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By Dr. Bruce T. Marshall
January 9, 2011
Readings
The question of happiness has long perplexed human beings. And so a
vast quantity of opinion has accumulated on this topic. I’ll begin
with a sampling of quotations about happiness.
Abraham Lincoln observed, “Most folks are about as happy as they
make up their minds to be.” Albert Schweitzer offered the thought
that, “Happiness is nothing more than good health and a bad memory.”
While the mathematician, philosopher and social reformer Bertrand
Russell offered, “If there were in the world today any large number
of people who desired their own happiness more than they desired the
unhappiness of others, we could have paradise in a few years.”
Thomas Jefferson created a memorable phrase in the Declaration of
Independence when he stated that people have certain inalienable
rights, including, “Life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.”
But from the other side of the ocean, the English novelist and
scientist, C. P. Snow sniffed, “The pursuit of happiness is a most
ridiculous phrase; if you pursue happiness, you’ll never find it.”
Also from England we have the playwrite, George Bernard Shaw
claiming, “A lifetime of happiness! No man alive could bear it: it
would be hell on earth.” In similar vein, the American writer Edith
Wharton observed, “if only we’d stop trying to be happy, we could
have a pretty good time.”
“I am kind of a paranoiac in reverse,” J. D. Salinger wrote, “I
suspect people of plotting to make me happy.” The comedian George
Burns offered this definition, “Happiness is having a large, loving,
caring, close-knit family—in another city.” And W. C. Fields weighed
in with this advice, “Start off each day with a smile, and get it
over with.”
In the Book of Proverbs in the Old Testament, it is written, “Happy
is the man who finds wisdom and understanding for the gain from it
is better than gain from silver and profit better than gold.” Helen
Keller offered a similar view. She said, “Many persons have a wrong
idea of what constitutes true happiness. It is not attained through
self-gratification but through fidelity to a worthy purpose.”
The elusiveness of happiness has often been noted. The actor John
Barrymore observed, “Happiness often sneaks in through a door you
didn’t know you left open.” As she was growing old, the French
writer, Colette, exclaimed, “What a wonderful life I’ve had! I only
wish I’d realized it sooner.” Nathaniel Hawthorne, the New England
writer and Unitarian, offered this thought, “Happiness is like a
butterfly which, when pursued, is always beyond our grasp, but, if
you will sit down quietly, may alight upon you.”
But let’s give the final word on this selection of thoughts about
happiness to Winnie the Pooh. “‘Well,” said Pooh, ‘what I like
best,’ and then he had to stop and think. Because although Eating
Honey was a very good thing to do, there was a moment just before
you began to eat it which was better than when you were, but he
didn’t know what it was called.”
Sermon
Throughout the years, I have read several books and many articles on
the subject of happiness. I’ve gone through enough of them to
recognize that they follow a pattern. These works start strong,
suggesting that in what is to come, secrets of happiness are to be
revealed. Then the author meanders through the topic before petering
out at the end, coming to a conclusion something like, well,
whatever makes you happy is what happiness is. I get to the end
feeling let down by unfulfilled promises.
I offer this observation as a caution: this sermon might end up the
same way. You’d think that after centuries, if not millennia, of
considering happiness we’d have it worked out by now. After all,
we’ve learned how to make machines that fly; we’ve learned how to
cure or at least treat a vast number of physical ailments; we’ve
learned how to digitize just about anything—but happiness remains
elusive. For all the advances of our civilizations, there isn’t
convincing evidence that we are happier today than were our
ancestors, who didn’t know how to do all the stuff that we can do
and who didn’t have all the stuff that we have.
So happiness continues to be a tempting theme for still more books,
more articles—and more sermons. This morning I would like to offer
thoughts on happiness drawn from research in a field called “brain
science,” that is, the study of how our minds work. This realm of
brain science is new for me, and it reveals findings that are
different from what I might have expected, particularly when
addressing the question of happiness.
● ● ●
I’ll start with one such conclusion. This has to do with aging and
our relative happiness as we grow older. There is an assumption,
often unwritten, that personal happiness mirrors the condition of
our bodies. Our bodies usually are at their peak in our early
twenties and then begins a slow decline. When we look good and feel
good, so we assume, then we are happiest. When aging sets in, we
anticipate that happiness too will decline.
