by Peter Mikel
When the thirteen colonies decided to dissolve political bonds with Great Britain, Thomas Jefferson and the Second Continental Congress penned the extraordinary words in the Declaration of Independence, “We hold that these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.” These words resound as strongly today as when they were written almost 233 years ago. Life and liberty are battle cries heard through the annals of history. It is the pursuit of happiness as an unalienable right that makes the passage complete. What purpose is life, and what value liberty, without happiness? The drive toward happiness, this pursuit, is one of the most basic human needs. The issue apparent is that there is no definitive (or permanent) achievement of happiness, only the pursuit of what makes people happy.
The United States is the most free and wealthy country in the history of the world, but Americans aren’t the happiest people according to multiple studies. The following are two recent examples of happiness studies based on country (geographic lines). Released in 2007, “A Global Projection of Subjective Well-being,” done by Adrian White, a social psychologist with the University of Leicester, proposed that the Danes are the happiest people with America as the twenty-third. Another study, released in 2003 of eighty-three countries, by Michael Bond in New Scientist Magazine, came to the conclusion that Nigerians are the happiest. The United States was sixteenth on that list. Why are the Danes and Nigerians happier than Americans in these assessments?
The criteria that these (and others) use to determine happiness is problematic. Daniel Nettle in his book, The Science Behind Your Smile, suggests that the study of happiness is fraught with difficulties, “the concept is a bit like a mirage to social scientists, it shimmers on the horizon as an appealing object of study, but often has a tendency to slip away when closely approached (5).” The mirage comparison is very apt, as happiness cannot be evaluated by quantitative means with a calculator, nor placed on a scale. There is no “hedonometer;” so happiness is subjective and difficult to define, assess, and evaluate, especially when applied to groups or entire countries.
Dr. Kaare Christensen of the University of Southern Denmark did a follow up study on the “A Global Projection of Subjective Well-being” and released “Why Danes Are Smug.” Christensen puts forth, “We basically figured out that although the Danes were very happy with their life, when we looked at their expectations they were pretty modest.(xx)” If the expectations are low, it is difficult to be disappointed and thus, unhappy. The Nigerians also have low expectations, with an average annual income of $1,036.00, average life expectancy rate of forty-seven years, and a literacy rate of sixty-five percent as reported by the CIA’s website.
Americans believe that a person can achieve whatever goal they desire in life. It is almost a cliché that parents think their gifted child will grow up to become President. It is unlikely, but possible and, as such, represents high expectations. Americans, across all ages, believe their future will be better than their present, as Dr. E. C. Chang reports in his article on Cultural Variations of Optimistic and Pessimistic Bias (478). These high standards and expectations and optimistic views impart a pressure to succeed. This leads to the possibly of disappointment and unhappiness. The first ten amendments to the Constitution, the Bill of Rights, doesn’t guarantee the right of happiness, and the Declaration of Independence only acknowledges the right of its pursuit. However, the freedoms, choices and responsibilities that Americans have raises the bar on happiness, as well as the chance for, and personal responsibility for, unhappiness.
In recent years there have been several new schools of thought reviewing and re-evaluating what makes people happy. These psychologists are looking at how a person’s brain “thinks” about happiness. Two of these groups, the Hedonic Psychologists, and the Positive Psychologists, have a great deal of common ground but have distinct differences. Neither group claims the true route to happiness but agree that they can only open the door to teach how to pursue happiness with more success.
Hedonic psychology, not to be confused with Hedonism, a philosophical area of study, is an emerging field in psychology, which focuses on the mental and anthropological studies of the pleasurable and unpleasurable states of consciousness as defined in Webster’s Dictionary. A common philosophy for being happy is carpe diem, or “seize the day.” This is the philosophy of living each day to the fullest. Much can be said for being “in the moment” and its effect on being happy, but Daniel Gilbert, Hedonic psychologist at Harvard University, explains that people are unable to live totally in the moment, since our mind is constantly on the future. In the forward of his book Stumbling on Happiness, he leads the reader toward this realization,
“What would you do right now if you learned that you were going to die in ten minutes? …. light that Marlboro you've been hiding….waltz into your boss's office and present him with a detailed description of his personal defects ….order a T-bone, medium rare, with an extra side of the really bad cholesterol? Hard to say, of course, but of all the things you might do in your final ten minutes, it's a pretty safe bet that few of them are things you actually did today….The things we do when we expect our lives to continue are naturally and properly different than the things we might do if we expected them to end abruptly. We go easy on the lard and tobacco, smile dutifully at yet another of our supervisor's witless jokes, read books…and we do each of these things in the charitable service of the people we will soon become (xiii).”
Dr. Gilbert focuses on how the human mind perceives the future and the success rate at which we achieve the “happy” future. The future, from his perspective, is measured in both moments and years, and its perception is both truth and false. The thought process is that people not only have the ability to look to the future, they cannot stop from looking forward and combined with imagination, colors our past, as well as predictions of the future. Concluding that the way in which a person looks to the future and looks back upon his/her past has a profound effect on happiness.
