There is a new field of psychology that’s finding it’s way into more college courses. It’s called happiness studies or positive psychology. What it seems to boil down to is that the key to being happy is either being stupid, having few choices, or being one of the few survivors of a nuclear fallout.
Ok that’s an oversimplification of matters. There’s more to it than that. I’ll get to that in a moment. First some of the most likely people to be happier according to polls and studies:
The religious. Ignorance is indeed bliss.
Married people seem to live longer and rate themselves as happier than the single. THis might have something to do with choices which I’ll get to later.
The flip side of that marriage thing though is that most of the studies done suggest that children don’t make parents happier. The guy who wrote a book that touches on the studies is quoted at the link below as saying, “It really violates our intuition,” he says. “Yet every bit of data says children are an extreme source of negative affect, a mild source of negative affect, or none at all. It’s hard to find a study where there’s one net positive.”
One piece of info that surprises me and seems counterintuitive to everything I’ve seen from the religious is that they are less likely to abuse drugs, commit crimes, or to kill themselves. This is attributed to the sense of community, structure, meaning, and heavenly reward.
From what I’ve seen it is often people with drug and alcohol problems who find religion to give them a false sense of superiority and esteem. While I’ve seen plenty of evidence to support this I’ll allow for my being off on a general basis. What the study doesn’t show though is how deceitful, manipulative, sleezy, loose moraled, and nuerotic many of the faithful tend to be. Unfortunately these qualities don’t qualify as crimes and aren’t considered addictions. Perhaps also a bit unfortunate is that as the above indicated, they don’t tend to kill themselves enough.
Other nuggets on happiness indicate that being smarter or more successful doesn’t make us any happier, moderation does, being attractive does as well, but not to a great extent, and older people seem more satisfied and happy than younger people with fewer darker moods. Women aren’t unhappier than men but tend to have more ups and downs. (Shocker there).
An important indication in all this concerns the lack of happiness of those who have alot of money compared to those who don’t. This phenomenon was partly due to something dubbed the, “hedonic treadmill.” This is defined as the unending hunger for the next acquisition.
As a general rule, human beings adapt quickly to their circumstances because all of us have natural hedonic “set points,” to which our bodies are likely to return, like our weight. This is true whether our experiences are marvelous—like winning the lottery—or shattering. Not only did Brickman and his colleagues look at lottery winners but also at 29 people who’d recently become paraplegic or quadriplegic. It turned out the victims of these accidents reported no more unhappy moments than a control group.
This could be one of the reasons New Yorkers are rated as the unhappiest people in the country. Not East European unhappy according to studies, but unhappy. Red staters appear to be alot happier. Canadians and Swedes top the list of the happiest countries. But what’s up with N.Y.?
Well the problem is attributed to the above hedonic treadmill and what Barry Schwartz calls the “paradox of choice”.
The idea is that too many choices make us unhappy. And New Yorkers have more choices.
“New Yorkers should probably be the most unhappy people on the planet,” says Schwartz, a psychology professor at Swarthmore. “On every block, there’s a lifetime’s worth of opportunities. And if I’m right, either they won’t be able to choose or they will choose, and they’ll be convinced they chose badly.”
The article talks about how economists call people who seek out the best and are generally ambitious “maximizers.” Studies indicate that maximizers are generally pretty miserable in comparison to those who make do with what they have, those called satisficers by economists.
“My suspicion,” says Schwartz, “is that all this choice creates maximizers.” If that’s the case, New York doesn’t just attract ambitious neurotics; it creates them. It also creates desires for things we don’t need—which, not coincidentally, is the business of Madison Avenue—and, as a corollary, pointless regrets, turning us all into a city of counterfactual historians, men and women who obsessively imagine different and better outcomes for ourselves.
Since the reach of Madison Avenue extends beyond N.Y. I’d guess that this phenomenon is at play nationally and contributing to alot people’s unhappiness. There’s just too much available to the average American and there’s always someone who’s got something you don’t have. And it’s human nature to covet what we see others partaking in, imagining that those things make them supremely happier than we are.
