Good Life Project - Happiness. It’s Complicated.

Episode Date: November 24, 2016

What if the quest to be perpetually happy was actually making us miserable? Who doesn’t want to be happy? Who doesn’t want to laugh all day? It’s a wonderful state, deserving of a powerful seat at the good life table. Happiness has become a hot subject of study over the last two decades, along with […]The post Happiness. It’s Complicated. appeared first on Good LifeProject. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Hey, Jonathan. So you know how I've been telling you about that little new book of mine, How to Live a Good Life? Turns out my publisher is now offering the ebook version of it for a limited time for 99 cents. Yeah, that's not actually a typo or made up number. It's not going to be that price forever. In fact, not for a super long time. But if you want to get it now, if you've been on the fence, and you literally want to spend less than a buck for it, you can go get it on Amazon, Barnes and Noble, Nook, iBooks, and dive into it and hope you enjoy it. So take advantage of this while it is out there. Now, on to our show.

Hey, it's Jonathan. I'm back with A Good Life Project Rift. Today is entitled, Happiness. It's Complicated. So if you also want to see the essay version of this, you can see the print version. You can read it if you like and share it around. It is posted at jonathanfields.com slash happiness. So here we go. What if the quest to be perpetually happy was actually making us miserable? Summer 2012. 2,000 miles west of New York City, nearly 9,000 feet above

sea level, deep into the Colorado Rockies, I'm sitting in the woodclad home of soon-to-be friend, venture capitalist, entrepreneur, and deeply wise and truthful explorer of life, Brad Feld. And we're taping a conversation for an episode of Good Life Project. Our goal, Brad offers, speaking about himself and his wife, Amy, is that each of us, individually and together, is to have a happy life. Happy and good mean the same thing. That's it. That's the goal. I don't care about anything else. Further into the conversation, he adds, the components of that vary. And there's an acceptance that there's lots of tragedy in the human condition. You have these huge moments of negative stimuli in the context of your own life.

And then you have the ability to deal with them however you want and surround them with whatever you want. For the two of us, having a happy life is about focusing on the things you can impact rather than focusing on the macro. So who doesn't want to be happy? Who doesn't want to laugh all day? It's a wonderful state, deserving of a powerful seat at the good life table. Happiness has become a hot subject of study over the last two decades, along with the explosion of the field of positive psychology. This near mystical state comes with myriad benefits beyond, well, being happy. Happy people, it turns out, have more friends, are healthier, have better immune systems, are more active contributors to society,

and get more done at work. The list of happy-related yumminess is long. But what exactly is happiness? How do we get it? And is happiness really a must for a good life? So let's take these questions one at a time. First, what is happiness? Such a loaded question, devoid of a universal answer. Ask the average person on the street, and the answer is usually state-based. It's an emotion,

a feeling, kind of like joy, upbeat, positive, you know, happy. Drill down a bit and the answer begins to expand out into life conditions that lead to this state. One person's happiness is being in the arms of love. Another's is coding a complex algorithm. Yet another finds it in the reduction of chronic pain from extreme to moderate, still suffering deeply yet happier. Someone else might describe it as the feeling of besting competitors or finding justice after a long fight. In parts of the world where extreme poverty, starvation, violence, and suffering are part of daily existence. It might be described as a day with food or water or

a temporary lull in violence. Ask a positive psychology researcher and you'll get a different set of answers that integrate contributors like connection, meaning, and more. In her 2007 book, The How of Happiness, acclaimed researcher Sonja Lubomirsky described it as, the experience of joy, contentment, or positive well-being combined with the sense that one's life is good, meaningful, and worthwhile. Happiness researchers, in fact, cannot offer universal agreed-upon definitions to their research subjects when conducting experiments, which makes it challenging to draw broad conclusions. How do we know that across different labs, cohorts, and experiments,

we're all even talking about the same thing? Most rely on some variations of standard survey questions like looking at your life as a whole. Are you 1. very happy, 2. quite happy, 3. not very happy, or 4. not happy at all? And subjects are asked to rate their happiness, but are never offered a definition, because they cannot be. It's just too subjective. So we're left with pieces of a puzzle that often come down to, we just know it when we feel it, and it's different for everyone. This is part of the challenge when trying to make

