Nov 5, 2017

Love People, Not Pleasure

by Arthur C. Brooks

ABDAL-RAHMAN III was an emir and caliph of Córdoba in 10th-century Spain. He was an absolute ruler who lived in complete luxury. Here’s how he assessed his life:

“I have now reigned above 50 years in victory or peace; beloved by my subjects, dreaded by my enemies, and respected by my allies. Riches and honor, power and pleasure have waited on my call, neither did any earthly blessing appear to have been wanting to my felicity.”

Fame, riches and pleasure beyond imagination. Sounds great! But then he went on to write:
“I have diligently numbered the days of pure and genuine happiness which have fallen to my lot: they amount to 14.”

Abdal-Rahman’s problem wasn’t happiness, as he believed — it was unhappiness. If that sounds like a distinction without a difference, that is exactly the great emir's problem. With a little knowledge, he could have avoided the misery that befell him.

What is unhappiness? The common intuition might be that it is simply the opposite of happiness, just as darkness is the absence of light. But that is not quite so. Happiness and unhappiness are certainly related, but they are not actually exact opposites, either. Images of the brain show that parts of the left cerebral cortex are more active than the right when one experiences happiness, while the right side becomes more active when one is unhappy.

As strange as it seems, being happier than average does not mean that one can’t also be unhappier than average. One test for both happiness and unhappiness is the Positive Affectivity and negative Affectivity Schedule Test (PANAST). I took the test myself, and I found that, for happiness, I am at the top for people my age, sex, occupation and education group. But I got a pretty high score for unhappiness as well. That meant, I am a "cheerful melancholic".

So when people say, “I am an unhappy person,” they are really doing sums, whether they realize it or not -- i.e., “My unhappiness is x, my happiness is y, and x > y.” The real questions are why and what one can do to make y > x.

If one asks an unhappy person why he is unhappy, he will almost always blame circumstance. In many cases, of course, this is justified. Some people are oppressed or poor or have physical ailments that make life a chore. Research unsurprisingly suggests that racism causes unhappiness in children, and many academic studies have a clear link between unhappiness and poverty. Another common source of unhappiness is loneliness, from which about 20 percent of Americans suffer enough to make it a major problem [source of unhappiness] in their life.

Credit Andrew DeGraff

There are also smaller circumstantial sources of unhappiness. The Princeton psychologist Daniel Kahneman and his colleagues measured the “negative affect” (bad moods) that ordinary daily activities and interactions kick up. They found that the Number 1 unhappiness-provoking event in a typical day is spending time with one’s boss (which, as a boss, made me unhappy to learn).

Circumstances are certainly important. No doubt Abdal-Rahman could point to a few in his life. But paradoxically, a better explanation for his unhappiness may have been his own search for well-being. And the same might go for anyone.

Have you ever known an alcoholic? An alcoholic generally drinks to relieve craving or anxiety — in other words, to attenuate a source of unhappiness. Yet, it is the drink that ultimately prolongs his suffering. The same principle was at work for Abdal-Rahman in his pursuit of fame, wealth and pleasure.

Consider fame. In 2009, researchers from the University of Rochester conducted a study tracking the success of 147 recent graduates in reaching their stated goals after graduation. Some had “intrinsic” goals, such as deep, enduring relationships. Others had “extrinsic” goals, such as achieving reputation or fame. The scholars found that intrinsic goals were associated with happier lives. But the people who pursued extrinsic goals experienced more negative emotions, such as shame and fear. They even suffered more physical maladies.

This is one of the cruelest ironies in life. I work in Washington, right in the middle of intensely public political battles. The unhappiest people I have ever met are those most dedicated to their own self-aggrandizement — the pundits, the TV loudmouths, the media know-it-alls. They build themselves up and promote their images, but feel awful most of the time.

That’s the paradox of fame. Just like drugs and alcohol, when one becomes addicted, one can’t live without it. But one can’t live with it, either. Celebrities have described fame like being “an animal in a cage; a toy in a shop window; a Barbie doll; a public façade; a clay figure; or, that guy on TV,” according to research by the psychologist Donna Rockwell. Yet they can’t give it up.

That impulse to fame by everyday people has generated some astonishing innovations. One is the advent of reality television, in which ordinary people become actors in their day-to-day lives for others to watch. Why? “To be noticed, to be wanted, to be loved, to walk into a place and have others care about what one is doing, even what one had for lunch that day: that’s what people want, in my opinion,” said one 26-year-old participant in an early hit reality show called “Big Brother.”

