Happiness Page 5

  Whether or not we know what it means to be really happy remains to be seen. Obviously there is some confusion about that part of the equation. One study reports that Lithuanians and Indonesians depend for their happiness on the level of their finances and the quality of their jobs. But Venezuelans, on the other hand, barely consider money at all as an indicator of what it takes to be happy. They rank money as the least important element of all in the grasp for happiness in life and make personal relationships paramount instead.1

  The Swiss and the Finns count physical health as a major dimension of a happy life. But the Vietnamese and Indonesians consider access to unbiased information and Internet access far more important than physical health.

  The Swiss and Vietnamese rank their relationship with their bosses as a strong factor in the happiness equation. In the United States and Poland, respondents ranked their relationships with co-workers even more important to their happiness than relationships with their families.

  Obviously, the data is not unanimous. What is called happiness in one part of the world does not always translate to other times and places. So, the concept of “happiness” takes on the character of a movable feast, makes us restless, sets us seeking in foreign lands and strange places. Whether or not it is a universal human condition becomes more and more unclear with every new survey. People everywhere seem to be seeking it, but differently. How, then, are we to know whether what we’re looking for is realistic or not? In fact, how will we know when what we’re looking for may not itself be dangerous to our very hope of finding happiness?

  The data is not totally confusing, however; in fact, we get from it a great deal of information about what happiness requires from the very culture in which we live. Learning to listen carefully to those social and cultural messages can become a standard of comparison for ourselves. Evaluating the demands of a culture in the light of the great questions of life must surely have something to say to us about our own decisions in life. If we want to be really happy ourselves, it’s important to understand what the society around us is pointing us toward in our daily choices and lifetime aspirations.

  What’s even more important is to form an internal standard for ourselves in order to determine the quality of what we’re being told by others is of the essence of happiness. Knowing what that particular pastiche of life does to other people, seeing how those decisions affect the world around us has got to be a key part of what it means to grow up, to live the good life, to find a kind of happiness that is greater than the moment and larger than the immediate.

  A popular tale, half apocryphal perhaps, but important nevertheless, makes the point:

  In the islands they tell the story of the American who was traveling through the Caribbean on business. On one of his stops he walked along the beach one afternoon just in time to see one of the natives pull his small boat up along a little wooden pier, pull the catch of the day lazily into the bow, and then crawl into a nearby hammock to rest a while.

  “What do you do around here all day?” the American asked him.

  “Well,” the native said, “first I catch my fish, then I take a nap on the beach here in my hammock, then I take the fish home so my wife can cook it for supper. After supper, I come back to the beach to drink some rum and play my guitar with my friends till the sun goes down. Then I go home and go to bed.”

  “But that doesn’t make you any money,” the American said. “If you fished longer every day, you could catch more fish and sell them.”

  “My boat is not big enough to carry many more fish,” the native said.

  “But that’s the point,” the American explained. “If you catch enough fish to sell some of them, you can save your money and buy a bigger boat.”

  The American was getting excited now. “And pretty soon,” he plunged on, “you will be able to buy a fleet of boats and hire crews to do the fishing and you can sell your fish everywhere!”

  The native didn’t say a word.

  “Then,” the American continued triumphantly, “you will be able to take a vacation when you want to, enjoy this beautiful island, eat well, and spend time with your friends every day of your life.”

  The native looked up at the American and said, a bit incredulously: “That’s what I do now.”

  Clearly, cultural norms in any category can deceive us. They make the majority the norm, the standard by which we judge the quality of our own lives. We can get so caught up in the rhythm of other people’s lives that we lose sight of our own. The neighbor works hard and buys a new house, so we work harder and buy a bigger house. Our friends get condos half a world away, so we take a second job and get one, too. The family has an expectation that its children will be professionals rather than artists, so we slog through law school rather than form a local band.

  We go through life, then, never knowing if happiness meant doing what we were expected to do or doing what we were meant to do.

  But unless and until we have found for ourselves an answer to the question of what it means to be fully human, how can we ever know if what we are doing can possibly make us happy or not?

  The quick fix is always a temptation in life. We do what people expect us to do and then try to squeeze the rest of life in on the side. We work sixty-hour weeks and send email cards to friends in lieu of seeing them. The problem with quick fixes is that they disappear as quickly as they come. They may give us a few minutes of satisfaction but do not bring the kind of deep-seated surety that can possibly sustain us through the dry, bare times to come.

  If the quick fix is our answer to what it means to be happy, we need to know what it is that would make us happy enough to be able to bear all the unhappiness we must ever face.

