Happiness Read online

No, life is not about some of us laying down our lives so the rest of us can be happy. Life is about making happiness possible for everyone while we make personal happiness the individual responsibility of each of us.

  “I put before you life and death,” the Hebrew scripture reads. “Choose life.”

  What really being “alive and happy” means for us and why we do not choose it are questions enough for a lifetime. And they must not, for all our sakes, be ignored.

  We are, we must remember, “made for bliss.”

  But where will we begin, perhaps, to find out how to pursue our own happiness without encroaching on the happiness factor in the lives of those around us?

  Positive psychology may well be the beginning of a very new answer to those questions. This era’s positive psychologists are at least, for the first time in the history of psychology, devoted to pursuing those questions for us.

  chapter 14

  The Foundations of Happiness

  At one level, it’s all getting clearer now. At another level this thing called happiness is not clear at all.

  Global surveys tell us that people everywhere are seeking happiness, are conscious of it in ways seldom heard of before. Clearly, this generation — our generation — does not take unhappiness for granted. On the contrary. Unhappiness, at this time in human history, is not a state to be accepted as normal.

  We know as few people before us have ever known — the slaves of the world, the outcasts of the world, the serfs and peasants, the laborers and leftovers of society — that happiness is part of our birthright. Now we also know that what drives us to go on pursuing this holy grail, however dismal our efforts, however slight our successes may seem, is that the capacity for happiness is part of our very physiology. But if we are to believe the kinds of answers people give to the question on social surveys, happiness seems to mean different things to different people. Even to different nations. So is there really such a thing as happiness at all?

  Maybe, if the data is to be taken at face value, happiness is only a series of satisfying experiences, none of them essential, all of them simply fleeting sensations that gratify some sort of personal taste.

  And yet, neurologists tell us now that we are actually made for happiness, that we are more than blood and bone, more than workers and mates, more than male and female. We are happiness factories. Endorphins — what neurologists call “the pleasure principle” — are a real substance that we carry in our real bodies, however poor we may be at cultivating it in our souls.

  But even if that’s true, how will we know happiness when we see it? What is it, exactly, that we’re looking for? We have, after all, known multi-millionaires who sank into depression or drowned themselves in drugs just to get away from the burdens of their wealth.

  We know celebrities who rose to the top of their field and then wrote books about the terror and the emotional torture of it all.

  We know national leaders across every age who reached the pinnacles of power and then died raging in underground bunkers or stricken to the ground with the diseases of the debauchery their power brought them.

  We know people down the street in every neighborhood in the country who looked like the perfect family but whose children ended their lives fractured and mentally maimed from the pain of being perfect — or even being normal — in the perfect family.

  We know now, in other words, that happiness may be an actual possibility, configured in us so that we may learn to live life with all the energy and joy it deserves. But, at the same time, it is just as obvious to us that happiness, though possible — inbred in fact — is not guaranteed.

  If anything, we have learned from these types what happiness is not. But we’re not sure why. After all, all those things — money and power, fame and status — look like enough to make anybody happy, don’t they?

  The answer, of course, depends on what we think happiness is and where we look for it.

  It’s finding what’s missing in the obvious that is the life-long task. And who knows what that is?

  In 1998, in a move that surprised the psychological world for its clarity, its simplicity and, in a sense, its conspicuousness, Martin Seligmann, in his presidential address to the American Psychological Association, challenged the members of the association to a new field of thought. How is it, he asked them, that psychology, now over one hundred years old, has concentrated almost entirely on curing unhappiness rather than on training people in happiness? How is it that the body of psychological research concentrates more on happiness gone wrong, on negativity and its nefarious effects, than it does on developing the capacity for happiness?

  That challenge, in the light of this era’s new neurological findings and steadily increasing volume of discoveries on the chemistry of the brain, has spawned an entirely new field of psychotherapeutic research and treatment known simply as positive psychology.

  But this new work on happiness is anything but simple and definitely not simplistic. On the contrary, it requires an entirely new way of looking at life, at the ways we’re meant to live it, and at the process of training ourselves to see life more as an exercise in gratitude than as a problem to be solved.

  Positive psychology stands on five findings common to research on happiness and happy people:

  First, happiness is the human being’s default mode. Negativity is an aberration of the natural aptitude in us for happiness. But innate as it may be, it nevertheless needs to be nourished and developed.

  Second, happiness and pleasure are not the same thing. Because something gives us momentary delight does not make it a bedrock of human happiness. Taste is temporary, excitement is temporary, sex is temporary, consumption is temporary, youth is temporary.

  Third, the natural happiness index in any human being can be raised but not necessarily permanently changed. There is in us a kind of “set-point” of happiness that comes and goes according to the situation but which does not far exceed its own norm. If I register 7 on my internal happiness scale the day they deliver my Porsche, it will, nevertheless, recede to my usual 5 point response within days, despite the fact that I still own the car. The newness of both the item and my response to it wear off, the pleasure meter stabilizes at the level of the familiar, and, unless I myself can stimulate the meter, I will remain fairly constant. Happiness does not grow without tending; it stabilizes.

