What does it mean to be happy?
The answer to this
question once seemed obvious to me. To be happy is to be satisfied with
your life. If you want to find out how happy someone is, you ask him a
question like, “Taking all things together, how satisfied are you with
your life as a whole?”
Are you satisfied with your life? How are you feeling? Does either question tell us what we really want to know?
Over the past 30 years
or so, as the field of happiness studies has emerged from social
psychology, economics and other disciplines, many researchers have had
the same thought. Indeed this “life satisfaction” view of happiness lies
behind most of the happiness studies you’ve read about. Happiness
embodies your judgment about your life, and what matters for your happiness is something for you to decide.
This is an appealing
view. But I have come to believe that it is probably wrong. Or at least,
it can’t do justice to our everyday concerns about happiness.
One of the most
remarkable findings in this area of psychology, for instance, is just
how many poor people say they are satisfied with their lives — very
often a majority of them, even in harsh environments like the slums of
Calcutta. In a recent study of poor Egyptians, researchers asked them to
explain why they were satisfied, and their responses often took
something like this form: “One day is good and the other one is bad;
whoever accepts the least lives.” This sounds like resignation, not
happiness. Yet these Egyptians were, in terms of life satisfaction,
happy.
The problem is that
life satisfaction doesn’t really mean what we tend to think it means.
For you can reasonably be satisfied with your life even if you think
your life is going badly for you, and even if you feel bad. To be
satisfied is just to regard your life as going well enough — it
is satisfactory. You might think even a hard slog through a joyless
existence is good enough. It sure beats being dead, and maybe you feel
you have no right to complain about what God, or fate, has given you.
Similarly, you might
be satisfied with a hard life because you care about things besides
avoiding misery. Perhaps you are a dissident in an autocratic state and
suffering dearly for it, yet you are satisfied with your life because
you believe in what you are doing. But are you happy? Probably not.
I do not mean to
suggest that life satisfaction studies can’t give us useful information
about how people are doing. But I am suggesting that it is misleading to
equate satisfaction with happiness, even if it is perfectly ordinary to
talk that way at times.
So how else might we define happiness? There is another approach popular among researchers — one that focuses on feelings.
If you feel good, and not bad, you’re happy. Feeling good may not be
all that matters, but it certainly sounds like a more suitable candidate
for happiness than a judgment that your life is good enough. Evidently,
those Egyptians do not feel good, and that has a lot to do with why it
seems unnatural to say that they are happy.
But what exactly is
this “feeling good”? The standard view is this: Happiness is pleasure,
and unhappiness is pain, or suffering. Philosophers call this view
“hedonism” about happiness. If we think of happiness as pleasure, we can
see why people value happiness so highly: Who really prefers misery to
enjoyment? Lots of philosophers, like Epicurus, Jeremy Bentham and John
Stuart Mill, have thought that pleasure and suffering are all that
ultimately matters. Hedonism about happiness has an obvious appeal. It
is natural to think of happiness as a matter of feelings, and what else
could this mean but having pleasant feelings?
But I have come to
believe that this approach is also probably wrong. When you look at the
way researchers study this kind of happiness, you’ll notice something
peculiar: Their questionnaires almost always ask about emotions and mood
states, and rarely ask directly about pleasure, pain or suffering. In
fact, you might have thought that if happiness researchers were really
interested in pleasure and pain, among their queries would be questions
about pain (“Do you suffer from chronic pain?” and so on). Such
pains make a tremendous difference in how pleasant our lives are, yet
happiness surveys rarely ask about them.
Why not? Because, I
would venture, these researchers aren’t really thinking of happiness as
pleasure, as they take themselves to be doing. Rather, they’re tacitly
thinking of happiness in another, more interesting way.
II.
I would suggest that
when we talk about happiness, we are actually referring, much of the
time, to a complex emotional phenomenon. Call it emotional well-being.
Happiness as emotional well-being concerns your emotions and moods, more
broadly your emotional condition as a whole. To be happy is to inhabit a
favorable emotional state.
Unhappiness is not just a brute animal response to your life. It is you, as a person, responding to your life as being somehow deficient.
