Happiness Read online

  Personality traits are nothing more than personal tendencies or immediate reactions to the world around us. They are clues to what drives our customary social responses. They are the default position of our social chemistry. They are not psychological cement. We can change them anytime we so desire.

  I have a vivid recollection of becoming irritated at a teenage friend who thought that having a good time in life was to tickle someone to the point of pain. When, despite my begging, she didn’t quit, I grabbed her arm in the swimming pool dressing room and, helped by a combination of leverage and a wet floor, flipped her up against the wall. I heard her head hit the back of the tile and watched her slide down to a crumpled position in front of the bench. I made an instant decision: if this girl were not hurt, I promised, I would never do anything like that again. And I haven’t. It was an instant decision and it was forever.

  We all develop a repertoire of responses that seem to work for us under stress. If I begin to cry every time the light of the world goes out for me, I may discover at the age of three that the world will rush to my assistance and change my life for me. It will get me chocolate milk instead of white, the stuffed dog instead of a nap, mommy instead of the baby-sitter. But if I’m still throwing temper tantrums by the time I’m fifteen or thirty, I may well find that people stop responding at all. Nothing changes. In fact, inside of me, the frustration, the depression, the sense of rejection only make my world worse.

  Then the foot stomping needs to stop. Then I need to develop other ways of dealing with the implacable or unsatisfying world in which I live and in which no one is listening to me anymore. Not only is it possible to change, I discover; it is a necessary part of the process called “growing up” or “self-criticism.”

  The point is that we are not doomed to repeat the processes we’ve developed along the way to enable us to manage life. We can, in fact, and do, tweak those behaviors all the way through life. The foot stomping becomes a pout, becomes an argument, becomes a conversation, becomes a negotiation, becomes a smile or a laugh or a compromise. Because if it doesn’t, it becomes a series of job losses or a divorce, alienation or a lifetime of therapy that cannot change me till I am willing, seeking, ready to change myself.

  We all know shy people who outgrew shyness, angry people who came to control their outbursts, insensitive people who learned to curb their judgments, check their sarcasm, contain their tears. We remember what it took to bridle our own tendency to emotional excess as we grew up.

  We know that our first reactions to anything are only that: first, yes; necessary or compulsive, no. The higher our degree of emotional intelligence, the greater our intuition for the needs of the moment, the more likely we are to temper those responses in us that stand to make bad situations worse and good situations fraught with tension.

  There is, then, a link between genetics, the genes we inherit biologically from our ancestors, and our own ability to develop within ourselves a state of well-being healthy enough to protect us from becoming our own obstacles to happiness. We are not doomed by our genes. They provide us with the raw material of life. But we may well be alerted by what we lack genetically to cultivate in ourselves the very dimensions of life we need if our own chances for happiness are to increase as life goes by.

  Happiness is something more than what we achieve in life. It rests as much on what we develop within ourselves as it does on the physical or social goods of life which we manage to accrue as life goes by. Which is why heaping up things does little or nothing for happiness. Taxi cab drivers and millionaires have been found to be within decimal points of one another on happiness scales.

  Happiness is that other part of us, that deeper part of us, that self-evaluation of us that points us beyond the mundane to the status of the angels. We find in happiness that bright, brief flash of what it means to be more than matter — but to be also the spirit that makes us fully human.

  But happiness is not a new question, and definitely not our question. It is the oldest question of a thinking human race. The Greek philosophers grappled with the question over and over again. And they came to the same conclusion that the briefest, most superficial review of our own life, the history of our own families, the spiritual truths of the ages, and our own most painful experiences prove true. Loud laughter, deep silence, great wealth, or public acclaim are not necessary signals of what it means to be “happy.” We have known it at the most abject levels of our lives, smiled through a good many deaths, found it in the love of others when we were suffering most physically.

  The fact is that there is a difference between the desire for pleasure and the desire to avoid pain, between hedonism and the attempt to find happiness and meaning in life. What the Greeks called eudaimonia — or good/godly spirit — is beyond the search for pleasure. It is the state of “human flourishing” that is far beyond the inclination to avoid pain. Eudaimonia is the sum total of what it means to live “the good life.”

  Eudaimonia, the state of being happy, of living “the good life,” Aristotle argued, is independent of wealth and beauty and physical conditions and state of life. It is a lesson dearly to be learned in our own time. “The gospel of success” — the notion that accumulation of the trinkets of life is a guarantee of God’s blessing, a sign of virtue — has taken many a finance manager to his ruin, destroyed too many marriages, misled too many talented young people to seek quick money rather than slow but certain growth. It changed Wall Street into a white-collared Las Vegas and wiped out pensions for a whole level of society — elderly, retired, tired of working — who nevertheless straightened their backs as they had done all their good lives and refused to be broken by the loss of the cosmetics of life.

