Happiness Page 4

  Or at least, we have always thought so.

  The data is clear: where traditional values are held in high esteem, religion is very important. Deference to authority, traditional family values, and a rejection of divorce, abortion, euthanasia, and suicide are constants. These societies are marked, too, by high levels of national pride and a nationalistic outlook. In these areas, the traditions of the people trump change. These cultures embrace new ways of life and modes of living more slowly than others, if at all. In these places, community concerns rather than the development of the individual take precedence.

  Historically wealthy countries, on the other hand, have moved from being industrial societies to being post-industrial societies, from making money by making things to using money to make money. In these countries, concern for group survival has changed to a concern for self-expression. It doesn’t matter so much anymore — to most of a given society — if the plant closes. We are not the generation that took jobs there expecting to work in that plant all our lives. We are the ones whose money is making money. But for people who found themselves at the end of the industrial age and on the cusp of a technological society, the face of life — and the meaning of happiness — has changed entirely. Happiness is not getting a job where your father worked, living in the neighborhood you grew up in, or going to the school down the street. Happiness now lies in striking out on your own — and unhappiness, too, we fear, lies in having to strike out on our own.

  As corporations went in search of new labor forces, new markets, whole populations went with them. Young families moved a world away from the town they grew up in. College graduates left one at a time by the thousands for lands their parents had barely heard of, let alone ever visited. And, at the same time, the individual, rather than the group, began to take a new and privileged place in society. Gone were the farming communities, the mining towns, the company stores. In their place was an entirely new way of being alive.

  With that came a whole new way to be happy. Or, at least, a whole new need to learn new ways to be happy.

  Priorities shifted from an emphasis on economic or physical security to an emphasis on personal well-being. Researchers conclude that in these situations traditional values gave way to secular-rational values “in almost all industrial societies.” Increased tolerance for the self-expression of others — a change in child-rearing practices and tolerance for differences — emerged and became the dominant value of social change.2

  And so, in these cases, the very meaning of happiness itself shifted. Happiness as an immersion in the familiar and the familial in a small village with a common vision began gradually but surely to disappear. In its place, happiness as a goal to be gained by the coming of the self to independence began to emerge. Rootlessness became a new and rapidly growing norm.

  The tug of war between a society that fostered newness and thrived on differences and a society that enthroned tradition and preferred likeness had begun.

  But however clear the social evolution that caused it, the divide between them left a great deal to desire. There is, it seems, no “winner” of the contest.

  Why? Perhaps because the very idea of “happiness” transcends both forms of society. Maybe happiness — real happiness — is really independent of each. Maybe genuine happiness cannot be assured by either traditionalism or modernism, by group identity or independence. But if happiness is not ensured either by settling down in the bosom of the familiar or by being beholden to little or nothing of what we have been taught to believe or desire or do, then what is it?

  The two positions are, at least seemingly, mutually exclusive. In these cases, polarization commonly becomes the social order of the day. Whole societies divide into liberal-conservative, progressive-fundamentalist camps. What do we say about our “value system” then? How do we compute “happiness”? In fact, at that point, how can we define happiness at all? Or is happiness only a personal quality? Is it possible to even imagine happiness as a computation of the quality of a group?

  The data is disarming, even at some points disturbing. What things, precisely, are we looking for when we say we want to be happy? Worse, perhaps, is the problem of how to know the difference between being happy and being amused or comfortable or excited or full of joy. Surely something as valuable as happiness ought to be more universally understood and agreed upon. What is it in us or around us that can lift us to the point of satisfaction with life? Alexander Solzhenitsyn warns us, “One should never direct people towards happiness, because happiness too is an idol of the market-place. One should direct them towards mutual affection. A beast gnawing at its prey can be happy, too, but only human beings can feel affection for each other and this is the highest achievement they can aspire to.”

  Is that it? Are social relations and mutual affection the be-all and end-all of happiness? And if so, do you have such a relationship now, here, as you read this, in a world in constant flux? Are relationships themselves the core of happiness? Most of all, what are all of these social and personal changes saying about happiness, about you, and about life in general in the here and now?

  chapter 6

  What Makes a Person Happy

  The social surveys are clear: the world at large does not anymore define money or bigness or any one single set of social values as the essence of happiness. Happiness as we have defined it is, it seems, a thing of the past. The individual pursuit of personal satisfaction has become more important than the development of great communal identities like being Irish or American or male or any particular religion. As a result, tradition, long the mainstay of societies, is no longer its guarantor. Great overpowering systems of nationality or religion or profession have splintered and fractured and gone to dust, their commonalities evaporated, their stability unmoored. Only in the smallest villages do mining-town communities or small-truck farm coops or single economic systems still exist. All of life is plural now and open and interracial and cosmopolitan, if only at the level of technology and media. As a result, instead of defined communities with their patterned interactions and group cohesion, open societies, it seems, turn individuals into isolates — a fact that will at least affect our definition of happiness if not its very contour.

