Happiness Read online

  chapter 12

  Happiness Is a Value

  To search for happiness with any hope of finding it in the end, it’s necessary to ask ourselves an important question. It’s easy to say that happiness is a value. But the real question is, do I value it? Do I really care enough about happiness to do what it will take for me to achieve it?

  The answer to the question of whether or not I value happiness lies in determining what kind of things on which I spend most of my time. Am I happier — more contented, more satisfied with life, more lost in the flow of it than bothered by the petty parts of it — because of the ways I’m spending my time? When what I am doing is the best of what I can be, happiness — that sense of fulfillment and purpose, of meaning and fulfillment — is surely within reach. The cellist of Sarajevo, playing his instrument dressed in black tie and tails atop a mound of bombed-out rubble because it was the only way he knew to lift the spirit and touch the souls of the battered and beaten people of the city begging for bread — this is an icon of ecstatic happiness in a brutally unhappy world. It is the ultimate sense of purpose in life, of gift to be given, of a person’s awareness of the reason for which they have been born.

  There is something about finding more than myself in what I do that not only makes me feel happy but that changes all the rest of my life. A young set designer in New York City, haunted by the pictures of stunned and frightened children in Haiti, created geodesic domes to relieve the housing needs of refugees from the earthquake there. She had never done anything of the kind before but, totally intent on the project, discovered that she loved designing them, assembling them, taking them to Haiti herself. More than that, she discovered in herself a fierce commitment to justice in her struggle to get the domes through customs there while homeless and orphaned children slept in mud and rain that changed her life direction as well as theirs.

  What we learn about ourselves when we do what makes us happy — the sense of self-expression, the drive to learn, the need to share, the joy of giving — can be discovered no other way. Most of all, what I learn about the rest of my life because of it can be the turning point in my life. Einstein, playing with numbers in a telegraph office, discovered a great mathematician within him. Grandma Moses, Anna Mary Robertson Moses, dabbling in paints in her 70s, discovered a previously unknown artist in herself. An eye doctor friend of mine discovered the pioneer doctor in himself on a trip to South America and has gone back, built clinics, and, every year since, trained others to work in the villages there, too. I myself, doing lectures on the process of social change as a community administrator, came face to face again with the long-suppressed writer in me.

  When I do what I love, that is not a job; that is a life.

  If I am seeking happiness but continue to work at a job I do not like, simply because it earns more money, despite the fact that I find little or no personal satisfaction doing it, am I really seeking happiness or am I spending my time trying to substitute something else for the joy of really living the life I’m supposed to have?

  If I am seeking happiness but continue to work at a job I do not like because I cannot find another one and cannot afford to give this one up, I may not be able to do everything I want to do. But surely I could do some of it. That means, of course, that I will need to make room in my life to do both the job and at least some of what I really want to do on the side.

  To see something as a value is one thing. To value it enough to give myself to doing it is something else entirely.

  We are meant to be happy, yes, but the real happiness project lies in determining why we are doing what impedes our achieving it. When I am doing exactly what I do not want to do, it’s time to take stock. What else is it that is more important to me than doing what brings out in me the best I have to give and gives back to me the happiness I seek?

  Why did I study math, for instance, when literature is my love? Is it because my father insisted that I could make more money with a math degree than with a literature degree? Why did I become a lawyer when I always wanted to work with children? Whose idea of happiness did I take on — and why? Is it fear of failure or poverty or change that impels me? Or is it the need for social approval? Or is there something I dread to lose as much as there is something else I want to gain? And, in the end, what has happened to the real me as a result of it? What is it that I value more than I value my happiness? And why?

  The questions are life-changing ones. They can lead me to recompute my life, to reconfigure my direction. In the end, I may remain exactly where I am, but at least I will know what it is that keeps me there. I can finally stop blaming someone else for my life. I can take responsibility for what I’m doing and in that, at least, feel the glow that comes with being a conscious adult. I will know then that, in the end, what I am doing with my life is entirely of my own doing, my own choice. And I do choose it. Or it may finally indicate that it isn’t happiness I’ve been about at all as much as it was prestige or excitement, pleasure or status, money or power.

  The psychiatrist Steven Reiss identifies sixteen desires that define our personalities and, he says, are our “keys to happiness.” They are acceptance, order, power, independence, idealism, vengeance, physical activity, honor, family, status, romance, eating, saving, social contact, tranquility, and curiosity or knowledge.1 Unless we somehow satisfy five or six of our most important desires, he argues, whatever else we do in life, we cannot possibly get to the point where an underlying discomfort with life ceases to plague us and we come to see ourselves as happy.

