for societies that worship at the shrine of their bank accounts, the size of their houses, and the age of their cars, findings such as these are nothing if not surprising. They may also be an omen of things to come, however successful a nation may consider itself to be. How far, the happiness data requires us to consider, can a country really hope to survive a division between what the government calls good for it and what the people see as the rudiments of personal happiness there before its spirit begins to wither from the inside out?

  The kinds of questions that arise out of material of this sort only make “happiness research,” and a national reflection on the nature of happiness, even more important. When a nation has to choose, when none of us can have everything, what choices must a government make? More armies or more schools? Higher wages or a better health care system? More wealth for the wealthy or more equitable distribution of wealth for all? Which of these choices will make any particular country happier at any given time? Which government is best equipped to provide it? And when those issues are resolved, even then will real happiness be at hand?

  The greatest surprise of the national studies — and the most pertinent to us all today, perhaps — lies in how low many Asian countries scored on happiness indicators. After all, these are cultures long considered bastions of strong family systems and cultural traditions. These things, we like to tell ourselves, provide the comfort and security people seek above all else.

  In the West, money and things are apparently no longer the major measures of personal success or security or satisfaction. In the East, the extended family and the expectations that cultural traditions have commonly spawned may no longer be the bulwarks of social life or the measure of its success. Clearly, the world is in the throes of massive change everywhere.

  chapter 5

  Group, Self, or Something Else

  The World Values Survey set out to plumb every dimension of life — political, economic, and social — for a sense of priorities and a measure of impact. In the end, however, two dimensions of modern life dominated the picture.

  The first significant clustering lies in the divide between a commitment to traditional social values on the one hand and secular-rational value systems on the other.

  In this category, being Catholic or German or Irish — being part of a clearly defined ethnic group — with all the cultural norms and religious customs and social expectations that implies, is the major organizing principle of society. Long-honed traditions define both the actions and the choices of a given group and give a kind of definable description of society despite all its pluralism, all its national norms. This is a society that is Christian or Muslim or Jewish or Hindu or Buddhist in flavor. America is a “Christian nation,” some argue, with all the feastdays and spiritual norms that implies, despite its multiple non-Christian groups and its constitutional commitment to resist the institutionalization of an established religion.

  Secular-rationalist societies, on the other hand, melt into an amorphous collection of multiple individuals who live according to social norms free of the expectations of any particular ethnic group. These societies allow for the greatest degree of variety and freedom among the greatest number of people. A secular-rationalist society is just that: secular, meaning not defined by any particular religious tradition, and rationalist, meaning reasoned but non-religious in its norms and restrictions. Ireland, for instance, a traditional Catholic society, in which birth control pills and condoms were illegal, as was divorce, until the mid-1990s, in compliance with church norms, has evolved to become a secular nation in which the norms of the Catholic Church are no longer permitted to curtail civic legislation. A secular-rationalist society becomes a collection of groups, none of them its defining center.

  The second social fissure in the data emerges in the tension between a commitment to communal values and values that promote self-expression.1

  Some of us, that is, want the world to go back to the way society was organized in small agrarian centers before war and industrialization turned us into great corporate hubs. Before the new corporate agribusinesses came to swallow all the small truck farms up again into a kind of new feudalism. Before so much of “small-town society” where people were self-organized into ethnic, religious, economic, and political neighborhoods themselves disappeared into the great amorphous population stream created by global mobility.

  The rest of us, though, the research indicates, are more drawn now to the secular-rational value system that comes with the homogenizing of a society. In this wo
rld, no single tradition can possibly predominate. We become centers of personal expression measured only by the fact that we do not impose our values on others or allow them to limit us. The common core of Protestantism or Hinduism or Republicanism or steel town ethos disappears in favor of the personal but ethnically non-descript.

  It is in material like this that we begin to see the lines drawn and the tension build about the very nature of happiness itself. Are we people who have lost our way? Has the movement away from “tradition” and all it implies — “the Brady Bunch” icon of family, the clarity of common social values that comes with small towns, the centrality of the prevailing religious ethos, the “sameness” that comes with regional inbreeding — cut us adrift from ourselves?

  The problem refuses to go away. It nags at us for resolution: on the one hand, if happiness lies more in what we have been — in tradition — than in what we can be — in a kind of individualized modernism — then personal happiness is a very shallow thing, easily disturbed, constantly under threat of immanent possibility.

  And yet, it is tradition, custom, that stabilizes. We know how to celebrate Christmas because we have done it the same way every year for years. Tradition roots us to the past and so gives security and structure to the present. More than that, perhaps, it gives us a kind of spiritual architecture of values by which to guide our own lives in the present. We know who we are and what we do and why we do it. We do what we do because we are Italian or German or Lutheran or Catholic. We have roots and we do not stray far from them.