And the article does also mention that Economists and psychologists in the field agree it’s not money or lack thereof making people unhappy. It’s lacking it relative to others. We’re a consumerist, materialistic culture and I think it creates alot of stress feeding into the already present and probably genetic human desire to want more and desire what we don’t have. We probably wouldn’t be here without it. But we’re reaching overkill levels now where the things we covet are just silly, uneccessary, and pointless. Driving a car you can’t really afford because they’ve become status symbols is probably not contributing to the survival of the species.
I can certainly understand this as a person who’s always had a problem making choices. It’s pretty stressful. I always wonder what the other option will be like and what’s part of the imagination is naturally better than the ordinary reality of the paths taken. And it’s that human imagination that gets us in trouble. As the article quotes on its experts as saying, “Imagination is the poor man’s wormhole.”
Our imagination has an odd knack for Photoshopping things in and airbrushing things out, which is why we think that getting back together with our exes is a good idea; it also tends to mistake our present feelings for future ones, which is why, when we decide to marry the right person, we find it unthinkable we’ll ever be tempted to sleep with anyone else.
Of course there’s the whole argument about the relevence of being happy anyway. Who says we have a right to be? Contentment may be attainable and worthwhile but it’s not necessarily equatable with happiness. One of the Buddha’s rules was that desire causes unhappiness. While on to something he may have mistaken happiness for discontentment and drawn the conclusion that they are mutually inclusive. I think we can cut off that desire for what we don’t have but I’m not sure if we can be truly happy in a such a complex, interwoven society. I’ve often said that there is a tyranny of couples and the marital industrial complex in our society. I think all this touches on some of the reasons for and behind it. Mass marketing and the hypnotism of the culture make us want all these things that really aren’t making those that have them all that happy either despite how they reate themselves in polls. As I will get into momentarily, studies also indicate that people who find such states of happiness are often delusional or unrealistic.
Who says we’re supposed to be coupled up? Slice it how you will monogomay is not natural to the species. Those that can be satisfied looking at the same face and hearing those same voice utter the same pattern of ideas over a lifetime are rare indeed. Not to say there aren’t better matches than others and that some find the maturity coupled with the desire to make unity work as a partnership for the long term. Maybe it’s where we’re better off evolving too in the centuries ahead and these are uncomfortable steps we’re going through for the benefit of naturally selecting the attributes of loyalty and mating in domesticity for future generations. But they are not natural or inherently right.
“Happiness is fine as a side effect,” says Adam Phillips, the British psychoanalyst and lay philosopher whose latest work, Going Sane, examines functionality and well-being, but from a much more literary and ruminative perspective. “It’s something you may or may not acquire, in terms of luck. But I think it’s a cruel demand. It may even be a covert form of sadism. Everyone feels themselves prone to feelings and desires and thoughts that disturb them. And we’re being persuaded that by acts of choice, we can dispense with these thoughts. It’s a version of fundamentalism.”
And it is kind of religious. Not to mention the ties between religion and marriage, also deeply wedded to capitalism and property rights-protection. Good or bad I think there’s something for those of a non-comformist bent in the idea that departing from societies standards and embracing singlehood, isolation, mediocrity, lack of property (there’s alot of home owning propaganda out there as well), and just general. . . I want to say unhappiness, but maybe lack of happiness is a better term, is a valid choice leading towards a brand of contentment. Or less unhappiness.
Indeed, trying to be happy, and in fact thinking you are, or even feeling you are, may be a quality indicating not only conformity, but lack of intelligence.
Unlike Seligman, Phillips declares happiness “the most conformist of moral aims.” “For me,” he continues, “there’s a simple test here. Read a really good book on positive psychology, and read a great European novel. And the difference is evident in one thing—the complexity and subtlety of the moral and emotional life of the characters in the European novel are incomparable. Read a positive-psychology book, and what would a happy person look like? He’d look like a Moonie. He’d be empty of idiosyncrasy and the difficult passions.
