In one of his sermons, the celebrated 15th-century German monk Thomas à Kempis
urged his flock to stamp out all vestiges of self-worth or be damned: “If I
cast away all my self-esteem and reduce myself to the dust that I really am,
then grace will come to me; thus will the last trace of self-esteem be
engulfed in the depth of my own nothingness.”
Hair shirts are mercifully out of vogue now (though I’ll bet Kempis got a huge
ego boost from being really humble). We are allowed the luxury of spending
periods feeling guiltlessly good about ourselves. These bursts of inner
warmth are so agreeable that it’s sorely tempting to try to extend them ever
farther. Surely modern life can pave the road to infinitely more happiness?
That’s the hope that drives us technologically ever onwards.
And if modern life isn’t actually making us any happier yet (thanks to
spiralling stress, depression and anxiety), then this hope has at least
spawned a new lifestyle sector – the fulfilment industry – which promises
that by working on ourselves we can easily develop far more joy and
self-esteem: it’s medicine for the human condition. And that’s official. The
British Government’s feel-good tsar, Lord Layard, an emeritus professor of
economics at the LSE, argues in Happiness: Lessons from a New Science that:
“Happiness is that ultimate goal because, unlike all other goals, it is
self-evidently good.” So, no arguments: happiness is your ultimate life
goal.
Pressure from the happiness industry
A literary genre has sprung up around the H-word, with titles such as Authentic
Happiness, The Art of Happiness, The Happiness Hypothesis
and Happiness: a Guide to Developing Life’s Most Important Skills.
But this new imperative may hinder far more than help. Declarations like
those of Lord Layard reinforce the pressure to believe that you’re not
adequate enough if you are not resolved enough, fulfilled enough or joyful
enough. The happiness industry presses us to reinvent ourselves, to chase
another of modern life’s evermores, on top of the fantastic career, the
perfect possessions, the ideal home, the flawless partner, the trophy
holidays and all the other latest best-lifestyle options. If striving for
those hasn’t left you feeling better, then “learning how to feel better”
surely will.
But no matter how hard you try to boost your happiness, science has a rather
less rictus message: you’re smacking your head against a manufactured
rainbow. The idea of being able to boost your happiness significantly is
founded on a fallacy: if we look at our evolutionary wiring, we must
conclude that we aren’t designed to have happiness as our natural default.
It is not something that lies like a wall-to-wall carpet under a shoddy
jumble of unhappinesses waiting to be vacu-brushed away.
We can’t even say that high levels of happiness are a “self-evident good”.
When psychologists followed 1,216 children whose personalities were assessed
in 1922, they found that those who were most happy died earlier in adult
life than those who were less cheerful. The markedly happy kids grew up more
likely to drink, smoke and take risks, possibly because their happy
world-view made the dangers appear smaller. The psychiatrists concluded in
the Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin: “Although optimism
and positive emotions have been shown to have positive effects when people
are faced with a short-term crisis, the long-term effects of cheerfulness
are more complex and seem not entirely positive.”
Rather than being a life panacea, happiness is a fleeting state that we
evolved to make us engage in certain behaviours at certain times when they
might optimise our chances of getting laid or finding breakfast. It’s the
same with our less compelling emotions: boredom, dissatisfaction, sadness.
Humans feel happiness. Lower-order creatures such as sea squirts don’t.
Humans feel boredom, dissatisfaction and sadness. Sea squirts don’t. As
Theodosius Dobzhansky, the geneticist, argued: “Nothing in biology makes
sense except in the light of evolution.” If an emotion is inside us, it’s
because it usefully evolved there. Trying to rip out our deeply wired
nature, or to displace aspects we don’t like is, in the words of the old Zen
joke, like a naked man trying to tear off his shirt.
Our rush to conjure alchemist’s gold from positive psychology has made it
taboo to seek good reasons for the existence of our unsmiley side. But it
has long been known that being moderately pessimistic helps us to see the
world more accurately.
Psychologists call this “depressive realism”. It works because life generally
dishes out more rough deals than good ones, and mild miserabilists are
better at predicting life’s outcomes than cockeyed optimists. A dose of
hypochondria is healthy, too: we are built to worry that something’s wrong
with us, because our Neolithic ancestors had to stay alert for infected food
and disease. Evolutionary scientists believe that the slight advantage that
depressive, hypochondriacal cave-dwellers had over their happy-go-lucky
neighbours meant that, over millions of years, the anxious survived, while
the carefree lolled about grinning while their wounds festered, their crops
died and bears ate their kids.
Self-esteem-raising efforts are futile
Depression can still help us today when something dismal happens. It
interjects to tell us to stop what we’re doing and to reconsider, prompting
a healthy human response to slow down to grieve, to mull and to make
changes. Doctors, however, are now keen to block this process with pills. An
American study of 8,000 depressed and medicated people, in the Archives
of General Psychiatry, reports that up to a quarter were not clinically
glum, they had just undergone a life event such as bereavement. Their
symptoms, it said, should be left to pass naturally.
Self-esteem-raising efforts are largely futile, too, says Nicholas Emler, a
psychology professor at Surrey University, who has examined thousands of
psychological studies and concludes that the morale-raising promises of the
positive psychology movement are profoundly mistaken. “In government papers
it’s considered that everybody should have more self-esteem,” Emler told an
Edinburgh conference. But, he added, studies show that it’s exceedingly
difficult to make any real difference to a grown-up’s esteem: “It can bobble
up and down in response to circumstances, but any individual’s self-esteem
has a typical level around which it bobbles.”
