Just a question - is it possible that something can make us happier while we're using/experiencing it, but not happier overall? For instance, if I were to buy a new Mac because it's great for photo editing (and I like photo editing... or really, digital art), I'm sure I would be very happy using it. But would it actually contribute to my overall happiness? The kind of happiness that you get asked about in a survey: "On a scale of 1 to 10, how happy do you think you are?" If it doesn't contribute to that kind of happiness, but the amount of time I spent at work to be able to afford the computer made me unhappy in a more permanent sense, then don't I experience a net loss on the deal?
Is this simply a spending money wisely issue put another way? Or am I right in feeling that there's more to it than that?
If there is, what kinds of things do make us 'permanently' happy? For me, I think that an ideal life (at least for a few years) would be working in a hostel in Europe, making just enough money to travel a little and drink wine and read books. Do the acts of drinking wine and reading books give me that permanent kind of happiness, or are they just, in the end, like the Mac? Or have I associated them with a type of lifestyle, one that I think will make me happy? What kind of lifestyle is associated with the Mac?
The next questions are maybe hugely ambitious, but I'll throw them out here and maybe come back to them again later:
What does a family of 4 with an income of $40,000 do to achieve happiness?
What does a family of 4 with an income of $400,000 do to achieve happiness?
Or, you could think of it in terms of single people if that's easier. Say $20,000 vs. $200k.
There are a quite a few people who have visited without commenting. Maybe I'm boring you to death, and that's fine. But if this is interesting to you at all, please, let us know what you're thinking!
7 comments:
John, I was wondering a few weeks ago if you were going to write a blog again, and lo and behold, you have!
Yes. Your example of a material item, the Mac, is totally true. Also the same with junk food and alcohol, something that tastes and feels good at the moment of consumption, but overindulgence usually leads to negative consequences.
I think that happiness is nebulous. Things, people, feelings contributing to my overall happiness are likely totally different from yours and totally different from a person from a different culture. There may be a few base things that societies use to rate their happiness (family and friends; financial stability; religion), but I think it is widely individualistic. Thus, the happiness question of the family of 4 with income of 40K or 400K is hard to answer.
With that said, it irks me when people try to bin everyone's happiness into the same bucket. I read No Impact Man's blog on a regular basis. I love his posts about changing your ways to help the environment, but I detest his happiness posts, because he tries to say EVERYONE will be happier if they remove themselves from the grid and live a lower impact life BECAUSE they'll have more family time. If that's how he feels about his happiness, good for him, but I don't think it's fair to paint it on everyone.
-Alexis
I'll agree with Al concerning happiness, that it is not something that has a defined shape that every single person can see.
Something with me concerning happiness is that I feel like I have to somehow earn it. I've always felt like there has to be some sort of internal or external struggle to achieve that little piece of contentment for a short period of time.
For me, happiness is something that is fleeting. That's why I think Jefferson hit the nail on the head when we wrote that we have the inalienable right to PURSUE happiness. When we accept the fact that happiness is not something handed to us along with a teddy bear and bottle from the time we are infants, we can then handle the struggles of life a little bit easier.
That being said, I don't believe that there really is a permanent happiness. Not in this life, anyway. If there were a happiness that I could achieve for the rest of my life, I would have to ask myself what I did to truly earn it. Because I haven't done this yet, I think it's time to throw an overused analogy in there. The road to happiness is like an endless series of hills and valleys, where there is going to be a low point where you try to claw your way back up, and a high point where you feel simply euphoric.
Now, imagine if at some point along this road of hills and valleys, you find a helicopter that can take you from one peak to the other, without ever having to go near a valley ever again. Yes, it will be great for the first while, but we would lose the full impact of the feeling because we've forgotten what it was like on the other end of the spectrum.