A technique of these happiness studies is to simply ask, “Are you
happy?” Responses to that question reveal a different pattern of
happiness as we make our way through life than we might expect. It
starts the way we would think—people score high on a happiness scale
in their early twenties. They’ve made it out of the teenaged years;
they’re beginning to find their place in the world; they have
friends and relationships; they feel hopeful about the future. By
and large, we are pretty cheerful in our early 20s.
Then begins a slow decline. People in their early 30s aren’t as
happy as those in their 20s. People in their early 40s aren’t has
happy as those in their 30s. But then a surprise: that decline does
not continue as a gradual slope until death. Rather, it reaches
bottom—that is, the point at which people report feeling most
unhappy—at age 46. Then this happiness slope reverses direction
steadily rising so that by their early 70s, people report levels of
happiness and satisfaction higher than people in their 20s.
There’s an article in a recent issue of The Economist magazine
called, “The Joy of Growing Old (Or Why Life Begins at 46).” It
identifies the shape of the happiness curve as a U-Bend. We start
out cheerful, decline until our 40s and early 50s, then go back up.
This is a world-wide pattern, not just an American phenomenon,
though people of different nationalities reach the bottom at
different ages. The Swiss get there first at age 35. Ukrainians take
the longest time—their happiness scores decline until age 62 before
they rebound. It also holds for societies in which people are
happier than average on an absolute scale—Denmark, by the way, tops
the list for absolute happiness with all the Scandinavian countries
doing well while the nations of the former Soviet Union cluster at
the bottom.
Ask the question in reverse—that is, not about happiness but about
sadness and depression—and this pattern also reverses. Instead of a
U-Bend, it becomes an arch, with sadness and depression peaking at,
you guessed it, age 46. (I’m trying to remember my own age 46, and
as I recall, it was not a great year.)
What do we make of this? Why is there such a consistent
cross-cultural pattern? There are several theories which inspire
more studies. In one, people of different ages were asked to listen
to recordings in which disparaging things were said about them.
Younger people and older people reacted differently. Younger people
expressed sadness and anger about what they heard, sometimes
becoming quite agitated. Older people also felt sad but not to the
degree as younger people, and they didn’t get as upset. As one said,
“You can’t please all the people all the time.”
Another theory to account for this pattern is that with age our
ambitions become... well, less ambitious. We learn to accept
ourselves, who we are, and what life seems to have in store for us.
The philosopher William James observed, “How pleasant is the day,
when we give up striving to be young—or slender.”
However we account for this U-bend pattern, it suggests that aging
and how we respond to it might offer clues about what makes for
happier people—of any age. One is the ability to let go of anger,
rather than stewing on things. Another is to respond to criticism
with more perspective. Yes, we can always learn, and criticism helps
us improve whatever we’re doing. But we might not experience it as
an assault on our total being. Yet another key to happiness would be
acceptance: accepting each other and, most importantly, accepting
ourselves. Few if any of us have climbed as high on ladders of
success that we have aimed for, but at some point it just doesn’t
matter. What is: is.
The “graying of America” is often cited as a cause for concern. The
country is aging and that puts stresses on our society as health
care needs increase, and fewer workers are available to pay into the
Social Security System. But maybe there’s a bright side. Maybe as we
age, this country will become happier than we’ve been in recent
decades.
● ● ●
I came across another book on the topic thanks to Jean Smith. It’s
called Stumbling on Happiness by Daniel Gilbert, a professor of
psychology at Harvard. He also cites the work of researchers in
brain science that have implications for our pursuit of happiness.
The author’s premise is that we think we know what will bring
happiness and so we guide our lives by what we think we want—but
that we’re usually wrong.
Human beings are unique among the creatures of this earth in that we
have the power of imagination with which to create a future. This
capacity is different than just being able to anticipate the future.
Many animals are able to anticipate the future. When Amy puts on a
certain apron, our dog runs the other way, having associated that
apron with a bath, even if Amy is just going to make a pie. Human
beings also make cause and effect associations, some of the right,
some of them not. I study hard before a test, and I get a good
grade—there must be a relationship so I study hard before the next
test. I eat pizza and ice cream before a test, and I get a good
grade—there must be a relationship so I return to that diet whenever
I have a big test, no matter how bad it makes me feel. Sports
figures are notorious for their good luck rituals, even though
everybody—including the player —knows full well that, for example,
refusing to change your underwear is unlikely to have any
relationship to maintaining a hitting streak.
