We live in an imperfect world. Ideally, a mentally healthy person is aware of this fact and is able to function and even progress without being defeated by external forces that do not go as expected or desired. I.e., things that are more likely to make one unhappy than happy.
I tend to look askance at a person who is aggressively positive. You know, the friend who insists “Everything happens for a reason,” or the "If you put out positive energy you get positive things from the universe’ kind of nonsense. Oprah “The Secret” bullshit. Blame the victim for things outside of their control stuff.
In other words, I think insisting on happiness in life inevitably leads to disappointment, and thus makes things worse. And pretending to be happy leads to a dishonest, unrealistic engagement with the world and your time on the planet.
Is this self defeating pessimism? Or do people who are “OK with” periods of unhappiness get more out of life by engaging honestly?
Clarence Darrow once said “people tend to be about has happy as they set out to be.” Think that’s true. I have a very positive outlook (i.e., I’m happy) and that doesn’t usually lead to disappointment, or make me think I’m being dishonest or unrealistic.
I assume over the top bubbly personalities who come into work all cheerful (damned morning people…) have a pile of bodies in their basement. But that’s probably just cynical jealousy.
For real though, I hope these people have an off switch eventually if you get to know them and they’re wearing the mask to make everyone else think they have it together and nothing bothers them. But I tend to associate with fellow miserable snarky people so maybe they really do act like that all the time.
I know I sound like a broken record on this, but Epicurus and Democritus and a handful of others had the answer:
You maximize happiness by moderation. You can’t go around having a party or an orgy in your head all the time: it actually ends up reducing your overall level of happiness.
Maximizing your happiness by a rational approach of wise investments of your time and energy is the highest possible human wisdom. But it must be along a path of moderation.
Suddenly having $100,000 would increase my happiness. Robbing a bank might accomplish that. But because it’s also highly likely to land me in jail, removing most of my happiness, I don’t do that.
Happiness itself is an instinctive mammalian behavioral trait. It’s how nature rewards us. As intelligent beings, we have transcended some of our instinctual programming, but not all of it. We still do irrational things – tell jokes, flirt, climb mountains, compose music – because it gives us pleasure.
Happiness is the most important thing. Sometimes things interfere with happiness and it needs to be put on the back burner for a time, and that’s fine. If you’re not trying to live a happy life first and foremost, what else are you trying to get out of life that’s more important?
Figuring out what will make you happy is the hard part. It’s definitely more than hedonistic pleasure, which gets exhausting quickly.
That’s just it. You say it’s the most important thing, so nothing anyone could accomplish would be more important, by definition. Take the first part off the table and the world’s your oyster.
That’s exactly what happiness is all about. Happiness doesn’t mean ignoring the bad things that happen, it means being able to maintain your personal composure and good feelings in the face of those unhappy external realities. Yes, saying, “Everything’s great,” when things are falling apart can be mentally unhealthy. But so can saying, “Woe is me!” True happiness comes from being able to recognize, accept and integrate the bad things in life, and still find joy. It’s also about being able to put things in proper perspective. If you suffer a serious loss or disappointment, you need to take the time to address it, but you also need to be able to move on. But too many people are unhappy about things that are minor and insignificant compared to the joys in their life. This is where learning to be happy comes in.
I say this as someone who spent way too much of my life basically being miserable, when my life really wasn’t all that miserable. Learning how to be happy has made a tremendous difference. I still struggle with the letdowns, but they don’t defeat me the way they once did. And my happiness is in no way fake. I genuinely have the skills to greet the world’s imperfections with a better attitude.
Inner peace is not overrated. The absence of misery, neuroticism, superego abuse, terror, intrusive thoughts, etc. is a very laudable goal. But the feeling of a slight subjective positive tilt to life? I think that is overrated.
People who seem constantly happy (when others who aren’t too close to them are looking) seem like they are overcompensating for something. The ones I have known (usually it is women who do this in my personal experience) are covering up for a pretty fucked up life on some level.
That ‘everything happens for a reason’ meme makes me want to vomit. Tell it to the people infected with parasites, that the parasites eating away inside them is designed to help god’s love reveal itself. It is just bullshit of the highest order, people being served a shit sandwich and trying to convince themselves it is filet mignon.
Happiness seems to be half genetic, half non genetic. Aside from genes, it seems to mostly revolve around ones social relationships and relationships with the community. I’m sure traumas one cannot let go of can also sap happiness. I don’t believe the whole ‘you adjust after a year’ theory. If someone’s child commits suicide you aren’t going to go back to your baseline level of happiness in a year. True trauma permanently darkens your temperament a few shades.
I don’t know if you ‘get more’ out of life by being honest with yourself and your emotions. However I’m sure you will be less neurotic and more authentically connected to self and others if you stop demanding life be something it isn’t.
I’ll take a stab at it. I’m reminded of Bill Maher and Ana Marie Cox getting briefly sidetracked on this issue on his show a few months ago, where Cox – obviously a successful and ambitious lady – tried to make the point that fulfillment was a lot more important, and Maher thought happiness pretty much defined everything. But I think they were talking about different things. Another issue where the whole argument is framed by how you define the word you’re arguing about.
