Happiness: Simultaneously Concrete and Ethereal
Mykala directed me to some information that she saw on a recent Oprah show about happiness called “How Happy are You?” She had some good quotes from it.
We have beliefs about ourselves and our lives, and our perception gathers evidence in support of these beliefs. If you believe that your life isn’t satisfying or that you are a failure, you will look around for ways that this is true. If you believe that life is fulfilling and you are a worthy and significant person, you’ll find evidence to prove this case.
So, one of the ideas is that of the self-fulfilling prophecy. One might say that a person is visualizing/forming a mental image of something, which increases the likelihood of that visualization coming true. What’s even more interesting to me, however, is the type of lifestyle that this thinking facilitates:
“It’s always about tomorrow, so you’re chasing ‘more,’ ‘next’ and ‘there,’” [Dr. Holden] says. “You promise yourself that when you get there, you’ll be happy. And I promise you, you won’t, because you’ll always set another destination to go for.”
…
“Destination addiction: you live in the not now. You set all of these goals, destinations, and you say ‘I’ll be happy when I get there.’ But you’re not. You just set the next destination.”
This “go go go” mentality is not unique to the American psyche, but its effects are particularly widespread and potent here in the states (at least from my anecdotal observations). This being the case, the majority is not always in the right, and a reexamination of never-stop-itis can lead us to healthier alternatives in our attitudes. (And when I say “our,” I really mean “my,” but I seem to have gotten stuck with that syntax somewhere earlier in this piece.)
In addition to Dr. Holden’s work, I am even more interested in what a recent Scientific American article about Sonja Lyubomirsky calls “the science of happiness.” Dr. Lyubomirsky’s primary thesis is that the psychological set point of happiness has a rather high amount of inertia. That is, happiness levels are resistant to permanent changes.
We tend to adapt, quickly returning to our usual level of happiness. The classic example of such “hedonic adaptation” comes from a 1970s study of lottery winners, who a year after their windfall ended up no happier than nonwinners. Hedonic adaptation helps to explain why even changes in major life circumstances—such as income, marriage, physical health and where we live—do so little to boost our overall happiness.
What’s particularly interesting is that both of these sources on happiness agree that goals have absolutely nothing to do with happiness (emphasis mine):
“There’s been a tension in the field,” explains Lyubomirsky’s main collaborator, psychologist Kennon M. Sheldon of the University of Missouri-Columbia. “Some people were assuming you can affect happiness if, for example, you picked the right goals, but there was all this literature that suggested it was impossible, that what goes up must come down.”
Good news for us, though: it appears that this happiness set point is plastic, and therefore can be changed. For example, doing good things for others (and being sure to vary what exactly these things are), seems to be a good way to increase one’s happiness. Another tacit implication by that Scientific American article is prioritization on a very grand scale. It discussed a Holocaust surviver, and the attitude of this person was that it was “indecent or inappropriate” to be unhappy about trivial things. That reflects someone who truly has their priorities straight.
And finally, the core of my interest in this Dr. Sonja Lyubomirsky is her forthcoming book (2008) called “The How of Happiness,” where these concepts and attitudes are scientifically laid out and defended. This link should point to the book on Amazon, once the book exists.