Knowing you as well as I do, and I like to think that I do, I'm going to guess that this particular train of thought, the one of "happiness" that has been a pervasive theme in your first few posts, is coming from a frustration of the "Happiness is relative" argument, no? It seems to me that you are indeed looking for a universal mode of happiness, not in a specific sense (ie buying a Mac may make me happy so I can edit video, but not somebody else who would rather buy a bike), but in a more general sense that requires looking at the big picture regarding lifestyle and non-monetary worth (as you mention in your working metaphor; if buying a computer makes me happy, but I'm miserable at my job where I'm trying to raise money for said computer, is it worth it?).
However, I could be wrong, because I am an idiot.
But if that's the case, then there are myriad other things that need to be considered regarding someone's "happiness", which just brings the argument back around to "Well, happiness is individual," which as I mentioned I surmise you're trying to avoid. I think an important distinction needs to be made between "happiness" and "contentment"; that is to say, I may be content buying a new computer, but my happiness depends on how I use the computer, whether it was worth buying compared to other things I have going on in my life, etc.
Is any of this what you were going for or am I way off base?
Ryan, your last paragraph just about blew my mind, because that's almost exactly what I was going to say. Except that I would have switched "contentment" with "happiness," as in "Are you content with your life?" vs. "Are you happy you have a new flat screen TV?"
Thus, I would argue that there is in fact a more general (I used the word permanent before) kind of happiness, and that's contentment. (So Ryan, I'm only disagreeing with you semantically). And whereas happiness is an (oft fleeting) feeling, contentment is a state of being. I understand your point Sam and it's a good one, but in this blog I'm attempting to look at things from a societal - rather than individual - perspective. And if I were to generalize the subject of this post into two opposite poles, I would be arguing that happiness cannot be found in consumerism. But of course there needs to be more nuance than that, and I'm trying to figure out what that nuance is. But here's something that I think is worth considering.
Say a person wants to buy a lawnmower because he has a lawn. This makes perfect empirical sense because in order for the lawn to be of any use, the grass must be cut, and the lawnmower may be the most efficient way of doing so. But we shouldn't just stop there and say "Ok, it's perfectly logical for this person to buy a lawnmower." We have to ask why the person wants a lawn to begin with. Maybe he wants to be able to play catch right outside his house. By extension, then, he's actually buying the lawnmower so that he can play catch outside of his house. Now what I'm trying to do in this blog is to follow this chain all the way to its very source - "Why does the person want to be able to play catch right outside his house," etc., etc. Then we'll know the real reason he wants to buy the lawnmower.
I wanted to have this conversation because I suspect that if we were to do this exercise for most of the things we buy, we would find that the costs of purchasing the items (that's money, but also opportunity and any other costs) are no longer justified by the ultimate purpose they are supposed to serve. In contemplating this, I keep thinking about the ever-increasing technology that goes into our TV sets. A little over 50 years ago, my dad's grandma owned the only TV on the block. Watching it was a community event; the TV was a catalyst for building bonds between people and fulfilling a need that contributed to people's overall contentment. Now if we were to go to the store today and put my great grandmother's TV next to a new 52" plasma, there would be absolutely no question as to which would be the "better" TV. What I'm asking is, are we happier now that we have plasma TV's than we were when only one person in the whole town had one tiny black and white screen? I don't think we are.
Alexis, you're right that it would be ridiculous of me to try to tell people what would make them happy or - even worse - develop some sort of model and claim that it would make everyone happy. However, I don't think it's unfair to say that American's are actually terrible at knowing how to make themselves happy. We see this especially when people choose careers. Ask college students what's important to them that's driving their decision making, and a lot of times you'll hear "Well, I had a strong family growing up, so I know that family is going to be important to me." From there, they decide that "Because family's going to be important to me, I want to get a good-paying job to provide for them." Then these people take 6-figure salaries at Lehman Brothers, but end up working 80 hour weeks and calling their children from the airport at 7 in the morning telling them they're sorry but they couldn't see them off to school because they've got to get to a 1:00 meeting in San Francisco. This, of course, makes no sense at all. [A brief aside about financial firms : they don't pay a lot because they really need you; you could be replaced in 2 seconds (think about how hard it was to get the job in the first place). They pay that much because that's what they think your life is worth. "You give me a year of your life, and I'll give you $100,000. Brilliant."]