  Happiness may, of course, have all those things, but not necessarily. More importantly, to be truly happy, we must live a life of clear purpose and high virtue — translated as the development of our greatest human strength, rationality, and our highest moral values. It is these, the Greeks say, that give a life deep meaning and eternal gratification.

  The hedonist or pleasure seeker seeks comfort. The eudaimonist or disciple of the good life lives for happiness, for a state of soul that transcends the sensual and seeks transformation. This is the person who is devoted to living life fully on every level — moral, ethical, and spiritual, as well as physical. These are people who go through pain and loss, through emotional tragedy and physical deprivation knowing that life is what happens in us, not to us.

  Hedonism is about the satisfying of the body. Happiness is about the satisfaction and flourishing of a soul in touch with what being alive is all about. It asks the question, why am I here? And it finds an answer that is about more than eating, sleeping, and possessing all the goods of the world. It finds an answer to life that is beyond the obsession of the isolate Narcissus with his own beauty.

  The distinctions between hedonism and happiness are more than rhetorical. They account for why it is that a superfluity of creature comforts is not necessarily synonymous with happiness, good as these may be. In fact, researchers insist that the more a person identifies having to have money with happiness, the less happy they are likely to be.

  These are people for whom enough is never enough. They are eaten up inside by the need to have more, always more, of the things that mark success but cannot guarantee it, as if accumulation were the infallible sign of human fulfillment. What we call “success,” either our own or someone else’s, may, then, be nothing more than the camouflage of our failure to become the wholeness of ourselves.

  But the line between hedonism and eudaimonia is, if nothing else, clear. Hedonism may, indeed, be within the grasp of those whose grasp is aimed at the frills of life, at its physical ornaments and decorations. The question is whether or not those who finally amass their desired amount of physical comforts will actually be happy. “A great fortune,” the Roman philosopher Seneca wrote, “is a great servitude.” And not without insight. It is
one thing to get things; it is another thing to go on maintaining them for the rest of our lives.

  Only the truly happy person, the person whose development of soul is at least as great as the development of bank accounts, can possibly sustain the kind of advances and reversals the average life involves. The round of deaths and illnesses, gains and losses, challenges and burdens, achievements and disappointments that every life encounters draws on the well of happiness within us, always threatening to deplete it, and yet, if we will, always adding to its internal strength and sense of purpose.

  Most people, the surveys tell us, are basically happy. And yet, most people go through one trial after another in life, interrupted only by the great joys of life that then, eventually, also become part of our burdens: the marriage that does not last, the baby that is chronically ill, the jobs that come and go, the dreams that are never fulfilled. How, then, can that natural resource of human joy be explained, understood, nourished in the face of the fluctuating emotional geography of life? Most of all, how can it be developed in us?

  The amount of scientific and social-scientific research on happiness in this day and age floods every field of human endeavor. One study after another amplifies or shades the research projects that have gone before it. Vocabularies change from one to another. The context of the studies shift from one arena to another. The disciplines involved range from one dimension of human concern across the entire spectrum of human activity. And yet, at base, most researchers inhabit a kind of common ground of conclusions.

  Happiness, real happiness, the research data from every discipline implies, is attainable. It is not confined to a single state of life, or a single race, or a single sex, or a single class. That’s the good news. But the rest of the news is that every one of us needs to cultivate those things in us that are misery-proof if we intend to survive our own small lives and common struggles. Happiness does not come free of cost. It does not come without a price. But it also does not come without great reward and abiding joy and the promise of light in the soul, whatever the darkness around us.

  But then what are its components? And what do we need to begin to train in ourselves in order to achieve it?

  chapter 17

  The Qualities of Happiness

  Genetics, scientists tell us, account for about 50 percent of the average happiness quotient. Which means, of course, that some people simply inherit the personality traits that are most conducive to the development of a happy life.

  Circumstances, the way things are for us right now in terms of emotional climate at home, social support around us, the necessities of life in reach of us, account, the scholars of happiness tell us, for only 10 percent of what we call happiness.

  The rest of what it takes to find joy in life, however — the other 40 percent of what it takes to make up the happiness factor in life — we must develop for ourselves.1

  Fortunately, thanks to the development of scientific interest in what happiness is all about, we have far better notions in this generation of what that entails than in any generation before us. In fact, happiness is a relative newcomer to the scene. Only in the late eighteenth century did the idea of happiness as a “right” find its way into the arenas of public thought.

