Happy

In 1961, twins Lori and Dori Schappell were born in Pennsylvania. Their heads were joined together, and they spent the first 24 years of their life in an institution for the intellectually disabled, which they were not. However, Dori’s spina bifida required special attention and a court judge decided on their behalf… Currently, Lori is a champion bowler, whereas Dori (now George) is a country singer that moves around in a special self-designed chair pushed by Lori. They both went to college after George fought to have their original misdiagnosis overturned. Today, Lori and George are the longest-living conjoined twins and claim that they live their lives to the fullest. Can really Lori and George be as happy as you and I are?

Enter Stumbling on Happiness: [1]

Psychologist Daniel Gilbert proposes a couple of hypotheses to explain the reported happiness of the twins:

Language-squishing hypothesis:

On a 1-to-10 scale, we taste a cake and give it a 5 whereas they give it an 8. The cake tastes exactly the same to all of us, but we talk about it differently because our scales are different (our range is larger).

Experience-stretching hypothesis

Perhaps Lori and George express their feelings in the same way as the rest of us, but they feel something different. Because they don’t know what they are missing, they are happy with less.

Which hypothesis is correct? Given that the point of view of each of us is different, it’s hard to tell. But, can we objectively define happiness? Or a path to reach it?

Eudaimonia

This Greek word is commonly translated as happiness, but more literally, it means “good spirit,” “human flourishing,” or “life well lived.” In ancient Greece, happiness was the direct result of the virtuous doing of ones’ duties. But what constituted virtue(arete) was something different to each of the classics.

Socrates considered that virtue alone is the only requirement for eudaimonia. He was convinced that virtues like wisdom, courage, justice, self-control, and piety are essential to lead a good and happy life. Simply put, a virtuous person cannot fail to be happy. Plato posed that a virtuous person is one with a soul in harmony and order. Such a state (i.e., lack of inner conflict) is essential to reach happiness. For Aristotle, to reach eudaimonia the work of a human being was the attainment of excellence in activities driven by reason (what he considered the ultimate human virtue). Epicurus linked a good life with pleasure, but not any kind of pleasure, only those leading to long-term well-being. He argued that some pleasures lead to greater pains and should be avoided (e.g., instant gratification such as eating in excess). The stoics built into Socrates’ perspective on eudaimonia, adding the claim that the eudaimon life is a morally virtuous life (honor, wealth, and other assets were considered just “neutral”).

The Athenian statesman Solon argued that happiness is the result of living up to one’s maximum potential. Hence, it was impossible to evaluate if someone had been happy until that person was dead. An interesting twist into this perspective was imposed by Christian theologians centuries later: Happiness was not the product but the “reward” of a life of virtue, waiting for us in the afterlife…

In conclusion, a human mind is a wandering mind, and a wandering mind is an unhappy mind. The ability to think about what is not happening is a cognitive achievement that comes at an emotional cost.

Matthew Killingsworth and Daniel Gilbert, Science (2010)

In charge

We want to control our futures. It makes us happy. Steering one’s boat through life gives us pleasure because it makes us feel that purposeful—what we do matters, it has an impact. Clinical analyses show depressed people tend to focus on the lack of control that we have in most circumstances. Hence, Gilbert concludes, the feeling of being in control (even if we are not) is a sign of good mental health.

Wanting to be in control of our lives is a good thing because some futures are better than others. The problem, Gilbert poses, is that we are not very good at predicting how our future is going to feel like.

The emotional experience that results from a flow of information that originates in the world is called feeling; the emotional experience that results from a flow of information that originates in memory is called prefeeling; and mixing them up is one of the world’s most popular sports.

Daniel Gilbert, Stumbling on Happiness (2006)

Timeless confusion

Most mental images are atemporal: We see who is doing what. We identify where it’s happening. Many times, the when is not clear. When we attempt to figure how we are going to feel in the future under certain circumstances, we are really judging how we would feel if those things would happen now. Gilbert explains that this “Reality First policy” precludes us from feeling good about an imaginary future.

Is it possible to be happy just doing the same? First experiences can be wonderful, but their impact disappears with repetition. A solution? Include variety in single-time episodes (e.g., a beer sampler flight might make you enjoy more the bar experience than drinking the same old beer constantly). Or include time in the equation. If your visits to the bar are sufficiently spaced, you might keep being delighted drinking the same old beer.