  Fourth, a rising body of research confirms that there are processes which, if they are consciously developed in us, can equip us to live in less turmoil and with more joy. Consciously attending to basic “happiness exercises” or mantras or perspectives on life can move or maintain the human happiness compass due north. The mood swings become less violent; the turmoils of change subside.

  Fifth, there are basic and fundamental qualities of life that not only increase our chance of happiness but protect us against the life-numbing paralysis of external pain.1

  It comes down to this: happiness is within our grasp, but it’s not free. It doesn’t just happen. It takes a reorientation of our own mental habits to both realize it and maintain it. Most of all, the achievement of happiness requires a commitment to bend the arc of our lives in the direction of the things that count in life rather than toward the trinkets that decorate it.

  Positive psychologists urge us to train ourselves to live and think positively. Not dishonestly — if life is a struggle at the moment, denying that is not healthy either. The better thing is to find in the dark the slivers of light that enable us to remember that life is a blessing — even now — however clear its burdens at the moment.

  Positive psychology faces us with scientific data that confirms what the philosophers have contended for centuries. It confronts us with the ideals the spiritual masters of all traditions have taught throughout time. It brings us face-to-face with ourselves and asks us each to consider what must change in us if we are really to be as happy as we claim we wan
t to be.

  Matthew Arnold, the poet, said of life, “Life is not a having and a getting, but a being and a becoming.”

  It is in the “being and becoming” that life is lived. Whatever now is for us, life is about becoming something more even as we go through every day. The problem lies in determining how to be happy and how to sustain that happiness as we go.

  Obviously, simply getting things that other people say are essential to happiness is both specious and limited. First, things wear out, go out of style, get lost, break, and disappear. Second, the surveys tell us only what people believe will make them happy, not whether the satisfaction that comes with having them is long-lived. And though science tells us that the capacity for happiness is neurological and medicine tells us that happy people live longer, are healthier, succeed more often, and enjoy life more than unhappy people, neither of them tell us what happiness itself is ­really about. Obviously these dimensions of life, considered alone, are insufficient. They tell us that happiness is possible; they don’t tell us how to get it. Or, even yet, what it really is.

  The question is a simple one: What is it that we are to strive for as far as positive psychology is concerned, and how do they say we can become happy?

  chapter 15

  The Essence of Happiness:

  What It Is Not

  One of the most important insights in the pursuit of happiness is the ability to distinguish between happiness and delight. Delight is a collection of momentary events — a day at an amusement park, the day I got my first job, the day we bought our first house — that set off a chain reaction of excitement and gratification in us. Happiness, on the other hand, is a general and pervading and long-lived sense of well-being, of right-mindedness, of soulful contentment with life. Delight comes in the wave of giggles and smiles and enthrallment that come and go with the going of the moments. It is the crescendos of life that remind us how alive life can really be. But a collection of positive moments, Martin Seligman, the founder of positive psychology, emphasizes, is not the final computation of happiness.

  Positive feelings, however valid at the moment of reaction, do not make for happiness. Grieving widows can smile at a grandchild and mean it, love the floral arrangement on the casket, and be grateful to turn over the particulars of the burial service to an undertaker. That collection of single reactions, however, is no substitution for the feelings of abandonment, fear, despair, or anger that lurk underneath in the atrium of her soul as she deals with the sudden loss of a loving spouse.

  The plunge into alcohol or drugs, travel and gambling, money and parties may all serve for the moment to distract us from our difficulties, to deny our distress. They are immediate anodynes to failure or humiliation, rejection or pain, but they cannot heal any of them. They provide momentary highs, perhaps, but as their initial delight wanes and the demand for pleasure increases, the “cures” themselves bring with them the kind of pain that comes from satiation of the senses. Just like everything else, they pale with use. Too much alcohol and drugs may make a person ecstatic the first time around, but every use after that requires more and more of the same substance to get the weakest of reactions until the mind is destroyed by what, at first, beguiled it.

  The truth is that we can eat only so much filet mignon before the very thought of another bite of steak sickens us. We can run only so far away so often until the loss of home and the novelty of hotels wears off. We can drink only so much before what gave us energy makes it impossible for us to function at all.

  If anything must be dealt with on the journey to happiness, then, it is the deep need to come to recognize the difference between happiness and pleasure. We need to distinguish immediate reactions from lasting effects. We need to come to recognize the kind of satisfactions that fill up our souls with a sense of the fullness of life and the kind of experiences that drain us quickly of our capacity for joy even as they promise it.

