Happiness

(This is from the introduction to my book, “The Virtue of Happiness”)

Happiness is not a smiley face, and a happy life is not a perfect Facebook profile of blissful moments and beaming selfies building on a continual upward trajectory.

We are biological, not mechanical; our minds are not computers – though some functions of our brains are similar. Our lives are full of rhythms, cycles of expansion and contraction, ebb and flow. Just as a tree will withdraw into itself beginning in the Fall and during the winter, dropping its leaves and growing its roots, then expands out with new buds, blossoms, and fruit in the Spring and summer, our bodies pulse with heartbeats, breaths, and cycles of sleep and wakefulness. We don’t remain in a continual state; and we cannot expect continual, uninterrupted happiness or success.

Our consciousness is organized around stories; including our own personal stories of tragedy and triumph, comedy and creativity, love and loss. We have some say in the nature of the stories with which we identify – to what degree we see ourselves as authors of our stories; to what degree the characters can learn and grow; what possibilities there may be for interesting plot twists – and this is one of the ways we can steer ourselves toward a better life, a better sense of ourselves: We can think of our lives within the context of a better story.

We are constrained by the probabilities of life – our personal genetics, our inborn temperament, the nature of our birth and upbringing, the burden of our weaknesses and the blessings of our strengths. We are liberated by our imaginations, our courage, our consciousness, and our ambition, to defy our personal probabilities – to overcome hardship, to recover from setbacks, to master our diagnoses, to move from addiction to sobriety, to channel the best within us to create something better than we might have expected.

Life itself is a defiance of the principle of entropy – the tendency for matter to devolve into chaos and disorder. Life takes nutrients and the energy of inspiration and creates its own order, its own structure, and its own direction. As human beings, our consciousness allows us to take this process a step further, expanding it into a different dimension: To decide consciously to move in a particular direction; to create, to engage, to love.

So a human life that is happy is not a trivial matter of being lucky, of getting what we want; of pleasant pastimes or the absence of responsibilities or pain. A human life that is happy is an accomplishment; a triumphant, sometimes even a heroic creation. Some of the most deeply and genuinely happy people I’ve known have overcome tremendous physical or psychological hardships to get there. As with any big, long term project, it takes work; it’s complicated and time consuming – more like a great symphony of harmony and counterpoint than a simple catchy jingle. To create a life that is truly happy over time takes discipline, passion, and courage.

A happy moment can be a matter of luck; a happy life requires virtue.

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One of the – sometimes – unspoken expectations when we buy something is that it will, to some degree, make us happy.

We buy a new appliance, or a nice piece of furniture for our home, and it satisfies an idea we had that led us to buy it in the first place. Part of that idea is that the new oven, or couch, will make us happy.

We shop for a new piece of clothing, and we expect that we’ll enjoy wearing it.

Even a trip to the grocery store is often accompanied with an expectation that the food we buy will make for a yummy meal that we’ll savor.

We can buy gizmos like smart phones or Apple watches, and we expect they’ll improve, to some extent, the quality of our lives.

And each of these purchases usually does bring us some degree of satisfaction or pleasure… for a little while.

But part of our strength as human beings is our capacity to adapt to a multitude of circumstances; from tremendous wealth and opportunities, to severe poverty or physical danger. We can expand into great flourishing, or we can make do, struggle, and muddle through rough times.

“Hedonic adaptation” is the term that researchers use to describe this capacity to adapt to different circumstances while staying within a range of overall happiness. This gift of adaptability is a wonderful advantage in a continually changing world, full of endless creativity, unanticipated events, and unpredictable possibilities, good or bad.

It also means that we adapt to good things relatively quickly, so the happiness we experience from them is often fleeting.

…then we need another good thing.

…and another.

And when we become used to the availability of good things, when we come to expect them as a regular experience of a good life, we enter what’s called the “Hedonic Treadmill.”

Needing more and more good things in order to feel what we’ve come to expect as a baseline of happiness can be exhausting. It can undermine the sense of happiness we enjoy with each positive experience.

And in that way we can undermine our sense of being happy about our life.

But there is an antidote; something we can deliberately practice and gets easier over time, and that can significantly affect our happiness:

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We are in the midst of remarkable times, and our relationship to money is very different because of it. Appreciating this can open up possibilities for how you think, feel and act with your money.