Remember: Our minds might not be aware of the difference, but we should treat sequential and simultaneous events differently.

I didn’t appreciate others nearly as much as I do now.

Christopher Reeve, after the accident that left him tetraplegic

Unhappiness vax

It is likely that you heard from people that years after enduring a traumatic experience claim that they value the little things of life much more. Gilbert argues that humans have a “psychological immune system” that protects us against unhappiness the same way that our white blood cells kill extraneous bacteria. We live in our personal representations of what’s out there in the world. Hence, this system operates providing with an explanation about the meaning of the circumstances around us:

“I didn’t win the competition because the judge hates me.”

“They didn’t choose for the job, but that’s probably for the best.”

“It didn’t work, God might have better plans for me.”

The mere act of writing about it creates immediate health benefits in people with severe traumas. If you want to see a great real case study of logotherapy in action, read Viktor Frankl’s Man’s Search for Meaning.

The price we pay for our irrepressible explanatory urge is that we often spoil our most pleasant experiences by making good sense of them.

Daniel Gilbert, Stumbling on Happiness (2006)

Happily puzzled

We love puzzles, mysteries, dilemmas. Unexplained events have deep emotional impacts on us because they are out of the ordinary and because they are unresolved, thus we keep thinking about them all the time. Good story writers know this well and use it to keep watching, thinking, and talking about who killed Laura Palmer or what happened to Mulder’s sister.

Provide a good explanation of what happened, even a fake one, and it’s over. Narrative endings help our minds to give closure and move on to the next thing. This is the reason, Gilbert explains, why couples whose relationships end up badly “remember” that they were never happy, to begin with.

The desire for food is limited in every man by the narrow capacity of the human stomach; but the desire of the conveniences and ornaments of building, dress, equipage, and household furniture, seems to have no limit or certain boundary.

Adam Smith, The Wealth of Nations (1776)

Unhappily satisfied

Food, money, cars, houses, they all stop giving us pleasure as soon as we have enough. Why then don’t we seem to ever have enough? It’s all part of a “belief-transmission game.” Adam Smith (the father of modern economics) believed that, irrespective of social and economic status, all humans seeking the same thing: happiness. Smith argued that world economies flourish only because we are tricked into believing that they are the direct source of our happiness. The production of wealth does not necessarily translate directly into every person being happier, but it improves the economy. In turn, a better economy helps to maintain a more stable society, which functions as the platform to propagate the belief that more wealth equals more happiness.

Psychologist and economist David Kahneman argues that we confuse satisfaction with happiness. Conventional success makes people satisfied, but what determines how happy we are is largely social. [2] He argues that we are happy when we spend time with the people we love, especially friends more than children. In fact, Gilbert is of the opinion that the “joy of children” is another belief-transmission game, similar to the joy of money. We are just wired to believe that children bring happiness is a part of the conventional wisdom because otherwise society as we know it would cease to exist. This is why women tend to remember better the outcome of childbirth (their happy baby), than the long and painful process leading to it. In fact, when it comes to marital satisfaction, Gilbert points out to four separate studies indicating that it decreases after the first child is born, and it only recovers when the last child leaves the house: “the only known symptom of empty nest syndrome is increased smiling,” he concludes. On the other hand, others have developed convincing narratives of why having kids is like having a source of happy moments on tap.

Happy is he who bears a god within, and who obeys it.

Louis Pasteur on enthusiasm (from the Greek en theos, “god within”)

In our hands

If you are born to the chief of a small village in Congo, chances are that your fate has been set up for you. Not so long ago, the same principle applied if you were born to a local shoemaker or in a Royal family (especially before the 1700s). But the industrial and technological revolutions changed all of this. The range of options and opportunities available for many of us is outstanding. Options are good, but if we are seeking to find happiness, which precise sequence of things, people, and circumstances are going to lead us there? Is our destination as tangible as the horizon? Others with fewer options seem to have figured out a shortcut to a fulfilled life.

[1] This essay follows this essential book, although from a distance.

[2] Kahneman on Making Sense (2020, p. 307).

Cover photo: Joaquin Phoenix forcing a smile in Joker (credit: Warner Bros, 2019).