  In the face of those hard times, we need to consider a whole new set of questions. If money is what makes us happy, we will need to know how much money it will take to sustain us through the death of our one and only child. If power is what we seek, we will need to know how many promotions it will take to help us forget the pain of the hours we did not have with the family at home. If public approval is what we’re looking for in life, we will need to figure out how much public approval can possibly heal the scars of failure. How big a television set will it take to fill our days with happiness? How many watches, computers, motorcycles, boats, things, things, things are we lacking to be happy?

  And if we know that number for ourselves, do we also know the most important number of them all — how few things it takes to make a really happy person happy? And why?

  There are other answers to questions such as these that no statistical survey can ever answer. But they can make us wonder about the depth we ourselves have brought to those questions.

  Happiness, whatever it is, has got to be what enables us to go through stress one more time in life. Happiness is what gives us energy when we are at the very end of our resources. It is the difference between being emotionally healthy and being emotionally superficial. There is a difference between living and being fully alive. Happiness is the crossover point between the two. To be happy is to be up to life in all its forms and all its frontiers.

  Happiness is the point at which we become the best of what we are meant to be — full of life and full of hope, full of possibility and full of promise. It is the holy grail of life. But what is it? Where shall we begin to look for what the ages before us have also sought — but left no sure paths behind for us to follow?

  One thing we know now, thanks to all the surveys: different people — even different nations — look for happiness in different places and from different things. What we learn from that is very simple, very profound. We learn that happiness has something to do with choice. To be happy, it seems, we must first decide what happiness is. Then we must decide to choose that rather than something else, also apparently desirable, also at hand.

  The most significant implication of all, perhaps, is that no single thing i
s an automatic bearer of happiness. In fact, things may not have much to do with happiness at all. It is a lesson needing dearly to be learned in a recession-ridden economy long duped on the notion of affluence founded on debt as the key to the perfect life. If anything, the compulsive need for things — the next thing, the new thing, the expensive thing, the best thing — may be exactly why happiness is the great new question of a time caught mid-air in a whirlwind of things and dashed against the rock that is reality.

  Happiness:

  The Gift of Nature

  chapter 9

  Happiness and the Brain

  Happiness may well be one of the most studied, most analyzed, most unclear dimensions of human development in all of history. It is certainly one of the oldest concepts of all times that has been committed to human analysis. Every culture has considered it. Many have tried to manipulate it by means both internal and external. People have used both personal control and mood-changing drugs to make their worlds perfect, to make their lives “happy.” All societies have considered the question of happiness from the point of view of one discipline or another from the sciences to the humanities. The greatest minds of every society have reflected on the question in every possible way.

  The point is obvious: our own concern with happiness is neither narcissistic nor sybaritic, not common simply to these times or a singular sign of the dissipation of our own generation. Happiness is not now, and never has been, of small concern to the human race.

  Aristotle, in 323 ce, put it boldly: “Happiness,” he said, “is the meaning and purpose of life, the whole aim and end of human existence.” It is very difficult to say more than that about any subject. It is impossible to ignore happiness. But if happiness, as the great Greek philosopher said, is “the whole aim and end of human existence,” then its spiritual impact must also be a cataclysmic one. Perhaps Pierre Teilhard de Chardin was right when he said, “Joy is the infallible sign of the presence of God.”

  It’s not surprising, then, to see the subject referred to by every serious thinker on the planet: by poets and writers, by philosophers and spiritual figures, by whole religious traditions and scientists of every ilk. The only difference in our own time is that now there is a new tool with which to examine not only happiness itself but the very instincts and intuitions of the great minds of generations before us. The social conclusions of past ages about “melancholy” and “happiness” are now themselves being put to the test by the new sciences of neurology, biology, pharmacology, psychology, and genetics.

  In past ages, depression was a curse, but, at the same time, happiness was hardly an expectation of the masses. Only in recent times, in our own era, has happiness come to be considered a “right.”

  More than that, in our time, happiness has also become a great deal more than a philosophical or theological question; it has become big business. We sell conferences and seminars and workshops and therapy sessions on the subject. We promise it with diets and web sites. We guarantee it with large cars and exotic travel packages.

  But we seldom, if ever, define it or reflect on it or explain it as a life goal for children despite the fact that happiness has now become the coin of the realm.

  The “pursuit of happiness,” in fact, is fast becoming one of the measures of effective governments. It has become a standard of human development that trumps the more stock social values of social approval or industriousness. Two centuries ago children, even in the West, were still being treated as small adults made to be used by the adult population around them and put to some kind of physical labor long before puberty. They were simply part of the workforce in a world of slaves and serfs. In some parts of the world, little or nothing has changed in this regard. In other cultures, though — in our own — the responsibility for raising “happy” children, for instance, is now an entirely new focus for an entirely new era of both educators and parents.