Russian literature is depressing as all hell. But it’s smart, subtle, complex, and full of humanity. Self-help literature and feel-good populist stuff reads like a day at a day care clinic. The information basically concludes that happy people are delusional. Thus we have out ties to heavy religious areas reporting higher levels of happiness. Simple can be better. Lack of complexity also means less to choose from and brood over. Ignorance is truly bliss.
Hence happier red staters evoking the bible and voting for one of the most obviously incompetent and dishonest men to ever run for President. Twice! And hence smarter blue staters seeing through all this and still being too damn weak and miserable and self-conscious to overcome it and themselves. Twice!
I find it amusing that one of the quintessential New Yorker T.V. shows of recent times was Seinfeld which depicted basically miserable people. I don’t know how the show played in Peoria as far as ratings go, but certainly coastal areas got it and appreciated the wit and the magnification of the conversations, thoughts, and experiences they could relate to. I’ve always maintained there’s a little George Costanza in most of us (I have a bit of Jerry’s matter of fact aloofness and indifference as well), and despite the revolting nature of some of their characteristics many found it funny because it was in fact on some level more real. Certainly it was more so than your Cosby Shows or Everybody Loves Raymonds.
If you think about it that show was nonconformist is so many ways. Not only did it depart from normal sitcom formulas, there were no steady couples. Rather the characters were devoutly single, letting their selfishness and immaturity take its natural course. Sure they professed the desire to meet someone, well George and Elayne did, Gerry and Kramer were transcendently above caring about making relationships work or committing to anyone as remotely flawed as themselves, but they were unabashedly self-obsessed and caught up in the culture that never allows for real satisfaction. No one got married. No one really succeeded for long on the show. There were no lessons learned, mistakes and events made in prior episodes were never forgotten and could show up in the future, unlike most sitcoms. But the show was pleasantly free of morality tales or “very special episodes.” And as Phillips said in an above quote we’re all prone to feelings and thoughts that are disturbing. A certain fundamentalist streak stigmitizes them and would rather paint a rosy picture of humanity. Seinfeld just put all those thoughts out there giving alot of people a place to feel some relief they weren’t the only ones thinking those things.
Alot of it was pretty close to human nature. At least a more embarrasing aspect of that nature. Greatly exaggerated for most of us hopefully, but obviously alot of people related and still do. And this brings me back to being more realistic and how we undermine our attempts at happiness due to lack of realism about ourselves, or wallow in the false happiness of smily happy Stepford Mormons.
I’d always said (in perhaps half exaggerated tones), that depressive people tend to be that way because they are more realistic. Studies of some fo the greatest Presidents like Lincoln reveal they were probably manic depressive and indeed have linked that quality, along with it’s intendent negativity, with their insights and achievements. There’s a quote on our generator above, I forget who, it may have been Bernard Shaw, that says something along the lines of-what is commonly regarded as cynicism by many is really pragmatism or realism-and though I don’t believe this to be an across the board truth, more evidence supports the idea.
One of the most interesting bits of American research to surface—repeatedly—in books about happiness is a study that shows depressives are far more likely to be realists, while happy people are more likely to walk around in a mild state of delusion. The study itself was fairly simple: A group of undergraduates was given varying degrees of control over turning on a green light. Some members of the group had perfect control; others had none—the light went on and off of its own accord. The depressives accurately predicted, in each instance, whether they were in control of the situation or not. The nondepressives, on the other hand, thought they had control about 35 percent of the time over the situation in which they were, in fact, 100 percent helpless.
So take it from a depressive cynic: You are not happy and you will never be happy and if you say you are you are lying to me or yourself.*
*There are of course varying degrees of happiness and you may indeed have more along with more satisfaction that comes with variables like accomplishment and using your greatest talents to their and your best advantage, which studies indicate is a key towards contentment and or happiness. But in general most people won’t reach that level. I think a greater happiness is to be found in rising above the need to be happy and have that which we don’t have.
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