And then there’s the social media. Today, each of us can build a personal little fan base, thanks to Facebook, YouTube, Twitter and the like. We can broadcast the details of our lives to friends and strangers in an astonishingly efficient way. That’s good for staying in touch with friends, but it also puts a minor form of fame-seeking within each person’s reach. And several studies show that it can make us unhappy.

It makes sense. What do you post to Facebook? Pictures of yourself yelling at your kids, or having a hard time at work? No, you post smiling photos of a hiking trip with friends. You build a fake life — or at least an incomplete one — and share it. Furthermore, you consume almost exclusively the fake lives of your social media “friends”. Unless you are extraordinarily self-aware, how could it not make you feel worse to spend part of your time pretending to be happier than you are, and the other part of your time seeing how much happier others seem to be than you?

Some look for relief from unhappiness in money and material things. This scenario is a little more complicated than fame. The evidence does suggest that money relieves suffering in cases of true material need. (This is a strong argument, in my view, for many safety-net policies for the indigent.) But when money becomes an end in itself, it can bring misery, too.

For decades, psychologists have been compiling a vast literature on the relationships between different aspirations and well-being. Whether they examine young adults or people of all ages, the bulk of the studies point toward the same important conclusion: people who rate materialistic goals like wealth as top personal priorities are significantly likelier to be more anxious, more depressed and more frequent drug users, and even to have more physical ailments than those who set their sights on more intrinsic values.

No one sums up the moral snares of materialism more famously than St. Paul in his First Letter to Timothy: “For the love of money is the root of all evil: which while some coveted after, they have erred from the faith, and pierced themselves through with many sorrows.” Or as the Dalai Lama pithily suggested, it is better to want what you have than to have what you want.

So fame and money are out. How about pleasures of the flesh? Take the canonical hedonistic pleasure: lust. From Hollywood to college campuses, many assume that sex is always great, and sexual variety is even better.

This assumption actually has a name: the “Coolidge Effect,” named after the 30th president of the United States. The story (probably apocryphal) begins with Silent Cal and Mrs. Coolidge touring a poultry farm. The First Lady noticed that there were very few roosters, and asked how so many eggs could be fertilized. The farmer told her that the virile roosters did their jobs over and over again each day. “Perhaps you could point that out to Mr. Coolidge,” she told him. The President, hearing the remark, asked whether the rooster serviced the same hen each time. No, the farmer told him — there were many hens for each rooster. “Perhaps you could point that out to Mrs. Coolidge,” said the President.

The President obviously figured these must be happy roosters. And notwithstanding the moral implications, the same principle should work for us. Right? Wrong!

In 2004, two economists looked into whether more sexual variety led to greater well-being. They looked at data from about 16,000 adult Americans who were asked confidentially how many sex partners they had had in the preceding year, and about their happiness. Across men and women alike, the data show that the optimal number of partners is one.

This might seem totally counterintuitive. After all, we are unambiguously driven to accumulate material goods, to seek fame, to look for pleasure. How can it be that these very things can give us unhappiness instead of happiness? There are two explanations, one biological and the other philosophical.

From an evolutionary perspective, it makes sense that we are wired to seek fame, wealth and sexual variety. These things make us more likely to pass on our DNA. Had your cave-man ancestors not acquired some version of these things (a fine reputation for being a great rock sharpener; multiple animal skins), they might not have found enough mating partners to create your lineage.

But here’s where the evolutionary cables have crossed: we assume that things we are attracted to will relieve our suffering and raise our happiness. My brain says, “Get famous.” It also says, “Unhappiness is lousy.” I conflate the two by “getting famous and you’ll be less unhappy.”

But that is Mother Nature’s cruel hoax. She doesn’t really care either way whether you are unhappy — she just wants you to want to pass on your genetic material. If you conflate intergenerational survival with well-being, that’s your problem, not Nature’s. And matters are hardly helped by Nature’s useful idiots in society, who propagate the popular piece of life-ruining advice: “If it feels good, do it.” Unless you share the same existential goals as protozoa, this is often flat-out wrong.

More philosophically, the problem stems from dissatisfaction — the sense that nothing has full flavor, and we want more. We can’t quite pin down what it is that we seek. Without a great deal of reflection and spiritual hard work, the likely candidates seem to be material things, physical pleasures or favor among friends and strangers.

