During long road trips when I was a kid, instead of switching on the radio my father sang, sometimes accompanied my mother. My brother had left home, so it was just me in the back, behind a blanket strung from door to door, pretending I was on a pirate ship headed for China, doing my best to blot out my father’s off-key warbling. Bernie was not a happy man, but his repertoire had a single theme: Happy Days Are Here Again, Smile (though your heart is breaking) and Put On A Happy Face topped his hit parade.
My mother wasn’t any happier than my father, but it was as if she had drunk the same cultural Kool-Aid as he. They both had got the message that happiness is the only worthy emotion. The rest—anger, disappointment, fear, sorrow—were signs of a weak character. Shameful. I got the message, too. Like so many Westerners, especially Americans, we believed we were supposed to be happy all the time—as far as I can tell, the number one, surefire predictor of misery.
“We have this default assumption that happiness is a calculus of pleasure and pain, and if you get rid of pain and multiply pleasures then you’ll be happy, but it doesn’t work that way,” says Darrin McMahon, a history professor at Dartmouth College and author of Happiness: A History. What’s more, he explains, “The idea of happiness as our natural state is a peculiarly modern condition that puts a tremendous onus on people. We blame ourselves and feel guilty and deficient when we’re not happy.”
As it turns out, the notion that we should be able to manifest our own individual happiness is a relatively recent concept in human history, starting in the late 17th century and continuing to develop during the 18th (see under: Thomas Jefferson and John Locke). Before then, suffering was considered the norm and happiness was thought to be a matter of luck. In fact, hap is both the Old Norse and Old English root of happiness—and it means luck or chance.
“The belief in our own happiness has been a progressive and liberating notion, yet it has a shadow side,” McMahon tells me. To me it seems as if our whole culture has been living in this shadow zone for some time: Don’t worry, be happy. Or, as with my parents, pretend to be happy, even when you’re not.
Are we desperately seeking happiness because we’re more miserable than ever before, despite the many perks of modern life?
So what are we really talking about when we talk about happiness?
Clearly, given the recent explosion of bestsellers, smartphone apps, websites, workshops, TED talks, online courses, magazine articles, and a slew of research programs dedicated to helping people become happier, it’s no idle question.
Yet, I wonder: Are we desperately seeking happiness more than ever before because we’re more miserable than ever before, despite the obvious perks and advantages of contemporary life? Or are there important lessons to be gleaned from the thriving happiness zeitgeist that can actually make us, well, happier, in a real and authentic sort of way? Both explanations, it would seem, are true.
“Most of us have signed on for a cultural approach that has to do with possessions and status and achievements as markers of happiness,” says Emiliana Simon-Thomas, science director of the Greater Good Science Center at the University of California, Berkeley, which offers a free 10-week online course called The Science of Happiness. “But having bought into that vision and aspired to it on a fundamental level, we’re lonelier than ever,” she explains, noting that an estimated one out of every three people has no one in their life they can really talk to. “We’re more disconnected from our communities and less able to cooperate and we’re anxious about potential failure. All of these factors make happiness much harder to evaluate.”
Still, perhaps the tsunami of interest in happiness reflects a cultural awakening and swing away from the unsatisfying vision that has dogged us since long before my father started crooning Happy Days Are Here Again. There seems to be a growing hunger for a truer, more achievable and sustainable happiness than our shopworn trifecta of stuff, status, and achievements. The 114,000 people who signed up for Greater Good’s online course would seem to suggest as much. So would the 120 participants who flocked from around the globe to the Esalen Institute to attend Greater Good’s “Science of Happiness” weekend.
What better setting for a happiness weekend than the birthplace of the human potential movement, I think, as I enter the large, lodge-like dining room that, along with the famous cliffside mineral baths, is the heart of the Esalen experience. A loud buzz reverberates as guests help themselves to the evening meal of shepherd’s pie, then find a place at one of the long tables. Some have come on their own, others with a friend or partner, but everyone seems curious about who else is there and why—and seemingly random seating arrangements result in connections that last all weekend and perhaps beyond. Many of the folks I talk to have already taken the online course and want to go deeper. Others, including therapists, teachers, doctors, environmentalists, and leadership consultants, plan to bring the lessons back to their communities and families. And just about everyone aspires to boost his or her own happiness quotient. Laurie, destined to become my weekend BFF, tells me she believes opening to happiness is a lot like exercise. “You have to set the intention, then work your muscles by trying out various practices, but without worrying too much about how happy you are at any one moment,” she suggests. And even though we’re at Esalen, with its countercultural mystique, the crowd doesn’t seem to be in search of a woo woo experience. One woman, who could be speaking for the majority, tells me, “I like that the material isn’t all touchy-feely. It’s about changing your habits and your brain. And it’s based on real science.”
The 40% Solution
So what is this science of happiness, anyhow?
To me, one of the most interesting findings is the now well-documented fact that we humans are notoriously lousy at predicting what will—and will not—make us happy. “People think things that are unpleasant are going to be crushing for a much longer time than they are,” Simon-Thomas tells me a few days before the workshop, which she is co-leading. “They also think that pleasures, such as a new material possession or an incredibly empowering achievement, are going to lead to long-term boosts to their well-being. But what the studies show is that we get over and habituate to the things that are frightening or harmful or sad, and at the same time, we habituate to wonderful things.” In other words, our lowest lows and highest highs don’t last. “Pleasure is really important, but you can’t put it at the top of the list of aspirations.”
Not only that, it tu