We all see the world through the lens of the culture and the times in which we live. People living during the Renaissance didn’t know they were living during the Renaissance and didn’t call it that. It’s often only in hindsight that we can see the pattern.

Today it’s hard to fully appreciate the truly remarkable conditions in which we live. For us it’s just life. For our ancestors, it would be breathtaking.

Consider that for nearly all of mankind’s existence, our ancestors lived on the equivalent of about $1-$3 a day. Imagine paying for your home, your food, your clothing, your medical needs – everything – from a total of $1,095 for the entire year/$91 per month. For us that would be dire poverty, yet that’s what our ancestors have lived on – and, until recently, most of the population on earth.

Something changed all that, beginning in the later 1600’s in Holland, and spreading and growing in England in the 1700’s and moving gradually – and then recently more quickly – throughout the rest of the world.

That $3 a day grew by a very conservative factor of 16, and more realistically, when you include the vast improvement in the quality of goods and services, more like a factor of 100 (how do you compare an iPhone, or antibiotics, with anything in existence a few hundred years ago?).

This was the beginning of the Industrial Revolution, followed soon after by what Deirdre McCloskey calls “The Great Enrichment” – which we are very much still enjoying.

Throughout history there have been times and places of improved economic conditions. But for perspective, the best that you’ll find is maybe a raising of average income to $6 or maybe $8 a day, and that never lasted for very long; and it’s still dire poverty by our standards.

Today, worldwide average income is about $33 a day, and in the wealthier countries it’s more like $100 a day or more.

So if you’re reading this, it’s very likely that the average income among everybody in your country – not just a fortunate few – is more than 30 times what our ancestors could expect to live on. Adding the incalculable innovations and improvements (those iPhones and antibiotics again), we can conservatively more than triple that.

This isn’t the difference between having a clunky car or a nicer car; a small apartment or a large house; shopping at a discount store or a fancy store. This is the difference between a high probability of an early death by starvation or disease; or living a relatively good life until about 80.

In other words, this change since about the year 1800 is a phenomenal improvement in life for all people.

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As this political season heats up, and all the arguments, indignation and accusations that go with it come to a rolling boil, I thought it would be worth having a look at some of the deeper biases that we all can get immersed in, regardless of ideology or political sentiments.

I write this, not because I think you should be apathetic about politics, or choose a particular side that I might like. I write this because the bombardment of manipulations we are subject to can cause us to lose focus on the meaningful details of our own lives; and the biases which politics are teeming with can throw off our judgment about what’s most important.

By politics, I mean the process by which we – politicians and media most strongly, but individuals as well – persuade, cajole, manipulate, trick, argue, deceive, and otherwise do everything we can to empower those we want to empower, and disempower those we want to disempower.

This is an equal opportunity inquiry. We all have our personal beliefs, and, regardless of what they are, every single one of us gets seduced by our biases.

Emotional Bias:

First of all, politics, and the media hype around it, creates an emphasis on emotion. From the regal music of the Sunday news shows, to the passionate oration of the politicians, to the choreographed sneers and eye rolls of the political commentators, politics feeds into our emotional system much more than our rational, intellectual assessments, no matter how much a given speaker may insist that they offer the “True Facts.”

Tribal Bias:

Human beings are by far the most caring, empathetic creatures on earth. We have unique wiring in our brain that makes this possible. If a chimpanzee in the wild is injured, he will not be taken care of by the troop – they will let him suffer and starve; but when current day members of human hunter gatherer bands were questioned, fully half of the members had been in just such a situation, and the band nursed them back to health.

This is significant, because the exceptions stand out in stark relief. When we see or hear about examples of people doing monstrous things to other people, it horrifies us – because this is not how almost all of us behave toward our fellow human beings. (There are examples of other animals, dogs, elephants, etc. showing deep caring; but these are moving because they seem so human – they are also, almost always, toward direct relations.)

But politics feeds into a tribal bias. That level of compassion and empathy mostly disappears when we think of people as outside of our group. These days, more than any time in history, the whole world is our group, which is a very good thing. But when we judge a politician from an opposing party, we lose that empathy and compassion. Our bias is strongly for our party, and against the other.

Which means we’ll tend to see only or mostly the good in members of our team, and only or mostly the bad in the other. Regardless of what the actual truth may be.

Immediacy Bias:

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