Why striving for happiness is fucking you up…

So Christmas and New Year’s are over again – little orgies of excess that they are. Did they make you happy? In fact, how much of what we think will make us happy ends up being either stressful or disappointing (or both)?

Our quest for happiness has got a bit out of hand. We’re often bombarded by messages (from advertising, our peers, from friends and family) that equate stuff, power, status, money and consumption with happiness (or, conversely, unhappiness and dissatisfaction without these things). Worse we’re told we deserve to be happy, that our happiness is the most important thing, that we should do whatever it takes to be happy, that we should listen to our inner needs for happiness. The early 21st century has become rife with the epidemic of sought-after happiness – leaving many of us feeling so entitled about our right to happiness, and so hacked off when anything gets in the way of that (inalienable) right, that we’ll ‘happily’ express our anger at the perceived block to our rightful joy.

If that seemed a tad bitter, bear with me – I’m going somewhere.

Interestingly, the contemporary obsession with achieving happiness is a modern phenomenon. It appears to have started in earnest with the baby-boomer generation after the war. Led by America and aided by modern technology, an entire generation found itself able to wallow in mass consumption. Industries blossomed to feed and fuel this need to devour – advertising and marketing became increasingly sophisticated, and the economic dream of limitless growth became gospel.

Interestingly, this period also saw a dramatic rise in dissatisfaction. For the first time, people believed that they deserved a level of happiness in their lives, and that this feeling could be measured and quantified. Happiness went from being a fleeting emotion (usually felt through cooperation with others) to being a sought after commodity that could be purchased (or so we were told). Correspondingly, more and more people started seeing psychologists (and other therapists) to talk about their dissatisfaction and, to my great shame (regarding my profession), psychologists sat there and listened and often counselled greater levels of consumption and hubris. Somewhere along the way, most of the industrial world (including the US, Britain and Australia) became a bunch of self-entitled whiners and, in doing so, removed the mass (memetic) inoculation against depression that had sustained the world through two world wars.

OK – that’s a pretty big claim. At this point, this observation is only correlational – it would be hard to make a causal argument here, and even harder to prove this contention. Nevertheless, the observation remains: before people expected (or demanded) happiness in their lives, they were able to cope with a lot more discomfort, loss, and hardship than modern humans. It’s quite probable that were the average current human transported back 100 years, he or she’d find it pretty tough going (to say the least).

At this point, it might be a useful to actually define happiness. We talk about it (and its lack) almost obsessively, so what is it? Well, first and foremost, happiness is an emotion. Paul Ekman, a psychologist and emotions researcher, originally proposed five core emotions (anger, disgust, fear, happiness, sadness and surprise), but more recently updated the list to 17 (amusement, anger, contempt, contentment, disgust, embarrassment, excitement, fear, guilt, happiness, pride in achievement, relief, sadness/distress, satisfaction, sensory pleasure, shame, and surprise). Either way, happiness is classified as a ‘positive’ (i.e., desirable, pleasant) emotion but, like all other emotions it is a fleeting sensation, itself the product of relatively primitive brain centres responding to environmental stimuli with a cocktail of monoamine neurotransmitters (in this case, dopamine, serotonin and, possibly, noradrenaline). In other words, emotions (whether ‘positive’ or ‘negative’) are nothing more than fleeting (and thus, temporary) brain states. Going a step further (and at the risk of repeating myself from earlier posts), emotions evolved to make us pay attention to things that could either increase or reduce our survivability. Thus, emotions provoke approach or avoidance behaviour, often in a very strong way. They ‘feel’ immediate and important because they evolved that way. Just like smoke alarms have very loud, annoying warning signals, so do our emotions. If smoke alarms had soft, gentle tones, they’d be useless at getting our attention. Likewise, our emotions evolved to be loud and to get our attention, whether to warn us to run away from something, or to go toward it (originally to eat it or shag it).

So let me say this one more time (because it’s important). Our emotions are noisy alarms left over from a time when it was important that we had effective environmental alarm systems. They are hardwired at a fundamental level – making it almost impossible to ignore them when they activate. We’re also hardwired to pay attention to them and to believe in their veracity – this helped us survive and propagate our genes for a long time. It doesn’t help anymore. In fact, that we give so much credence to our emotions is the cause of most of the crap and suffering on this earth. Anger, fear, and contempt are responsible for the majority of unpleasantness around us. And our quest for happiness, well chances are it does almost as much harm. In fact our labelling of emotions (must have ‘good’ ones, must avoid ‘bad’ ones) is a part of the problem – most of us live our lives based on our emotions; we let our actions be guided not by our values, but by how we feel or want to feel. We like to believe we’re in control of the inner monkey but, most of us aren’t.

Along with many other positive psychologists, I believe that the quest for happiness is a flawed one. Researchers have demonstrated that the things we typically believe will make us happy (e.g., money, power, holidays, cars, relationships, promotions) do no such thing. You’ve probably experienced this yourself – after a couple of months, the new car that you really wanted is simply a car; the holiday you’ve been dreaming about ends up being a disappointment, etc. As humans we habituate extremely quickly, so we adapt to a new status quo very quickly. Worse, because happiness is a fleeting emotion, it simply can’t last, no matter how hard we try  (when people win the lottery they return to their prewinnings happiness level after only six months). Even worse, humans are easily dissatisfied, even when we get what we want. When was the last time you bought something you really wanted only to be bitterly disappointed because a new model came out a few days later, or a friend bought the upgraded version. Your happiness turned to disappointment, bitterness and avarice. Sadly, the natural response to this disappointment is to repeat the process – something that marketing and advertising firms cottoned onto a long time ago.  They sell you the illusion of happiness, knowing that it wears off quickly and that you’ll want to consume more to sustain the illusion.

What we have here is a confusion between happiness and satiation. That is, we’re programmed to believe that having stuff (and status, etc.) will make us happy even though we know it won’t. So can we ever be happy? Positive psychology researchers have suggested that sustained happiness comes not from seeking out the emotional state, but from living a certain way. I’ve talked about this extensively before (here, here, here and here) but to recap: on the one hand, living for satisfaction is called hedonism; it feels good, but it’s unsustainable (individually and societally, combined with the very real notion that the Earth’s resources are not limitless!). Eudaemonism, on the other hand, is living in a way that requires a belief system in something bigger than yourself. I’m not talking about religion (although some people find meaning through it) but, rather, living in a way that isn’t simply about providing for one’s needs and desires. It means finding something meaningful, mastering something worthwhile, realising that you are not the most important person in the world and (this bit is important), not demanding that your happiness should come first or expecting the world to give you what you want. In other words, true satisfaction comes from working to develop meaning in your life and in the lives of those around you, rather than demanding that they give you what you want.

My advice? There’s a lot to be said for reducing the emphasis on the self and its greedy demands (it’s an illusion anyway), and working to create something worthwhile (whatever that might be). Sound trite? Well, maybe, but I don’t believe that there’s any other purpose or meaning to life. We get damaged by the belief that there is and should be more (and that we deserve it). Our search for happiness really does fuck us up.

I’ll leave you with one of my favourite quotes (by Jon Ronson) which, I believe, sums things up rather nicely: “There is no evidence that we’ve been placed on this planet to be especially happy or especially normal. And in fact our unhappiness and our strangeness, our anxieties and compulsions, those least fashionable aspects of our personalities, are quite often what lead us to do rather interesting things.”