These are cause and effect relationships. But whether right or
wrong, they create less trouble than our power of imagination. Why
would this be? Imagination is a wonderful capacity; it enables us to
envision a future different—and better—than our present. George
Bernard Shaw put it this way, “Some men see things as they are and
ask why. Others dream things that never were and ask why not?” So
what’s wrong with imagining a happy future and doing what it takes
to get there?
The problem, according to the author of this “happiness” book, is
that we make some basic mistakes in trying to imagine a happy
future—mistakes that are more likely to create the opposite result.
Nevertheless, we make the same mistakes over and over again.
Daniel Gilbert identifies three of these mistakes. I’ll try to
articulate each one, starting with the first which he labels as
“Realism.”
Realism is the belief that things are in reality as we see them. We
walk around with the assumption that what we see is what there is,
as if our vision were like a digital camera with a ton of memory so
that we accurately take in the details of what’s in front of us.
What brain science tells us is that this isn’t how it works. A good
digital camera is, in fact, far better than our own eyes in
representing what’s really there. We have the illusion that we’re
seeing what’s really there thanks to a trick our brains play. It’s a
trick performed so neatly that we’re not aware it’s happening.
As I look out on this congregation, for example, I see what I think
is a pretty complete and detailed picture of the people who are here
this morning. However, what I see this morning is quite different
from what I saw a year and a half ago, when I first addressed this
congregation. Why would that be? A digital camera taking a photo
then and now would produce two pictures that are about the same,
allowing for differences in attendance and outfits and maybe a bit
of aging. But I see far more detail now than I did a year and a half
ago.
The reason is that my vision relies on clues that I pick up and then
fills in with memory and imagination. I can see you in far more
detail today than I could a year and a half ago because I’ve had
that time to fill in my picture of you. My memory and my imagination
makes what I see more complete than my eyes can actually see at any
one time—but it’s not necessarily an accurate representation of what
is.
What this means is that when we make decisions about what we want
that will bring us happiness, we are operating not from facts but
from imagination—what we imagine we see today. So we start off with
a handicap: we’re not working with reliable information about the
world as it is.
● ● ●
A second error in planning for a happy future is called Presentism.
What this means is that we imagine the future in terms of the
present. We really don’t know what the future will be or look like
or feel like. So our attempts to envision and plan for a happy
future are more about “now” than they are about “then.”
To demonstrate, we might consider efforts to visualize our current
time made by people in the past. In the 1950s, there are these great
futurist books with titles like The World of Tomorrow. Daniel
Gilbert notes, “Flip a few pages and you’ll find a drawing of a
housewife with a Donna Reed hairdo and a poodle skirt flitting about
her atomic kitchen, waiting for the sound of her husband’s rocket
car before getting the tuna casserole on the table...You will also
notice that some things are missing. The men don’t carry babies, the
women don’t carry briefcases, the children don’t have pierced
eyebrows or nipples...There are no skateboarders or panhandlers, no
smart phones or smartdrinks, no spandex, latex, Gore-Tex, Amex,
FedEx, or Wal-Mart. What’s more, all the people of African, Asian,
and Hispanic origins seem to have missed the future entirely.
Indeed, what makes these drawings so charming is that they are
utterly, fabulously, and ridiculously wrong.”
When we imagine the future, we do so in terms of the present. We
make the mistake of predicting that the future will be far more like
whatever present we happen to be in than how the future actually
will be. In fact, we have no idea what the future in which we try to
place our happiness will look like.
● ● ●
A third error we make can be identified as “Rationalization.” The
human body has a wonderful capacity for protecting itself against
invaders like bacteria, like viruses. When a threat presents itself,
our immune system springs into action—which is why a malfunction of
the immune system itself is so dangerous. We rely upon it to keep us
safe.