Ultimately, what I think I'm trying to say is that our society is constructed such that individual people, acting logically within this structure, make decisions and carry out actions that are contrary to actually achieving happiness/contentment. I hope this makes sense.
The following writing is from a member of a philosophy forum blog I belong to. I'd be interested in your thoughts on this guy's post:
[begin] Recently (perhaps the past year or two) I have been agonizing over figuring certain things out. A question will pop into my mind (such as "Why should we tolerate one another?") and it will frighten me, so I will look for an answer. While I'm contemplating, I can do nothing else. Concentration is lost. Eventually I will get an answer (maybe a week or a month later), and it will be over. However, something else will then come up and the process starts over. Recently I have told myself that I would rather live and enjoy life without trying to understand everything, but then I ask myself "but isn't understanding things more important than enjoying life?" I want to not take it so seriously, but when I tell myself not to, I then tell myself "but you should try to understand things rather than try to be happy".
Please help me. I recently went to the doctor and he says I have a sort of obsessive compulsive thing going on, which I agree with. He gave me medication, but the problem remains: Am I allowed to let certain things go and enjoy life rather than trying to figure everything out? [end]
So, I think everyone has trouble with this idea we've invented called "happiness." Let's see if I (a math idiot) can explain my thoughts through logic.
Allow the following:
let various stimuli possibly resulting in happiness
equal h
let contentment
equal c
let positive human attitude/outlook equal x
let negative human attitude/outlook equal y
let need for more stimuli equal n
here are the possibilities:
h+x=c
h+y=n
is it possible that we could take out the h and say that x-->c ?
I think that happiness is a result of stimuli- i.e. the acquisition of a shiny new mac, new clothes, plasma t.v., a 4.0 GPA, a promotion, the prospect of a new relationship, etc. But it all comes down to attitude and outlook. Contentment is only possible if a person has a reasonably positive outlook. Happiness comes and goes for all of us. But when it comes to those with negative attitudes and poor coping skills, it will serve only as distraction and escape rather than fulfilling, long term enjoyment. Stimuli resulting in happiness for those who have healthy, positive outlooks will provide enjoyment and enrich contentment. People with high resilience can recognize what material items make their lives easier and more enjoyable without feeling that they NEED them, whereas people with low resilience feel that they need certain items in order to maintain the happiness "high" and may never truly reach contentment.
Does this make sense? I feel like I may not have offered much in the direction you were going with your post, but it's my opinion on the subject nonetheless.
*Life is a series of moments. Take each one in- whether sweet or bitter- and appreciate it for what it is. A part of a life.
and I leave you with this:
Here we are, trapped in the amber of the moment. There is no why.
-K.V.
(may he rest in peace.)
I understand your point about the semantics, John, and truth be told I actually weighed in my head whether or not I wanted to switch them as I was writing my first comment, but thought being "content" was a more ephemeral thing while being straight up fuckin' "happy" was something deeper and more fulfilling. Just an explanation, though you're probably right anyway. Regardless:
The 'danger' with contemplating something like happiness (or contentment, or what have you) is that it's too easy to either over-simplify or unnecessarily complicate the matter. For example, all I can really think of in response to you is "Well, when you're truly content, shouldn't nothing else matter? The costs, be they real or opportunity, time spent, etc. should justify the fact that you've found contentment", but I know that's not what you're looking for. Try to break that down, though, and you end up in sort of a downward spiral between justifying what makes you happy/content, and arguing against it.
So, in essence, good luck, buddy.
This all makes me very happy. I think we're starting to make progress down a pathway akin to Plato's Cave Allegory (something I keep thinking about), but this subject is really exhausting so let's leave it at that for now. Next post will be about the depressingly decrepit state of leadership in the world. I'm going up to Dartmouth for Commencement, but I'm sure I'll find some time to get to the libs. Thanks everybody!
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