  Thomas Jefferson, historians tell us, more than likely took some of his ideas for the American constitution from eighteenth-century English philosopher John Locke and Scottish moral philosopher Adam Smith. Where they talked about the right to “life and liberty and estate,” though, Jefferson substituted the notion of “happiness.” Human beings, Jefferson wrote, have the right to “life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness” — think personal development rather than “estate” or the financial security that comes with property. And he struck those words about economic prosperity in an era in which owning land meant that the wealthy owned people and status and, more than likely, political positions along with it. Happiness clearly meant more to Jefferson than those. More than that, he knew that happiness had to do with what it means to be human. Property does not.

  Even then, the concept lay largely ignored until our own time, when the scientific findings of the geography of happiness in the human brain unleashed a new and very real academic interest in the question of whether happiness is actually attainable, let alone universal.

  Researchers combed psychological literature but found little to support the notion of “happiness” as an attitude that could be considered a human property receptive to development. But with the findings of the malleability of the human brain, the growth and development of the brain itself, the locus of feelings that could be tweaked and changed and manipulated at the end of a surgical probe, scientists took another direction.

  They searched history and discovered a trail of interest in happiness that went all the way back to China and through a body of major philosophers of the Western world. Happiness, it seemed, was a major preoccupation of the human condition. But with the fixation on the subject came no diagrams of its sources or its ends.

  Finally, social scientists began to ask people themselves what they saw as happiness and what it was that made them happy. And out of it all, they were able to create surveys that tapped into the kinds of attitudes, activities, and goals that gave people a sense of the fulfilling and fulfilled life.

  Out of those responses across age groups, sexes, races, and nations, researchers drew the picture of the happy person.

  The language changes from index to index but, surprisingly enough, the pith of the systems doees not. It tells us that if we do not consider ourselves happy, then something is missing here. Something needs to be cultivated. There is some part of life to which we need to give more attention if our own life is to be whole.

  One of these studies, for instance, the Oxford Happiness Questionnaire (OHQ), identifies six major attributes that signal the happy person. The happy person, in the language of the OHQ, is high in social interaction, loves parenthood, enjoys a stable and satisfying marital status, is involved in some kind of religious practice or consciousness, has enough income to cover their survival needs, and spends a good amount of time with happy people.2

  What happens to the people who do not fit this profile — those who are not married or have no children, for whatever reason — the researchers do not say. The fact that a good many people are not married — are widowed or deliberately single or divorced — raises even more significant questions about happiness. Surely it assumes that we need to ask all of those people what their idea of happiness is and if they have it. It’s possible that these outliers from the “popular norm” may have a great deal to teach everybody else about the internal dimension of human development and its relationship to happiness. The OHQ certainly challenges Aristotle’s conclusion that real happiness is about meaning and purpose, not about particular lifestyles or social choices in life. More than that, it raises the question, deliberately or not, of whether the individual, as individual, can actually be happy on their own, inside themselves, independently of other social props.

  But if we are not each able to be happy in ourselves, then what do we have to bring to marriage and children other than dependence or the need to procreate? And what about those who don’t feel the need for either or can’t do either or don’t want to do either? The implications of those ideas are mind-boggling in a culture in which roles are changing rapidly and technology makes children possible outside of marriage and family size around the globe is shrinking by the day.

  It’s easy to be consumed by the numbers and the statistics. Fascinating, in fact. But at the end of the day, all the various measures and findings are useless unless we ask ourselves what the material is really telling us. And the messages are legion. They answer how it is that the poor can be as happy as the rich. They warn us that it is not simply the vagaries of life that weigh us down. It is, far too often, we ourselves who have the most to do with weighing ourselves down.

  The underly
ing messages that seep up through the results of surveys like the Oxford Happiness Questionnaire also, however, show us a way through the forest of our own tangled emotions. They signal to us what it will take in us to recover from this death, to get beyond this job loss, to bear this illness, to come to peace with shattered dreams. They tell us what areas we must give more attention to developing in ourselves in order to go through life with more than a bank account. They tell us what it takes to survive an empty checkbook.

  They focus us on the things that really count in life and make us face which of them we have failed to develop: the social ties that connect us to the rest of the universe; the notion of generativity, of doing something to create a better future; the intimate relationships that require us to be about more than ourselves; the financial security that makes the leisure of the mind and the cultivation of the arts possible; a spiritual life that draws us to the heights of our rational, moral, and inward selves; and a cohort of friends who are themselves positive in outlook and who increase our own joy in life.

  To be about only our financial security, our fame, our power, our egos, ourselves does not, the OHQ would argue, bode well for our own happiness quotient in life.

  To see how others define the happy life makes us ask the important questions about our own:

  Have we created a real circle of friends with whom we spend good private time? These are the moments that re-create us and free our souls of the mold that comes from endless routine in life.