In fact, modern culture repeatedly slaps our morale downwards rather than
offering unprecedented opportunities to feel good. Our Pleistocene-era
brains tend to believe that what we see on screens and in magazines is
occurring within the narrow geography of a Stone Age tribe. It wouldn’t feel
so thrillingly relevant otherwise. Our snobbish brains originally evolved to
compare our skills and beauty against a few hundred locals at most. In
ancient hunter-gatherer clans, you could expect to find a niche by excelling
at something, but today you’ll always know of someone else on the planet who
is apparently far cleverer, or more beautiful.
Meanwhile, we’re supposed to keep smiling. As an analysis in the Journal
of Clinical Psychology entitled The Tyranny of the Positive Attitude
asked: “Could it be that the pressure itself to be happy and optimistic
contributes to at least some forms of unhappiness?” What we often call
happiness is a “flow state” of unselfconsciousness, the sort of thing that
happens when you’re so engrossed in a hobby that you don’t notice time
passing. Your ego and your maundering preoccupations fall away. You can’t
force this, but willing it to happen can cause a kind of self-help psychosis
– the psychological equivalent of watched-kettle syndrome. We become
hypervigilant for happiness and turn into emotional hypochondriacs when it
doesn’t happen: “Ask yourself if you are happy,” the philosopher John Stuart
Mill wrote, “and you cease to be so.”
A recent study of marriage helps us to understand another reason why chasing
happiness so often fails: above a certain level, it gets far harder to push
your morale any higher. The study of more than 3,000 people in the Journal
of Health and Social Behavior found that those who suffered depression
got the biggest boost out of getting wed, even if their marriages turned out
to be average. Marriage lifts miserable people 7.56 points on the depression
scale, while previously happy people get lifted only 1.87 points. The higher
you rise up the happy curve, the steeper it gets. Happiness-chasers are
bound to reach a paradoxical point where trying to be happier achieves such
frustratingly fractional results that it saps their morale and sends it
tumbling back down the curve.
After 25, our personalities don’t change
Unless we are suffering from a medically fixable pathology, the evidence shows
that our personalities generally do not change after about the age of 25,
when the concrete has set, entombing each of us within a lifetime of general
habit, attitude, approach and other brain presets that we know as our
selves. You can win big on the lottery or you can lose both legs in an
accident, but a year after either incident your morale will likely have
returned to its former level. That’s it. That’s us. And if self-help isn’t
helping, if esteem-raising isn’t lifting us up, if happiness-chasing may
cause misery, then we might try an alternative route: the route of “enough
happiness”, by putting realistically curt limits on the path to
self-fulfilment and waving goodbye to the promise of ever more bliss.
It’s a challenging task, because it requires us to swim against the riptide of
rampant consumer expectation. Declaring “enough happiness” also demands that
you challenge your own internal propaganda. Yes, your brain feels immortal;
yes, it whispers that (in the poet Walt Whitman’s words) you can contain
multitudes; yes, your brain says that you can have it all and do everything.
These egoistic inklings are all amplified by consumer culture’s persistent
promises of infinite self-realisation. But, in fact, no, your brain isn’t
immortal and you can’t have it all. Those are just convictions that your
head evolved to persuade your body out of bed on damp mornings. Embracing
this fact offers a far more achievable path to contentment.
Only contentment? This little c-word sounds like the dull, swotty sibling of
capital-H Happiness. But humanity has never before had a chance to enjoy
widespread contentment. We are now at that point, having created a society
of abundance, but our culture is intent on overshooting contentment in a
quixotic bid to turn the fleeting high called happiness into a perpetual
goo-goo state (and probably burn out our planet in the process). As the
American novelist Edith Wharton said: “If only we’d stop trying to be happy,
we could have a pretty good time.”
© John Naish 2008. Extracted from Enough: Breaking Free From the
World of More (Hodder & Stoughton, £16.99), to be published January
24. It is available from Times BooksFirst for £15.29, p&p free:
0870 1608080 or visit timesonline.co.uk/booksfirst
Science-backed paths to true contentment
Fostering contentment is a slow, demanding process compared with the
instant-bliss promises of the happiness industry. But scientific studies
show how these approaches bear fruit:
Giving can nurture wellbeing better than consuming. A study in the Proceedings
of the National Academy of Sciences scanned people’s heads as they
donated to a favourite charity and found that giving money lights up the
brain’s reward system in the same way that receiving money does.
Absorption in a single activity such as learning a hobby or skill,
instead of wildly multi-tasking, creates a “flow” state of
unself-consciousness that helps to develop our higher-functioning cerebral
cortexes, and to stem the nagging idea that “fun” is always somewhere else,
needing pursuing.
Meditation A study by Japan’s National Institute of Industrial Health
of 600 workers who had been taught to meditate found that they had improved
emotional stability, showed less anxiety and neurosis, and fewer nagging
physical ailments.
Gratitude Modern life presses us to fixate on what we don’t have,
rather than what we already enjoy. Texas University studies in the Journal
of Personality and Social Psychology say that people who nurture their
sense of gratitude raise their energy, optimism and enthusiasm levels. An American
Journal of Cardiology study shows that gratitude boosts people’s heart
health, perhaps because they felt emotionally less harried. As a Tibetan
saying goes: “The moment we are content, we have enough. The problem is that
we think the other way round: that we will be content only when we have
enough.”