  Maybe we need to face it. Maybe the very idea of national happiness is nothing but a shibboleth, a slogan, as Shakespeare says, “full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.”

  Maybe we simply make up the whole notion of happiness in the hope of convincing ourselves that there is more to life than we ourselves have found. Maybe happiness is just the proverbial carrot on the end of a very long but meaningless stick. Maybe we are striving for what isn’t there, and all of us, as a result, go through life basically unsatisfied.

  Among the continual outpouring of studies and surveys designed to dissect the nature and prevalence of happiness in contemporary society, there are those that cut closest to the bone: those that concentrate mainly on the personal level, on people who are most like us, on those of our own age and background rather than on whatever we mean when we talk about whole nations or races or ethnicities.

  These are the figures that enable us to compare ourselves most specifically to those around us. They give us the opportunity to determine who it is that is most out of sync with the rest of our world, these others — or us. First, I need to know if other people are happy or not. And if so, and I am not, I need to know what’s wrong with me. Or is it possible, perhaps, that I know something about happiness that they do not know — or at very least that few, if anyone, is testing?

  Some surveys concentrate on measuring personal satisfaction. One, for instance, set out to rank the states of the union on a happiness scale derived from the Gallup organization’s annual Well-Being Index. Happiness, as defined by this survey, is the sum total of the way we rate the general quality of our lives, the state of our emotional health, our basic physical condition, our tendency to engage in constructive behavior
, and the way we feel about our jobs.1

  But embedded in the data itself, whatever year it is taken, is a question begging for an answer: Are these qualities the sum total of what we’re all looking for — feeling good about life as I live it, having a basic, generally predictable emotional stability, decent physical functionality, a positive behavioral pattern, and a job I like?

  Does that mean that a person in a wheelchair who does not exercise and does not have what the rest of the world would call “a good job” cannot be truly happy? Is it a given that people who go into a plague area, for instance, to treat people with cholera and then contract it themselves die unhappy? Whole dimensions of life, it seems, may well be missing or at least not identified from surveys such as these.

  As important as the categories named may certainly be, the list somehow feels incomplete. Are they even the most important dimensions of what we mean when we ourselves say that we’re “happy”? Or is this simply a matter of being satisfied, maybe? Not depressed, perhaps, but happy?

  And yet, at the same time, researchers do give us some clues that may be more than worth considering in our own lives. The happiest states in the study, the report concluded, are those whose residents have the greater proportion of advanced educational degrees and whose jobs were considered “super-creative,” such as architecture, engineering, computer and math occupations, library positions, arts and design work, as well as in jobs in entertainment, sports, and media. Bohemians — people given to unconventional life styles or social conventions, such as writers, artists, musicians, and actors — the researchers said, also boosted happiness scores.2

  “We view that,” researcher Jason Rentfrow of the University of Cambridge in England went on, “as suggesting that in these types of areas, there’s more tolerance and with this increased tolerance people are freer to express themselves and to be who they are without feeling as though they have to censor themselves or conform a bit more to the status quo.”3

  In these areas, there may be something else operating, as well. Something that has more to do with being fully alive than simply going through life mentally balanced and physically well. These are people who set out to leave something of their own mark on the world. They leave the world different than it was when they came.

  The situation is a clear one. The need to “be me,” it seems, has become more important than a need to “be us.” On the road to happiness in this society, in our time, it may well be everyone for herself.

  The ability to be oneself, to be secure, to go on developing as a person is clearly a strong thread throughout the research data on happiness, but it brings with it a kind of spiritual unease. Happiness has got to be something more than merely the license to do as I please. If the human being is really a social being, a being not able to exist alone, not able to grow or to function or to succeed alone, happiness must have something to do with how I relate to the rest of the world.

  The conjunction between the personal and the public dimensions of life not only determines a person’s happiness but is key to human development. Clearest of all the findings in the study was the fact that of all the personality factors, neuroticism — a tendency toward the expression of negative emotions of fear, anger, and worry — regularly depressed the state’s happiness quota. What that may be saying about an individual’s having more effect on the environment than the environment has on the person may clearly be worth serious consideration. In other words, if I go through life eaten up from the inside out to the point that no amount of physical exercise can possibly change that, then my degree of negativity is bound to affect yours.

  We cannot control life around us, but we must control life within us if we are ever to survive, let alone thrive, in the worlds in which we find ourselves. If happiness is more than the accumulation of things, as these social surveys clearly suggest, then being able not only to control our responses to our environment but to be independent of them at the spiritual-psychological level must be crucial to the happiness we seek.