The human psyche also possesses an immune system that protects us
from psychic threats, that is, whatever might challenge the health
and wholeness of our sense of ourselves as people. So your boss
gives a scathing review of your performance. If you take it fully to
heart, you might not be able to get out of bed the next morning—or
you might do what somebody is accused doing at Suburban Hospital
last week: turn violent against the reviewer. A healthy
psychological immune system takes in enough of the criticism to
learn from it but not so much that it destroys his or her spirit.
The same psychological immune system, however, clouds our view of
the future. We imagine things as going more smoothly than they ever
really do. When trying to control for happiness, then, that same
immune system that protects from dangers in the present sets us up
for failure in the future by not letting us see the many
possibilities for our plans to go wrong.
● ● ●
Hence, when we seek to create a future of greater happiness, we
think we know what we’re doing, but we really don’t. We might be
looking for a new job to help create happiness or a relationship or
a new car or a raise or having children or surviving until the
teenagers leave home—whatever it is we anticipate as creating
happiness for us probably won’t, at least as we envision it.
For one, we’re working with faulty information—not the world as it
is but the world as we see it. Secondly, we are trying to project
ourselves into a future than is more a representation of our present
than it is of anything that the future might actually look like. And
finally, we adjust our view of reality to make it conform with what
we want it to be.
This seems like mostly bad news. As I read it, this brain research
tells that our efforts to secure happiness are stacked against us.
We have to ask, is there anything good and useful here? Can we draw
upon this same research to help us achieve a goal of happier todays
and happier tomorrows.
To my mind, this is where the book I’ve been drawing upon falters.
After presenting some fascinating analysis how we go wrong in our
pursuit of happiness, the author isn’t able to take the next step
and offer viable suggestions on how we might be able to get it
right. So this book—like many others on happiness—ends with a dull
thud. He admits as much stating, “My friends tell me that I have a
tendency to point out problems without offering solutions...” All he
manages as a prescription is that to discover the secret of
happiness, don’t rely on your imagination, rather, pay attention to
what others have to say about what actually makes them happy. If
something makes somebody else happy, then chances are it will work
for you.
That’s fine as far as it goes, but not real practical. So I’m going
to take the liberty of offering my own interpretation.
When I think about my track record in predicting the future and my
place in it, I find that I am almost always wrong. What really
happens has little relationship to what I anticipate. Even if what
happens is good, it’s good in a different way than I had imagined.
My experience thus aligns with what brain science research tells us.
In another interesting study, people were asked to imagine their
lives if some wonderful thing happened. They were also asked to
imagine their lives if some terrible thing happened. Then their
responses were compared with people for whom the good things
actually occurred—and people for whom the bad thing actually
occurred.
People imagining the good thing almost always imagine that they will
be happier than people who have experienced this good thing really
are. And people imagining the bad thing almost always imagine that
they will be sadder than people who have experienced this bad thing
really are. What this says to me is that each of us has a certain
equilibrium within that can be knocked askew from time to time, but
that will find a way to right itself, given the opportunity.
The research showing the U-bend pattern of happiness as we age
suggests that one key is acceptance—taking things as they come,
taking ourselves as we are. I find confirmation of that from the
research showing how our brains function and the mistakes to which
we are subject. We don’t really have the capacity to reliably
imagine and create a happier future—except in one way. And that is
to create a happier present. We create a happier present by finding
and living within and accepting that equilibrium that seems to exist
in each of us, that keeps us steady amidst the threats we experience
in everyday life and amidst the unanticipated changes the future
brings. This is not the delirious kind of happiness we might imagine
during peak experiences but the steady kind of happiness that stays
with us during good times and bad. I seem to be happiest when I just
am. When I am myself—not anticipating or fearing the future, not
pushing myself to become something that I’m not. It is at such times
that I can be open and available to life itself and to the surprise
of happiness which then comes as a gift—as a gift from life itself.
And so I think as a formula for happiness, the advice that Forrest
Church offered and that Denise shared earlier is quite good. “Want
what you have,” he said. “Do what you can; and be who you are.”
(Forrest, by the way, was one of the most cheerful people I’ve ever
known. He seemed happy.)
Or, expressed more poetically by another Unitarian, Nathanial
Hawthorne, in a reading with which I began, “Happiness is like a
butterfly which, when pursued, is always beyond our grasp, but, if
you will sit down quietly, may alight upon you.”
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