  Happiness, it is clear, requires a great deal of self-knowledge. Somewhere along the way in life, if we really want to be happy, we need to begin to be ourselves rather than clones of someone else. We need to listen carefully to our own excuses for not doing what we say we will do or want to do. We need to press ourselves to honesty. “I just don’t have the time,” we say. “If I don’t do these things, no one else will,” we argue in defense of doing one thing rather than another. “I don’t know how,” we moan. But, if we’re honest with ourselves, we don’t make the time, we won’t let some things go so more important things can be done, we don’t try to find out how to do what we say we want to do. Somewhere along the line, we gave up on the happiness we said we were seeking. We abandoned our own development. We accepted someone else’s dreams for our own.

  Sometimes the years slip by, however, before we even begin to realize the great gaping gaps in life. Then, we look back and discover that “happiness” never really was a value for us. Instead, we were trained to do what would give other people happiness.

  We were trained to value hard work, for instance, because our father feared the coming of another depression and insisted that our work become our life.

  We were trained to value obedience and discipline because deference to others was the key to approval and systemic success and even holiness — despite the fact that, as John Templeton said, “We would have been holier people if we had been angrier oftener.”

  We were trained to seek romance because marriage was all a woman could do, and so we never did find out whether we could have really been a dancer, a business woman, or a politician or not.

  We were trained to be strong and independent men and so never did manage to create deep personal relationships and have, as a result, felt lonely all our lives.

  It isn’t that all of those things, too, don’t have value or aren’t worth developing. But if those things take me off the course of developing my own gifts or desires, then happiness becomes a figment of my imagination and I spend my life going through the motions of being human — but never completely. What I’m doing doesn’t fit. What I’m doing doesn’t mean anything, not only to me, but to anyone else much either. It doesn’t develop me and it doesn’t change the world. All it does is supply surge after surge of momentary excitement for what doesn’t satisfy for long. The gadgets all get upgraded and I’m left behind, thirsting for anoth
er one that will only outgrow itself — and soon.

  Then, my drug of choice becomes things that do not satisfy and can never satisfy. They actually derail the very search I think I’m on. They do not, as the philosopher Aristotle points out, satisfy my highest human function, reason, and they do not give meaning, purpose, and direction to my life. They do little for me and even less for others. I lurch along through life, grasping at things that sift through my fingers like fairy dust. Looking for happiness, I find only paltry pleasures, worthless in the short run, unworthy of a life in the long run. Things that lead only to a palsy of the soul.

  Happiness is the value, science says, that is built into us in a special way. No other value — money, success, order, power — is built into the brain. No other value can ever take the place of the desire for happiness. They can, at best, only guide the search in such a way that we finally find the outlets for desires that really fit our abilities and satisfy our needs and enable us to leave behind our footprints in the sand.

  In a culture that sets out to create a desire for things — money and status symbols and accumulation — things can easily become an uneasy substitute for the happiness we seek. They become a diversion along the way, a lay-by on the road to the discovery of the self.

  But giving our lives to those things only holds us back and slows us down from finding what we’re really intent on finding and meant to be. They diminish the value of the self with every lesser choice we make. And down deep we know it. We know the emptiness and the farce of it. We know we’re pretending. We know we’ve swallowed ourselves as surely as Greek gods swallowed their children.

  We lose sight of what it means to become the fullness of the self. We spend our lives wishing we were happy rather than ourselves doing whatever it takes to realize our best self, to do our best, most meaningful work, to leave the world better because we have been here, to be happy.

  And all because we knew happiness was a value but we did not value it enough to become it. Instead of going on until we find ourselves really,

  really happy with who we are and what we do, in the end life for us remains unfinished. The ultimate purpose of it fades in meaning, and we wonder why we are walking instead of running through life, head up and laughing.

  The important thing to realize is that it is never too late to attend to the missing parts of the self. It is never impossible to taste the wells within us from which we have yet to drink. It is never too late to become what we are meant to become — for our sake, of course, but for the sake of the world around us, as well. Mother Teresa left one religious order after eighteen years there to begin her own. Candy Crowley, after years as correspondent for multiple other programs, did not become host of her own Sunday morning television show, “State of the Nation,” until her early 60s. Ronald Reagan went into politics at the age of 55 and was re-elected President of the United States at the age of 73.

  Whatever piece it is that is still missing in us is waiting somewhere for us to find it. And the rest of the world is waiting for us to find it, too.

  The discovery of endorphins, the pleasure principle, and the center of emotions in the human brain was one of the most important learnings in science in the twentieth century. It made happiness an imperative. It makes understanding the meaning of real happiness the fundamental exercise of life. Finally, learning to value our own happiness may be one of the most important lessons we ever learn — both for our sake and for the happiness of others around us, as well.

  One thing is for sure: trying to drown the call to happiness in alcohol, or outrun it in travel, or avoid it by distance, or smother it in depression may muffle the cry of the soul for happiness, at least for a while, but none of those distorted responses to the human drive for human fulfillment can possibly silence it forever.