  It is this relationship between us and the world around us that will haunt our pursuit of happiness at every level of life.

  chapter 7

  Personal Health and Happiness

  Social surveys are just that. They measure what the world around us looks like, what it tells us about itself, what it values at any given point in time. But the outside of us is not the be-all and end-all of what it is to be human. There are internal factors that work on our sense of self and level of personal satisfaction, as well. It’s imperative, then, that we discover what else there is in life that has the power to affect the happiness factor of life as much as or even more than the texture and color of life as we live it in the world at large on a daily basis.

  The conundrum is more than academic.

  One thing that has been tested again and again, scientifically as well as psychologically, is whether or not happiness has a medical dimension to it as well as a social one. “Happy individuals,” research psychologist Ed Diener reports, “are on average healthier and live longer, have higher incomes and better social relationships and are better citizens.”1

  The link implied here between personal happiness and health is an important one. Not to take our own happiness seriously, not to be involved in exploring what it is that makes us unhappy, may have physical effects both on us and on others that we never dreamed possible. Negative stress, we have been told over and over again by the medical community, wears down the immune system, makes us more susceptible to disease, and affects the way we live out our lives. But if that is true, then the pursuit of happiness is not narcissism raised to high art. Nor is masochism in the name of self-sacrifice a virtue. To go on doing what we do not like to do every moment of every day when there are other options to consider, other opportunities available, cannot possibly be life-giving. Not if happiness has something to do with health.

  Happiness is life made more productive. My happiness is not my business only. How I feel has something to do with the very foundation of the world around me. My happiness — or lack of it — affects the happiness of others, as well. It either develops or diminishes the efforts of others to build a good society, as well as securing a good future for myself. Happiness is not only an individual art; it is the art of a people in concert.

  Indeed, if anything should be studied, for the sake of both the present and the future, it is happiness.

  The task is to know what happiness really is when we set out to get it. To spend a life being deluded by what does not bring us something worth looking for is to risk both happiness and self-development. Even, at worst, our lives. On the other hand, to have had it but not known it is another kind of tragedy that can stretch a life to the breaking point. Or, worse, to give up real happiness for something lesser because we did not know what we had when we had it may take an even greater toll on our sense of self and life.

  For some people, even happiness itself can make them unhappy. Bedeviling the serenity that comes with happiness for them is the constant threat of losing it. These people live in an unknown future and fear it. A smiling present has become their enemy rather than their hope. They become victims of a stress level created by themselves. Their fear of change becomes their inner enemy.

  My mother became a widow with a three-year-old baby at the age of 23. What happened to us then? She married my step-father and we began life all over again. In fact, Jewish folklore, “The Jewels of Elul,” reminds the seeker that life is about beginning over and over and over — at every stage of life. That nothing is finished in life until life itself finishes.

  Things change, we know. Change is of the essence of life. If my life changes just when I thought I had things where I wanted them, does that mean that happiness is impossible? If you find happiness and lose it, can you find it again? “The Jewels” ask. And the answer is a clear one: yes, you can find happiness over and over again, but only if you are willing to begin agai
n to create new happiness for yourself, at every age, in whatever place, after whatever situation.

  The very idea of life as a perpetual pursuit of the proverbial brass ring on the merry-go-round of life is enough to begin the rumblings of a spiritual tsunami in us. What’s the use of chasing the uncatchable? we’re tempted to ask. Or, most serious of all, what’s the use of life if we don’t?

  To learn to navigate the shoals of life with a sense of adventure as well as a sensible measure of caution so that, when change comes, I myself am not toppled by it all must be one of the major elements of a happy life. Learning how that’s done is both a task and an opportunity in life.

  As the research on happiness piles up in university after university, the implications for individual as well as global health become more and more impacting. The search for happiness is not blatant egocentrism; happiness is a natural resource, a national strength, a social factor. Perhaps, to be more to the point, it is even a moral imperative. Which, of course, makes the search for it incumbent on us, a spiritual obligation as well as a social exercise.

  chapter 8

  Happiness Is a

  Cultural Expectation

  However many questions the sociological surveys raise in us, however much the surveys do not answer, one thing they clearly confirm: there is a ubiquitous commitment to the pursuit of happiness. As data pours in from all over the world, this singular consciousness of happiness as a major factor of life is unarguable. No people anywhere ask the researchers what they mean when they ask the question, as they do, Are you more or less happy now than you were five years ago?

  Happiness, then, is clearly a universal concept, a commonplace of life, a matter of serious, even philosophical, reflection. We know if we’re happy or not. We know, as well, or at least we think we do, what will make us happy.