  The truth is, positive psychologists warn us, that even major and life-changing events, the ones that raise our happiness level above our daily average — like marriage or winning the lottery or having a child or getting the promotion — are not permanent. They are simply isolated events. And, like any event, the exhilaration they bring with them fades like the memory of the event — only even more rapidly. We sink quickly back to the level of our average selves. The pride in the new house wears off with the tax bills. The fun in the convertible fails to satisfy when the trips become routine. The new promotion becomes little more than habit, and quickly. Nor is the commonplace effect of momentary pleasures a mere matter of personality types. Routine is the enemy of everything physical, including back scratching.

  Researchers from the United States, Great Britain, and France report that just as happiness itself is physical, so it seems is its level. Basing their claims on a twenty-year analysis of the life satisfaction of hundreds of people from Germany,1 the economists discovered that adaptation — the tendency of people to adjust to new circumstances, good or bad — and return to a basic happiness level is a given. This “thermostat of happiness” common to people everywhere keeps human emotions within the bound­aries peculiar to basic personality types as well as to individuals. Extroverts, as a rule, have higher average happiness levels than introverts, whose responses are normally slower and more reflective.

  We rise and dip, decline and recover, despair and forget at regular levels and with common speed. Time does heal us of the traumas of our lives. Experiences can buoy us. But in the end, the widow and the paraplegic, the lottery winner and the newly elected politician all go back eventually and, in most cases, to their normal level of happiness, whatever their most recent excitement, however debilitating their most recent tragedy.

  Conclusion: happiness is not an event. Events are no measure of basic happiness. Physical sensations do not last. They are not of the essence of happiness.

  But if that is the case, then the miracle of instantaneous happiness is not to be found by racing through life, wildly pursuing one high after another. The fifth marriage will, in large part, be no different in the long run than the first. The act of marriage itself, with all the romancing and giddiness, all the new rush of adrenaline and hope, will be no more lasting after the last marriage than it was after the first. No, a rush of adrenaline is not what happiness is about. Happiness is about the formation of essential attitudes toward life. It’s about reaching the height of human development. It’s about living a life that’s meaningful. It’s about everything Aristotle said thousands of years ago that it was: it’s about a life of meaning and purpose. Ours.

  It’s those things — meaning and purpose — that must be examined. It is the answer to the questions of what gives meaning to my life and what my life means to others that is the subject matter of life. It’s we ourselves and what we bring to every situation in life that are at issue in the measure of happiness. It’s what we pursue that will determine whether getting it will make a difference to our own satisfaction with life or not.

  And it is here that positive psychology begins to depart from society’s identification of happiness with the accumulation of things, of titles, of power, of money, of fame, of excitement.

  Positive psychology leads us to ask ourselves what we really want out of life and how we think we can get it and what we intend to do with it. Now it’s not simply wanting to be happy that is important. What is important is what we believe happiness is all about. It’s about asking ourselves what it means to define life as “good.”

  At this point, positive psychology requires that we begin to take stock. If the particulars of life, neither the highs nor the lows, can’t really anoint us into the ranks of the enduringly happy, then what does, if anything?

  At this point, we begin to define for ourselves what we ourselves see as the purpose of life in general, and as the purpose of our own little lives in particular. We start to understand what it is about the very way we go about lif
e that has something to do with our own capacity for happiness as well as the effect we have on the happiness of others around us.

  We come to realize that it is not just having the children that counts; it is raising them to become a gift of new love and goodness in the world that, in the end, makes parenting the acme of a person’s life. It is not just having a job that will sustain our sense of happiness in life; it’s having a job that enables us to look back on life knowing that what we did or the way we did it made the world a better place. It’s not just being gifted or wealthy or powerful that makes a person happy; it’s what we did to enrich life for everyone we touched with what we ourselves were given that allows us to heave a sigh of satisfaction as we do whatever it is we do, however stiff the course, however high the climb, however difficult the odds. Happiness is about being more contented with what we give than with what we have.

  “You traverse the world in search of happiness,” the poet Horace wrote in the first century, “which is within the reach of everyone. A contented mind confers it on all.”

  But if the momentary experience of great events, great achievements, great treasures, great power is not guaranteed to give us lasting happiness, what does? And how do we get it? Positive psychology is only beginning to answer those questions, but it already has some clear ideas of precisely what that is.

  chapter 16

  Happiness:

  The Way to More of It

  In their search for the common ground of happiness — the state of mind that, like a medieval alchemist, turns the dross of life into gold — positive psychologists have identified basic traits that make for a life at once gratifying and fulfilled.

  The important thing to remember is that though personality traits are innate predispositions to particular reactions in us, they are not psychological death sentences. They do not doom us to social rigidity. They do not condemn us to an unyielding repertoire of emotional responses. Just because we got our way once by staging a breathtaking array of mindless anger does not mean that we are doomed to be emotional children all our lives.