  Happiness:

  A Commitment to Choose

  chapter 13

  Psychology and Happiness

  One of the more interesting questions in the history of psychology may well be, what took them so long to figure it out? Happiness, neuropsychologists are now telling us, is of the very essence of being born human. We’re made for it and meant to have it.

  In fact, the quest for human happiness is the basic human enterprise. Every academic discipline on earth, ever since the beginning of recorded time, has struggled with the question of the nature of human happiness, of what it is and how to get it. Every discipline except one, that is. Ironically enough, only psychology — the discipline that devotes itself entirely to the development of the human mind and personality — came to the subject slowly.

  A relatively new discipline, founded only at the beginning of the twentieth century, psychology began simply as the study of human consciousness, of cognition, vision, hearing, and nerve conduction. Only later did this new discipline set out to apply to the study of the human psyche — of mind, thought, and behavior — the same kind of scientific rigor that had by then become common to the chemical and physical sciences.

  But this emphasis on the structures of the human mind, as important as it may be, soon broadened beyond the question of the physical makeup of the human brain to the consideration of the very purpose of the human mind, the functions of the human mind, the subterranean processes of the human mind, and its role in human behavior.

  It was a long journey from William Wundt’s study of the effect of audio and visual stimuli on the human mind in his lab at the University of Leipzig in Germany in 1897 to the psychology of human behavior and the emergence of the positive psychology of our own time.

  The irony, of course, is that, until now, psychology has dealt with the dregs of unhappiness, trying to identify its sources, cure its pains, heal its wounds and diminish its consequences but, at the same time, has done relatively little to explore the very nature and sources of happiness. Happiness the psychologist seemed to take for granted. The norm was happiness, of course, but few if anybody asked exactly what that meant for the rest of us.

  It was one thing to cure the damages that resulted from unhappiness; it was another thing entirely to help people to avoid psychic traumas before they set in. Happiness, however, in a discipline concentrated on pain, was on its own.

  The problem is that, in a society of fractured relationships and communal anonymity adrift in a culture of consumers who can no longer afford to keep stanching their psychic wounds with things, we no longer have the luxury of ignoring the very life breath of our psyches. Unhappiness is taking an enormous toll on us both personally and socially in this century. It is breaking out in bursts of alienation and violence, of ruined relationships and broken families, of physical illness and psychological breakdowns. The data is conclusive: if happiness is indeed of the essence of our humanity and, as Aristotle says, “the whole purpose of life,” then we must give ourselves over to learning what it is and how we might achieve it.

  Happiness is not simply a private and personal gift. Happiness is a social responsibility. My happiness — or lack of it — affects the people around me as surely as it affects me. When I am depressed, when my dark mood oozes out into the world around me, I poison the environment for everyone else.

  Life is not a matter only of attending to my own comfort and good feeling. Happiness has something to do with what I bring into every dimension of my life: my unhappiness makes for an unhappy family — mine. My workplace suffers when my productivity is clouded by anger and depression. My awareness of the needs of the rest of the world goes to nothing while I struggle with my own woundedness and do little or nothing to attend to anyone else’s.

  Happiness is a social imperative. Unhappiness is a social disease.

  “That’s just the way I am” is not an acceptable answer to those who try to help us move beyond one mood swing after another. We do not have the right to manipulate the environment emotionally in such a way that only our feelings count. If everyone around us is required to cater to moods we refuse to explo
re, then, for their own mental health, they may be forced, however much they would like to like us, to put distance between us and themselves.

  Loneliness and isolation are among the by-products of the kind of unhappiness that overflows into the public arena around us. Our children stop visiting. Our neighbors stop asking us over. Our colleagues fail to include us in a round of after work socials.

  Adolescent moodiness, those years when we are at the mercy of our undisciplined and raging hormones, is a stage of life we are meant to outgrow. It is a period of learning how to control our responses, how to negotiate our way through life rather than pout our way through life. No one is meant to bog down there indefinitely.

  When negativity takes hold of us, when we find ourselves becoming more and more a slave of emotional outbursts far beyond the merits of the issue at hand, when we rave too long or too hard about what is more normal to ignore, that’s when we need to look again at whether or not we have ever become emotionally adult, the fullness of ourselves, or are simply ranting at the world because we have not. Happiness is not narcissism; it is a moral responsibility.

  Life is not meant to be about victimization and sacrificial lambs. Life is not about being willing to bear the impossible simply because others either refuse to bear their share of it or put their emotional burdens on others. The mother, for instance, who refuses to allow a married son to really leave home is both crippled and crippling. The husband who expects to be waited on and so expects the working wife to do two jobs, the house as well as her career, creates unhappiness where happiness should be if both bore their family responsibilities equally. The child who expects parents to keep coming up with extra money for him rather than control his own budget clings to a childhood that could well destroy the rest of his life.