We look for these things to fill an inner emptiness. They may bring a brief satisfaction, but it never lasts, and it is never enough. And so we crave more. This paradox has a word in Sanskrit: upadana, which refers to the cycle of craving and grasping. As the Dhammapada (the Buddha’s path of wisdom) puts it: “The craving of one given to heedless living grows like a creeper. Like the monkey seeking fruits in the forest, he leaps from branch to branch [life to life]...Whoever is overcome by this wretched and sticky craving, his sorrows grow like grass after the rains.”

The search for fame, the lust for material things and the objectification of others — that is, the cycle of grasping and craving — follows a formula that is elegant, simple and deadly: love things, use people.

This was Abdal-Rahman’s formula as he sleepwalked through life. It is the worldly snake oil peddled by the culture makers from Hollywood to Madison Avenue. But you know in your heart that it is morally disordered and a likely road to misery. You want to be free of the sticky cravings of unhappiness and find a formula for happiness instead. How? Simply invert the deadly formula and render it virtuous: love people, use things.

Easier said than done, I realize. It requires the courage to repudiate pride and the strength to love others — family, friends, colleagues, acquaintances, God and even strangers and enemies. Only deny love to things that actually are objects. The practice that achieves this is charity. Few things are as liberating as giving away to others that which we hold dear.

This also requires a condemnation of materialism. This is manifestly not an argument for any specific economic system. Anyone who has spent time in a socialist country must concede that materialism and selfishness are as bad under collectivism, or worse, as when lives in a free market system. No political ideology is immune to materialism.

Finally, it requires a deep skepticism of our own basic desires. Of course you are driven to seek admiration, splendor and physical license. But giving in to these impulses will bring unhappiness. You have a responsibility to yourself to stay in the battle. The day you declare a truce is the day you become unhappier. Declaring war on these destructive impulses is not about asceticism or Puritanism. It is about being a prudent person who seeks to avoid unnecessary suffering.

Abdal-Rahman never got his happiness sums right. He never knew the right formula. Fortunately, we now do.

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Secrets Of Happiness

by Joel Achenbach

Sometimes when I’m sitting in my cubicle at work, under the fluorescent lights, I realize that it’s been a long time since anyone called me “swashbuckling.”

No matter. This is the life I have chosen, happily, freely, and without regret because the world needs the laborers and functionaries who keep the machinery going so that other people can be hip-hop artists or astronauts or astronautical hip-hop artists who “rap” from orbit and go to the Paris Fashion Week and then dive in a customized submersible to the bottom of the Marianas Trench before heading off to race in the Monaco Grand Prix. I pity those people, imprisoned by glamour, forced to stay up to ungodly hours, sometimes even past 11 p.m., to cavort in nightclubs with tycoons and movie stars.

These are the pitiful people who do not know the joy of having a favorite chair.

There have been several fine pieces of writing recently about happiness, including one this weekend in the New York Times by Arthur C. Brooks headlined “Love People, Not Pleasure.” He argues that the pursuit of fame, money, sexual conquests, etc., will more likely produce unhappiness than happiness, and he makes a pretty compelling case for giving stuff away, even the things you hold dear. There’s a whiff of New Testament here, though he frames this as a secular argument.

"Happiness," he says, "…requires a deep skepticism of our own basic desires. Of course you are driven to seek admiration, splendor and physical license. But giving in to these impulses will bring unhappiness. You have a responsibility to yourself to stay in the battle. The day you declare a truce is the day you become unhappier. Declaring war on these destructive impulses is not about asceticism or Puritanism. It is about being a prudent person who seeks to avoid unnecessary suffering."

A somewhat less demanding recipe for happiness from “Dilbert” creator Scott Adams. He argues that the recipe for happiness is health + freedom.

Adams puts in a good word for money, saying you need to have some of it if you want to enjoy your freedom:
"Money can’t directly buy happiness, but it can give you more options, and that’s an important part of freedom. So don’t give up too much income potential just to get a flexible schedule. There’s no point in having a flexible schedule if you can’t afford to do anything."

I would note here that freedom doesn’t necessarily mean that your life has to be full of novelty. Maybe you want the freedom to follow a routine. Some of us do the same thing over and over again almost ritually because it keeps us grounded, centered, whatever you want to call it. (I don’t grow tomatoes in the summer because I crave the actual tomatoes, though that’s a nice bonus. My whole life, I’ve grown things. This is what I do. I'm a man of the soil, of the Earth, not just grounded but literally with my hands in the dirt. When people say I’m “grubby” that’s a huge compliment.)

A happy life is a succession of happy days. Some of us are born, like my Mom, with a sunny disposition, and we tend to greet the morning with optimism. –Contributed by Ralph

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