(HAP class: we’re not meeting today.)
Chapter Five of Happiness Hypothesis is pivotal. Jon Haidt considers the Buddhist/Stoic hypothesis that happiness must come only from within, and throws a surprise left hook with some strong words against emotional detachment. “Surrender all attachments,” rise above pleasure and pain? Don’t “seek to have events happen as you want them to”? He’s not so sure. Me neither. Our next read, Matthieu Ricard, will bring a different perspective on this.
But first: he cites Lyubomirsky et al’s research bearing on a distinction between conditions and activities.
Conditions of life include the relatively fixed (race, sex, age, disability) and the semi-fixed, but sometimes fluid (wealth, marital status, where you live) facts of your life. Conditions are more-or-less constant; it is usually the path of least resistance to build your life around them and focus instead on activities. But, see below.*
Volunatary activities– including exercise, meditation, vacationing, and learning a new skill– are said to be more elective and malleable. Because you choose them, they’re more likely to stay in the foreground of your day-to-day awareness and you’ll not “adapt” to them in ways that rob you of their potential pleasures. They “offer much greater promise for increasing happiness and avoiding adaptation effects.” In the case of habitual regular exercise, one of my voluntary activities, I can second that statement. I have not “adapted,” daily walks (and gym visits, when the weather’s hostile) always give me a boost. “But that’s not happiness,” you say? Coulda fooled me.
H = S + C + V. That’s the equation we’ve already considered: Happiness equals your biological Set Point plus your life conditions plus your voluntary activities. Positive psychologists are challenged to substantiate this form with data, but meanwhile each of us can accept the challenge of seeing just how much leverage we’ve got in this game.
* “It turns out there really are some external conditions (C) that matter… changing an institution’s environment to increase the sense of control among its workers, students, patients [etc.] was one of the most effective possible ways to increase their sense of engagement, energy, and happiness.”
So I wonder, fellow institutional inmates here at the nation’s 57th best public university (and the state’s best, according to Forbes): can you think of any changes in the environment here on the ground at Enormous State University that would raise our collective, or your personal, Happiness Quotient? I fear that we’ll lose our happiness edge if we start naming deficiencies. We might do better to just count our blessings. You think?
But then again, I didn’t know that Charlotte Bronte was a pragmatist: “It is vain to say that human beings ought to satisfied with tranquility: they must have action…” I welcome her to the cause. Action begins with the recognition of a deficit state or a problematic situation. Blessing-counting may not be active enough.
Flow redux. Csikszentmihalyi (my mnemonic for the first syllable was always “chick,” Haidt’s is “cheek”– I like mine better) distinguishes pleasures from gratifications. If pleasure’s your thing, you might as well hop on into the Happiness Box (Experience Machine). Trouble with that is, hedonists tend to overdose. My college roommate wore out Bruce Springsteen’s “The River” for me, to my continuing regret. AC/DC’s “Highway to Hell,” on the other hand, was non-gratifying from the start. Different strokes. The message here is to try and make an Epicurean of your elephant. Wisdom is gratified by “not the greatest quantity of food [or music, or other sensual indulgence] but the most tasty.”
“Stop trying to keep up with the Joneses. Stop wasting your money on conspicuous consumption. Work less, earn less, accumulate less, and ‘consume’ more family time, vacations” etc. Okay, then.
We noted the Dalai Lama’s exceptional status as a world-class spiritual leader who actively promotes the scientific investigation of human life and consciousness (including the nuts and bolts of meditation). He wrote “Our Faith in Science,” for instance, for the Times op-ed page. “After all, if practices from my own tradition can be brought together with scientific methods, then we may be able to take another small step toward alleviating human suffering.” (More Dalai Lama news)
He also stands out as a spiritual leader who actively discourages proselytizing and evangelism. Buddhism is not for everyone. Follow us if you can and you must, he seems to say. But there are other paths to happiness, the art of which he’s also written about for western readers. And The Universe in a Single Atom: the convergence of science and spirituality explores our theme too. Still looking for the London appearance with John Cleese in attendance. This is not it, but it’s still a warm and colorful occasion.
Heard a Freemason on the radio yesterday, by the way. Dan Brown’s pulled back the veil, it seems. The spokesman said their only stipulation is that one must believe in some God or other, details irrelevant, to belong. That’s fine, but Buddhists go them one better on the God question. They’re right up with the Unitarians on that front.
Haidt’s objection to Stoics: “When life is unpredictable and dangerous (as it was for Stoic philosophers, living under capricious Roman emperors), it might be foolish to seek happiness by controlling one’s external world. But now it is not… to cut off all attachments, to shun the pleasures of sensuality and triumph in an effort to escape the pains of loss and defeat” is an overreaction.
Pointed harsh words for Buddhists and Stoics alike, inspired by Robert Solomon: The life of cerebral reflection and emotional indifference (apatheia) advocated by many Greek and Roman philosophers and that of calm nonstriving advocated by Buddha are lives designed to avoid passion, and a life without passion is not a human life. Yes, attachments bring pain, but they also bring our greatest joys.
Cue the drum and sitar: happiness is within you and without you.
(I know, the Beatles’ lyrics don’t say exactly what Haidt does. But the song’s been in my head ever since I started typing, gotta get it out.)