The positive aspect of Hedonics is that people are engineered to be happy. People make scrapbooks of celebrations, Christmas gatherings or weddings, for example. People do not create personal collections dedicated to divorces or failed recipes. We want to remember happy things. The same works for the future. The mind is constantly thinking about the well-being of our future self. A person thinks that he or she will get that job, car, or chocolate cupcake with sprinkles and life will be better. We might also think negatively about a future event, such as an oral presentation to a group of people, and the embarrassing possibilities that could happen. According to Dr. Gilbert, the imagined terror or anxiety minimizes the actual event and can even create a positive memory when the terrors of the imagination become unfulfilled (21).
Positive Psychology, another emerging school of thought, is “the scientific study of the strengths and virtues that enable individuals and communities to thrive,” as defined by the Positive Psychology Center web page. This area bases its studies on the desire that people want to improve their lives and relationships, and researchers believe they can mentor people to develop their positive aspects through a learned process. Dr. Martin Seligman, a professor of psychology at the University of Pennsylvania, and a past president of the American Psychological Association, believes that the study of unhappiness has been a problem with modern psychology. Jennifer Senior, in her article “Dark Thoughts on Happiness,” quotes Seligman, “Freud’s goal of psychoanalysis was converting hysterical misery into common unhappiness (5).” Seligman begins in his book, Learned Optimism, that people don’t want to go from -5 to -2, they want to go from +2 to +6 (iv). Therefore therapy should focus more on techniques that lead toward improving happiness and less on fighting misery. His reasoning is that classical psychiatry has made great strides identifying and correcting the misery and should now focus on the positive.
He teaches that optimism is the path toward happiness. Pleasure and gratification are separated into special categories. Pleasure is buying a cherry coke; gratification is when time stands still, and we are totally absorbed in the object of our concentration. It is the gratification that makes us fulfilled and happy in the long term.
Both groups of psychologists, the Positive and the Hedonic, agree with the Evolutionary psychologists who propose that trying to be happy is an evolutionary and genetic predisposition: The Hedonics, with the hard-wired nature of the human brain’s frontal lobe looking for the future, and the Positives, with the belief that people have a desire to bring out the best in themselves. The Evolutionary psychologists suggest nature has infused us with the desire to do what makes us happy, healthy and successful. Some of these traits for happiness, the evolutionary psychologists suggest, have negative connotations but are important to the evolutionary happiness or (success) of the individual. One example is the emotion of jealousy. Dr. David Buss, with the University of Texas, presents that there is evidence to support that “sexual jealousy is an evolved psychological mechanism designed to combat the adaptive problem of threat to valued long-term mateships” in his article “The Evolution of Happiness.” Dr. Buss continues by discussing positive traits that have evolved that are strongly equated with happiness: close kinship and friendship, cooperative alliances, and strong bonds between mates (1-4). In evolution, the ability to succeed can be interpreted as a measurement of happiness. The successful organism is “happier” than the unsuccessful organism. Evolutionary “happiness” doesn’t necessarily include the achievement of this goal. According to Dr. Nettle, evolution has accomplished its duty if we move toward happiness (4).
The following are some helpful notes for the pursuit of happiness:
- Be optimistic (and delusional). A recent study by Roger Brown and outlined in his book, Social Psycology, shows that realistic people are less likely to be happy, and happy people are more likely to be in a mild state of delusion.
- Get married and have children, but send them away. Married people are happier, and children, which most people say is their greatest joy in life, statistically have strong negative, medium negative or, at best, no influence upon happiness. The pre-child happiness didn’t re-occur until the parents became “empty nesters,” according to Dr. Gilbert, referring to four studies on marriage satisfaction (243).
- Make money, but you don’t have to win the lottery. Having a stable financial situation leads toward happiness, but you have to be earning as much or more than your peers. Forbes 400 earners (and lottery winners) are only marginally happier than the average American, according to Matthew Herper, author of “Money Can’t Buy You Happiness.”
- If Nigeria and Denmark are not options, move to Branson, Missouri, where the (current statistically) happiest people live, do not move to New York City, where people have the lowest happiness score, according to data collected by Psychologist Chris Peterson University of Pennsylvania in the article, “Some Dark Thoughts on Happiness” by Jennifer Senior (1).
- Live to be old. Dr. David Blanceflower and Dr. Andrew Oswald in their study, “Is Well-being U-shaped over the Life Cycle?,” older people are happier than young, but middle-aged people were the least happy (11). Additionally, older people are less likely to have “dark days” and have a higher life satisfaction level.
- Be lucky. Darrin McMahon notes in his book Happiness: A History, that every Indo-European language uses a common root for the word happiness. They use the same cognate for luck or chance. In English it is happ, for both “happy” and “happenstance.” The ancients believed that being happy and lucky were closely related (11).
It seems that Jefferson is correct, not that there was any doubt about this unalienable right being true, but science has also shown the depth that this pursuit is entwined into the human existence. Americans may never achieve the pinnacle of happiness according to the study de jour, but we are the country where the pursuit of happiness is most guaranteed. To quote Benjamin Franklin, “The U. S. Constitution doesn’t guarantee happiness, only the pursuit of it. You have to catch up to it yourself .”
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