There is a vast literature on how to be happy. As I read most of the articles I encounter, I stop to question the meaning of “happiness,” because it is too often understood as “pleasure.” I’m not anti-pleasure, but I’ve personally seen that pleasure-seeking is not a path to a meaningful life. In fact, it is the opposite. I prefer to seek a meaningful life, but doing this involves many painful moments that are, in the end, worth the pain. Here’s a caricature of these two approaches, from an article by Arthur Brooks, titled “There Are Two Kinds of Happy People: Some of us strive for a virtuous life. Others strive for a pleasant one. We could all use a better balance.”
Epicurus (341–270 B.C.) led an eponymous school of thought—Epicureanism—that believed a happy life requires two things: ataraxia (freedom from mental disturbance) and aponia (the absence of physical pain). His philosophy might be characterized as “If it is scary or painful, work to avoid it.” Epicureans see discomfort as generally negative, and thus the elimination of threats and problems as the key to a happier life. Don’t get the impression that I am saying they are lazy or unmotivated—quite the contrary, in many cases. But they don’t see enduring fear and pain as inherently necessary or beneficial, and they focus instead on enjoying life.
Epictetus (c. 50–c. 135 A.D.) was one of the most prominent Stoic philosophers, who believed happiness comes from finding life’s purpose, accepting one’s fate, and behaving morally regardless of the personal cost. His philosophy could be summarized as, “Grow a spine and do your duty.” People who follow a Stoic style see happiness as something earned through a good deal of sacrifice. Not surprisingly, Stoics are generally hard workers who live for the future and are willing to incur substantial personal cost to meet their life’s purpose (as they see it) without much complaining. They see the key to happiness as working through pain and fear, not actively avoiding them.
Here’s an alternate path offered by Emily Esfahani Smith. Instead of seeking happiness (which will not result in happiness), she urges us to seek meaningfulness in our lives. Her article in The Atlantic is titled “There’s More to Life Than Being Happy: Meaning comes from the pursuit of more complex things than happiness.” Here’s an excerpt:
Meaning is not only about transcending the self, but also about transcending the present moment — which is perhaps the most important finding of the study, according to the researchers. While happiness is an emotion felt in the here and now, it ultimately fades away, just as all emotions do; positive affect and feelings of pleasure are fleeting. The amount of time people report feeling good or bad correlates with happiness but not at all with meaning.
In her TED talk, Esfahani Smith explains that it is futile to seek happiness:
The data showed that chasing happiness can make people unhappy. And what really struck me was this: the suicide rate has been rising around the world, and it recently reached a 30-year high in America. Even though life is getting objectively better by nearly every conceivable standard, more people feel hopeless, depressed and alone. There’s an emptiness gnawing away at people, and you don’t have to be clinically depressed to feel it. Sooner or later, I think we all wonder: Is this all there is? And according to the research, what predicts this despair is not a lack of happiness. It’s a lack of something else, a lack of having meaning in life.
01:35
But that raised some questions for me. Is there more to life than being happy? And what’s the difference between being happy and having meaning in life? Many psychologists define happiness as a state of comfort and ease, feeling good in the moment. Meaning, though, is deeper. The renowned psychologist Martin Seligman says meaning comes from belonging to and serving something beyond yourself and from developing the best within you. Our culture is obsessed with happiness, but I came to see that seeking meaning is the more fulfilling path. And the studies show that people who have meaning in life, they’re more resilient, they do better in school and at work, and they even live longer.
02:24
So this all made me wonder: How can we each live more meaningfully? To find out, I spent five years interviewing hundreds of people and reading through thousands of pages of psychology, neuroscience and philosophy. Bringing it all together, I found that there are what I call four pillars of a meaningful life. And we can each create lives of meaning by building some or all of these pillars in our lives.
Esfahani Smith’s fourfold path to meaningfulness includes these four elements:
1) A Sense of Belonging, meaning relationships “where you really feel like you matter to others and are valued by them, and where you in turn treat others like they matter and are valued.”
2) Purpose, or “having something worthwhile to do with your time,” says Smith. “It’s this pursuit that organizes your life and involves making a contribution to others.” Smith writes and speaks about the best ways we can find purpose in our own lives. This includes locating our strengths and talents, what our unique perspective on the world is, and bringing that all together to give back.
3) Transcendence, “those moments where you’re basically lifted above the hustle and bustle of daily life and you feel your sense of self fade away.” Transcendence, for a lot of people, is part of a religious pursuit, experienced through meditation, prayer, and other expressions of faith. But you can also experience it in nature, or at work, explains Smith.
4) Storytelling, the final pillar “surprised me in a lot of ways,” Smith says. “Storytelling is really about the story that you tell yourself about your life, about how you became you. It’s your personal myth.”
For several years, I’ve embraced Esfahani Smith’s four principles. And, if you haven’t noticed, neither happiness-seeking nor pleasure-seeking are among her paths.