Happiness isn’t the state of having a perpetual smile on your face and being unconcerned about problems – that’s not happiness, that’s a debilitating mental illness. We have to be careful not to define it too narrowly. Happiness is some peculiar combination of personal fulfillment, sense of self-worth, and the perception* of a favorable balance of positive and pleasurable things over negative and painful ones that engenders a general sense of peace and contentment. Defined that way, happiness is absolutely the over-arching goal. Happy people, defined in any way even remotely similar to the above, tend to live longer and healthier lives because their actual physiology is different from the less happy ones – less stress, lower blood pressure, etc.
The perception part is important. It’s been shown that people in poorer countries who have the basic necessities of life tend to be happier than those in wealthier countries when – and provided that – the differential between rich and poor in their visible community is relatively small.
Barbara Ehrenreich wrote a pretty good book about about society’s unhealthy obsession with happiness–“Bright-Sided: How Positive Thinking is Undermining America”. She talks about how we’ve been inculcated with the belief that our thoughts and feelings are responsible for everything that happens to us–good or bad. So if you’re laying in bed sick, don’t you dare express fear or worry or sadness, even if you have good cause. You’ll just make yourself sicker. Put on a positive face, slap on a pink ribbon, and everything will work out!! She talks about stupidity like this and other dangerous thought patterns.
The self-righteous “I create my own happy world by thinking happy thoughts” people are definitely annoying. Maybe these people really are happy. But happy people can be crappy people who cause pain and suffering to those who can’t think happy thoughts. And I also think that people delude themselves into thinking that they are consciously making themselves happy. No one can make themselves feel a certain way. What they can do is engage in behaviors that increase the likelihood of them feeling a certain way (eating and sleeping well, exercising, etc.) But even that isn’t a 100% guarantee.
I think happiness is just like life. It’s a journey, not a destination. It’s how you feel when you AREN’T planning or thinking too hard. If you think about happiness too much, you put yourself at risk for more disappointment and hurt than if you don’t think about it at all. I know that for myself, when I do something solely to experience pleasure, I’m usually kinda disappointed with the results. But if I do something without having any purpose in mind, that is when I often feel joy. Perhaps other people have a different experience, but that’s how it is with me.
Cognitive Behavioral Therapy would disagree. There are studies that have shown that by using CBT, people can consciously make themselves happy. And of course there is my personal experience, which boils down to this:
Bad or negative thing happens
No CBT
Days or weeks of pure misery
Bad or negative thing happens
Apply CBT techniques
Feel better in a matter of minutes or hours
Now of course there is no 100% guarantee. Not all techniques work for everyone. I tried a number of different CBT approaches before finding the one that worked for me.
Again, not true for everyone. I have had personal experience with women who have lost children under traumatic circumstances. While it’s true that some were permanently darkened, others recovered. One of the most joyful women I ever knew had lost both of her children to devastating diseases. But she was a genuinely happy person. Now that might have been genetic, or just the way she was made, but there’s no question in my mind that she was able to absorb and deal with her traumas without becoming permanently unhappy.
It seems to me that you are stating exactly what I said. No one consciously makes themselves happy. Not anymore than a person who eats fruits and vegetables makes themselves healthy (I know plenty of vegetarians who stay sick). People can do stuff that increases the likelihood of happiness. But they have no conscious control over how happy they are going to be once they align all the planets perfectly.
I am well acquainted with CBT, having been treated by a CB therapist for the past six years. She has not trained me to change my emotions through sheer will. If sheer will was the only requirement, there would be few unhappy people. But what she has done is teach me behavioral strategies that promote certain thoughts, which then affect my emotions. She’s also helped me to come up with thoughts I can think to challenge certain negative thought patterns, when in turn affect my emotions.
She has yet to teach me how to transform my emotions from one state to another just by saying “Snap out of it and be happy, dammit!!” If she could do this, I’d be trying to find out how to nominate her for a Nobel Prize.
People who say they do X, Y, and Z to promote happiness don’t bother me. But the people who say they are happy because they want to be happy? They need to go sit their Pollyanna asses down somewhere.
Some people have a compelling need to make everyone think that everything is super-fantastic all the time. Particularly in a professional setting (especially in sales and other client facing professions). Indeed, for decades corporate American has encouraged this behavior with various management books on “positive thinking” and whatnot. And IMHO, this is one of the major things wrong with Corporate America as this mentality of “always be a positive team players” prevents people from looking at problems with the critical eye needed to resolve them.
Then again, some people just smile all the time because they are dumb as shit.
I think we agree, but have a semantic difference. I would call using CBT consciously making myself happy. I realize that I am unhappy, and I consciously choose to use techniques to make myself happy. The happiness doesn’t spontaneously come from some outside event, it comes from the work I do with my mind.
Of course that doesn’t mean that the techniques are always successful, but they are a conscious choice.
following Brain re Scientific American they do a little diddy called instant egghead, I had in mind #68, according to that it may depend on melatonin and serotonin (levels (the happiness horomone) temperature, location and season.