  Having gone beyond an overriding concern for survival, at least in the industrialized world with its accumulations of wealth and devotion to convenience, we have turned our attention to the issues of self-expression. We have become our own objects of concern. We have begun in the last hundred years to study ourselves. And it is that kind of study that is changing things, not only for us as individuals, but for our understanding of the needs and responses of human beings everywhere.

  Indeed, we are far beyond what early writers would have considered the study of happiness.

  Confucius, 2,500 years ago, was the first major figure to build a philosophy of government on the notion that the human being has the inherent power of self-transformation. We can, he argued, become more than we seem to be. We can change. On the individual he rested the responsibility for self-fulfillment. It was a defining moment.

  This whole notion of choice and change, of agency and responsibility for our own lives was a revolutionary position. It continued over the centuries to confront the notion that any peoples existed solely to be controlled by another. Confucius’s notion of essential human freedom provided the kind of foundation that would allow — in fact, require — that the subject of personal happiness be explored.

  After all, if we each have the capacity to change our attitudes and goals in life, then isn’t it just possible that it is as much what we bring to life from within ourselves as it is the amount of things we get in life that may account for the degree of happiness we call our own? Isn’t it possible that we are the architects of our own sense of fulfillment in life?

  Mencius, over 2,300 years ago, emphasized the role of the mind in the quest for happiness. To nourish the “sprouts of virtue” in ourselves — sympathy and the ability to identify with the feelings of others — he insisted, would lead both to sagehood, that is, to spiritual recognition, in society and to personal happiness.

  For all three of these earliest of thinkers, Confucius, Mencius, and Aristotle, the role of the mind in the cultivation of the self and the achievement of happiness is predominant.

  Nevertheless, at that time who could really be sure of ideas like that? Who could really know what was going on in the human mind? Who until our own century and its technological leap into neurology, genetics, humanistic biology, psychiatry, and psychology could really know? Then, suddenly, the mind itself became an organ accessible to exploration and experiment. More than that, the relation between the functions of brain and body could, for the first time in history, not only be deduced but could also now be seen with our own eyes.

  It was a new moment in human history. If the brain had something to do with emotional responses — like happiness, for instance — then those responses might well be under our control. Or, better yet, those responses might actually be built right into us.

  The implications of that kind of thinking turn the commonplace notion of happiness in a different direction entirely. If happiness is a matter of the mind, then no amount of accumulation, of things alone, could be guaranteed to affect it.

  The two positions are overwhelming for their clarity: either the mind has nothing to do with happiness and we are all victims of our environment, or the mind has a great deal to do with happiness and we all have the capacity to deal with it. We are, then, creatures who can, at one level at least, be happy in prison or, on the contrary, despairing in a mansion.

  Whatever the answer to that situation, the relationship between mind and matter has everything to do with being happy.

  From collecting things to delight us, the human race has moved in our lifetime to the discovery that happiness has at least as much to do with what’s in us as it does with what’s around us. If that’s true, it’s a breathtaking revelation. It may explain how it is that people who become paraplegics can be as happy after the accident as they were before. It may also explain how it is that no amount of change in our environments may necessarily change our attitudes for the better. It might help us to understand how it is that some people aren’t happy unless they’re
unhappy. It may lead us to see ourselves in a clearer, better light — and then do something to construct our own happiness rather than idle our lives away waiting for someone or something to do it for us.

  The fact is that some basics of social science have become painfully clear: almost one-fifth of the adult population of the United States experiences some kind of depression in their lifetime. Almost 10 percent of U.S. children, too, will go through a major depressive episode by the time they are 14.1This is clearly a culture that needs to give more attention to the meaning and modes of unhappiness.

  But some basics of anatomy have also become clear. Since 1949, thanks to the work of the psychiatrist Dr. Robert Heath, scientists have known that the human brain itself, when stimulated, can produce, change, and affect the range and display of human emotions as well as simply the personal experience of happiness.

  And that was only the beginning.

  A full one-third of the brain could be seen under neurological examination to be associated with the expression of emotions and happiness, as well as responsible for producing depression or garden variety sadness or deep, deep and unexplainable melancholy.2

  The point is that human emotions, in the healthy brain, have something to do with the way we think, with the ideas we fixate on, with the way we look at the situations we’re in. Happiness, in other words, has something to do with choice.

  Emotions, we now know, are not simply a kind of spiritual angst or a soul full of glee. Emotions have a physical dimension to them. They are not simply the fleeting mist of bodiless feelings. They exist. They can be located in the geography of the brain. And they can also be disrupted there.

  Suddenly words like “hormones,” “endorphins,” “neurotransmitters,” and “adrenaline” were part of a new vocabulary of the self. Pharmaceutical drugs, surgery, exercise, happiness genes, and electrodes that read brain reactions became the link between Aristotle’s claim that happiness was “the whole purpose and meaning of life” and the human attempt to achieve it.