I will pause this discussion at this point. More to come . . .
I look forward to the discussion. Among the “lower classes,” by which I mean those with little chance of influencing major decisions which significantly affect them (would include thee and me), I’ve perceived widespread Dysthymia and spreading Anhedonia since late last Spring. I’ve long thought that the “pursuit of happiness” was the wrong objective, preferring instead “the pursuit of hopefulness.”
Bill, you are challenging my memory from undergrad psychology, so I’m looking up these terms at Wikipedia:
Dysthymia – Dysthymia, also known as persistent depressive disorder (PDD), is a mood disorder consisting of the same cognitive and physical problems as depression, but with longer-lasting symptoms. The concept was coined by Robert Spitzer as a replacement for the term “depressive personality” in the late 1970s. In the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM-IV), dysthymia is a serious state of chronic depression, which persists for at least two years (one year for children and adolescents). Dysthymia is less acute than major depressive disorder, but not necessarily less severe.[8]
Anhedonia – Anhedonia is a diverse array of deficits in hedonic function, including reduced motivation or ability to experience pleasure.[1] While earlier definitions emphasized the inability to experience pleasure, anhedonia is currently used by researchers to refer to reduced motivation, reduced anticipatory pleasure (wanting), reduced consummatory pleasure (liking), and deficits in reinforcement learning
Yes, you’ve got the definitions right. There were easier-to-grasp words and phrases available, but the specificity of dysthymia and, in particular, anhedonia,, argued for their use. Anhedonia isn’t just the absence of experiencing pleasure, it’s an inability to experience pleasure. The symptoms reported by parents urgent to get their children back in school, sound much like anhedonia patients I once treated. The deficits noted together indicate a common cause, which is an inability to experience pleasure. When inflicted on a child, one cannot rule out lifetime consequences. As children we learn, and one of the things we learn is to experience pleasure rationally. Rationally experiencing pleasure is a building block of understanding that one is ultimately responsible for one’s own pleasure and other feelings.
Dysthymia isn’t just depression, which most lay people equate with “feeling down.” Depression is so much more than that. It typically affects the entire body, causing real physical pain, exhaustion, and other symptoms. Dysthymia is noticeable for its persistence. Children won’t just “cheer up.” The longer dysthymia lasts, the more difficult it is to exit. Teachers being paid to stay home may find themselves with a classroom full of children needing more individual attention than there are hours in a day.
Bill, it’s difficult to read your words because I fear that you are on to something important. A second invisible pandemic that doesn’t have an obvious “off” switch. The picture you paint reminds me of some depression-era photos I have of my relatives. You can see the deep pain in their faces, even on some of these photos
We’re at an unfortunate point where a great many difficult decisions have to be made simultaneously. We elect politicians to make them, which is why I vote on the basis of decision-making process. There are many bases for making these decisions, and I prefer to view them as thousands of continua rather than as thousands of 1-0 propositions. For example, decisions can be made on a basis feeling or thinking. At the extremes we tend to make very bad decisions. Currently, both major political parties are under the control of their extremes.
A second continuum is short-term partisan gain versus long-term good of the nation. Most of us have highly-developed skills for self-delusion, and we begin to believe our own rationalizations. Everything I decide is on the basis of long-term good of the nation, and it’s mere coincidence that short-term gain for my tribe precisely matches long-term good of the nation. That rarely results from honest, reasoned discourse. We’re going to have to talk with each other instead of at each other.
We cannot solve any of the current problems – a pandemic,an economy in shambles, the rise of authoritarianism, the emergence of critical race theory – without someone experiencing pain. The issue of reopening schools is a decent representative. We know that keeping schools closed is causing mental health issues in children, leading to increase in domestic violence, and disproportionately affecting single mothers of color, who cannot be both at work and at home simultaneously. My solution is to open pre-K and Kindergarten classrooms and allow teachers younger than 40 to return to the classroom. At the one-month mark we measure infections, complications and deaths from C19. Then open grades one and two, remeasure at one month, and so on. Eventually we begin raising the age of teachers allowed to return to classrooms. Some things will go wrong, some little child with an undetected birth defect will die.Rinse and repeat.
Bill, I agree that the two parties are under the control of their extremes. I would also hold that the extremes are a slim but loud minority of each party that somehow gets its way, often through boorish behavior. My gut-level solution is that the middle 80-90% of each party needs to ridicule and eject the 10-20% who are extremists. I don’t expect this to happen, because the loud minorities are great at name-calling, cancel-culture and power politics. I’m pessimistic that we will ever have a government that functions as well as it did in prior decades (which was sub-optimal; it’s never been great). That doesn’t mean we should stop trying.
Fully agreed/ Every time I time I think I’ve identified the extreme that’s worse, the other extreme reminds me how wrong I can be.