robust claims about happiness. We never quite know if we're talking the same language, or truly describing the same thing. Which brings us to those second and third questions. How do we get happy? And do we need to be happy to live a good life? Well, something interesting and a bit ironic happens when we pursue happiness as a primary goal, a mandatory prere lead to misery. In part because we rapidly habituate to the big, quick-hit sources we most often pursue. But also, and more subtly maybe, 100% uptime happiness is just not a realistic aspiration, nor despite popular lore should it be. Happiness is a bit like fitness. You can train and orient your life to cultivate a solid base and keep relatively fit on a regular basis, but you cannot sustain peak condition for more than a short window of time. Your body and mind need to cycle in and out. Peaks and valleys are natural and

necessary. Expecting only peaks is setting yourself up for frustration and futility. Beyond the fact that we're all wired on some level to cycle in and out of giggle-them lies a similar stark reality. We need the valleys as much as the peaks. Not necessarily deep depression or deep lows, but simply the chance to cycle back to baseline, things are good, or even, wow, that day sucked, to provide the contrast

necessary to know when we're actually happy. It's this contrast that also provides the context to see and embrace gratitude, to know when things are good because you've seen when they're not. Emerging research, in fact, shows that the full spectrum of experiences and emotion, what's become known as emodiversity and not a state of perpetual joviality, is what leads to the experience of a generally good and happy life. Our state of body and mind both improve when we feel not just joy, gratitude, and love, but also sadness, anger, fear, among many others. Human flourishing over the long haul has to allow for unhappiness as well as happiness. And that leads to one last thing. When it comes to happiness, we are not entirely in control. We each have a unique happiness set point.

Some 50% of our happiness is determined by our genes. Another 40% comes from behavior and choice. The final 10% from environment. So the good news is we do have a significant say in how happy we can be or become. But so does our biology. And if our genetic set point is more towards the melancholy or just chill side of the spectrum, but we hold ourselves to the standard of rabidly happy all the time, we end up warring with our biology

and setting ourselves up for failure and then frustration and then blame, then guilt, then misery. If we accept the reality of the set point though, then do what we can to influence the 50% that's within our control and then just know some moments will cycle up, others will cycle down, and that's okay. We let ourselves off the expectation hook. We acknowledge that we have partial control over our happiness and accept our responsibility to, in Brad Feld's words, do what we can to optimize what we can impact, both in the context of our internal systems and choices and our external circumstances. And we also create the space for happiness cycling, honor the role of biology and genetics in the process, and forgive ourselves when we don't hit what may be for us an unattainable, Pollyannistic illusion, the futile pursuit of which does more harm than good.

Think of it this way. Happiness is a snapshot. Living a good life is a movie. The former is a moment in time. The latter is the collective experience of every snapshot ever taken. So sure, you want plenty of happy pictures, but you also want a life of contrast and texture. You want the full spectrum of emotion. You want a life of interest, meaning, purposeful contribution, engaging relationships. Some of those will bring momentary happiness. Others won't. Some will cycle between. Your job is to be aware and intentional along the way,

to choose the experiences and create the pictures with as much agency and possibility as you can. Over the long haul, the net effect or side effect will produce the scenes of a movie that tell the story of a life well lived. As Viktor Frankl offered in Man's Search for Meaning, happiness is not pursued. Instead, it must ensue. If you want to live a good, happy life, don't chase happiness to the exclusion of other emotions and states. Live fiercely across the full spectrum of experiences. Connect, contribute, move, open,

risk, feel, do. Happiness will emerge as the byproduct of your fully engaged life in its own way, in its own time, of its own accord. So those are my thoughts today. Happiness. It's complicated. I hope you found it valuable. I hope it planted some seeds for you to think about. As always, so great sharing time with you.

And I'm so grateful for the time that you set aside to engage with us. I'm Jonathan Fields, signing off for Good Life Project.