When my younger daughter, Natalie was 3 we asked her at Thanksgiving, “What are you thankful for?” Her instant reply? “Lollipops!”
When you’re young happiness seems a little easier to come by. When I was 12 years old I stood in the chorus of the our school play, “You’re A Good Man Charlie Brown” singing “Happiness” wherein happiness is “Finding a pencil, pizza with sausage, telling the time…” As an adult happiness seems a lot less simple. There’s a recent emergence in the world of psychology of so-called “positive psychology.” The gist is this: traditional psychology focuses on making patients “not depressed,” “not anxious” or “not” any other number of emotional maladies. But not being depressed does not make you happy. It just sort of takes you to a “zero” point. In the words of the father of positive psychology, Martin Seligman, PhD, “Psychologists have mostly become victimologists and pathologizers.” To move beyond this we need something more.
Positive psychology suggests that there are three kinds of happy lives: the pleasant life, the good life and the meaningful life.
The pleasant life is a life of positive emotion and pleasure. The focus is on achieving as many pleasures as you can and savoring mindfulness to stretch to experiences over time and space. There are some drawbacks to the pleasant life. One, it’s not strongly heritable, meaning that pleasant experiences don’t really carry over strongly into other areas of life. The second drawback is that positive emotion habituates. I was having a frozen yogurt a few days ago and I noticed this exact thing. The first few bites were really delightful – a wonderful smooth, cool and creamy experience. But then I found myself just “getting through” the rest of it. I acclimated to the pleasantness of it pretty quickly. Pursuing “fun” as a way of pursuing happiness is fairly futile. Fun appears to have a square wave offset wherein the happiness drops off very quickly. A child may immensely enjoy going to Disneyland, but they have very little residual happiness from the experience 2 or 3 days afterward.
The good life is about engagement in life, about being in a state of flow or “in the zone.” It requires being in touch with your greatest personal strengths and crafting your life around these strengths as much as you can. We are experiencing the good life when we are engaged in activities that allow us to completely immerse ourselves.
The meaningful life is what Aristotle called eudaemonia or “happiness as the result of an active life governed by reason.” It’s being in the service of something larger than yourself.
It seems that each of these areas is important for achieving happiness. Happiness is not just positive emotion. It’s not just walking around with a grin on your face all the time. There must be engagement and meaning in life. In fact, pleasure makes a very small contribution to overall life happiness. Pleasure matters only if you have engagement and meaning. It’s the whipped cream and the cherry on top. But it’s not very deeply satisfying to just eat the whipped cream and cherry.