On this view, we can
think of happiness, loosely, as the opposite of anxiety and depression.
Being in good spirits, quick to laugh and slow to anger, at peace and
untroubled, confident and comfortable in your own skin, engaged,
energetic and full of life. To measure happiness, we might use extended
versions of existing questionnaires for anxiety and depression from the
mental-health literature. Already, such diagnostics often ask questions
about positive states like laughter and cheerfulness, or your ability to
enjoy things.
The emotional state
theory of happiness has significant advantages over the hedonistic view.
Consider, for starters, that we don’t normally think of pain as an
emotion or mood. It seems more natural, for example, to think of back
pain as something that causes unhappiness, not as unhappiness
itself. A more important point is that we are fundamentally emotional
beings. Who we are is in great part defined by our emotional natures, by
what ways of living make us happy. Yes, we have animal needs for food,
shelter, clothing and the like. But we also have needs as persons, and happiness concerns the fulfillment of those needs.
What sorts of needs
are we talking about? Among the most important sources of happiness are:
a sense of security; a good outlook; autonomy or control over our
lives; good relationships; and skilled and meaningful activity. If you
are unhappy, there’s a good chance that it’s for want of something on
this list.
Unhappiness is not just a brute physical or animal response to your life. It is you,
as a person, responding to your life as being somehow deficient.
Unhappiness, like happiness, says something about your personality.
Whereas back pain does not: It is just a sensation, something that
happens to you. Accordingly, Buddhists and Stoics do not counsel us not
to feel pain; their training aims, instead, at not letting pain and
other irritants get to us.
Our language also marks the difference: You merely feel a pain, but you are
depressed, anxious, melancholy or whatever. Similarly, you might have a
depressive or anxious or cheerful personality. But we never talk of
someone having a “painful” or “pleasureful” personality.
Note also how we don’t
worry about taking medicine for pain the way we often do about taking
“happiness” pills like antidepressants. We worry that by artificially
changing our mood we risk not being “us.” But no one feels inauthentic
because he took ibuprofen to relieve his back pain.
III.
While the
emotional-state view of happiness might seem common-sensical, it was
barely discussed 20 years ago, and the differences between this approach
and hedonism still are not widely acknowledged in the scientific
literature on happiness. Why has it been so neglected?
The reason, I suspect,
is that we tend to take a superficial view of the emotional realm. In
the popular imagination, the rich tapestry of our emotional lives is
reduced to nearly a point — or rather, two points for eyes, a “U” for a
mouth and a circle enclosing them. But there is much more to happiness
than the smiley-face emotion of feeling happy.
Our very language is
deficient, and so we sometimes reach for other expressions that better
convey the depth and richness of happiness: happiness as a matter of the
psyche, spirit or soul. Researchers rightly tend to avoid such
metaphors in their scholarly work, which demands clearly defined
terminology. But even those of us who do not believe in immaterial souls
often find this sort of language usefully evocative, as our technical
vocabulary can be pretty feeble in expressing the complexities of human
experience. At times, then, I have found it useful to employ terms like
psychic affirmation or, for the truly thriving, psychic flourishing. We
are not just talking about “being in a good mood.”
So there is something
specially human about happiness, something that speaks to our natures
and needs as persons. And meeting our needs as persons — our spiritual
needs, one might say — seems to have a special importance.
Why should these
needs, these aspects of ourselves, be so important? There is a long
history of philosophical thought, with roots stretching back at least to
Plato and Aristotle in Greece, and the Vedas in India, that conceives
of human flourishing in terms of the fulfillment of the self. Human
well-being, on this sort of view, means living in accordance with your
nature, with who you are. On this way of thinking, we might regard
happiness as a central part of self-fulfillment.
Furthermore, our
emotional conditions may provide the single best indicator of how, in
general, our lives are going. They don’t simply track the
moment-to-moment flow of events. If you are generally depressed, anxious
or stressed, you will probably not find an answer to your problems by
scrutinizing the day’s events one by one. It may be wiser, instead, to
consider whether the way you are living really makes sense. Often, the
signals of the emotional self can set us on the path to better ways of
living — and a happiness worthy of the name.
By Daniel M. Haybron
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