I am by day a mild-mannered Economist, quietly correcting students’ supply and demand diagrams, discussing the long-term profit possibilities in oligopolies. But by night, I get to pursue my real passion in life: surfing –both channel and web. Sometimes I do both at once! So I live a pretty full existence.
Sometimes on my quests, I unearth a jewel such as this presentation from Daniel Kahneman, on our “experiencing selves” and our “remembering selves.” We experience happiness, he explains, in the moment and also (often very differently) in our memory.
The two headed happiness-monster
Self-actualization is a process of reconciling these two selves: experiential and remembered. They way this works is similar to the lesson told by the ever-sagacious Jerry Seinfeld:
When it comes to Happiness we’ve got the spontaneous ‘Now Guy’ and story-teller ‘Then Guy’. Now Guy is your unsophisticated, spontaneous younger-self. He’s always got ideas about how to spend your lifesavings flying to Vegas for a really wild weekend. But Monday morning it’s Then Guy who has to explain the whole thing to your wife. A happy life requires the two to negotiate and agree.
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Seth Menachem is an LA director who, in his spare time, asks elderly strangers for advice. I grew up far away from my grandparents and I’ve lived overseas, away from my own parents, for a long time. Maybe this is why I love these clips from Life Advice from Old people.
These are two of my favourites:
:
Day-to-day I’m a very happy person, but I worry A LOT about making the right choices. I worry that I’m not spending enough time with my family. That I don’t write enough. That I don’t spend enough time outdoors or take the time to cook better meals. That I don’t know where in life I should settle down. That I work too hard. I think the good life is about sharing meaning and enjoyment, so to me what Seth is doing seems right on the money.
Also, listening to these clips makes me feel like when I was a kid and my dad would sit me down at our creeky old dining room table and tell me something important about life. It made me a stronger person. –well, everything except for that Birds and the Bees talk. That one confused me for years!
and the treadmill video –also by Ok Go. These guys have it figured out. There is something subtly compelling about these videos. I can watch them over and over again. I think we appreciate seeing people just being people –not being scandalous or overly special-effected, just having fun and being human.
Update:This video from Oren Lavie also falls into this genre of music-videos-showing-people-doing-interesting things.
Visiting Dubai, a few years ago, I had a fascinating discussion with our cab driver. I asked him if he hoped his country’s economic growth would lead to democracy. He replied without hesitating, “No. We don’t want democracy here. The government takes care of us. They run the country; we don’t have to worry about it.” Here my wife pressed my hand in a way that said, why don’t you just leave it at that honey.
“Yes,” I said, “But if they change something and you don’t like it, or if they refuse to listen to you… you’ll have no power to do anything about it.” He smiled, but didn’t respond. I hadn’t convinced him.
We can all agree that freedom is a good thing. And more freedom = more happiness. But is this always the case? Recently I’ve been reading Psychologist Barry Schwartz’ The Paradox of Choiceand it makes me wonder. The book offers a variety of examples of how more freedom of choice can actually decrease our happiness. Let’s look at a couple of the reasons:
Firstly, there is “adaptation” –after making a decision we can take for granted the benefits involved with our choice. We adapt. The great new promotion we accept at work becomes new norm and we stop appreciating it. We adapt to the rate of pay and are quickly back where we started from. People generally return to the level of happiness that is normal for them.
Also, many options also makes choosing difficult. A lot of us agonize over choices and then focus on what we gave up when we accepted, for example one career path instead of another. (I.e. I should have gone to medical school!).
Don’t worry
So Schwartz doesn’t suggest trying to maximize our happiness by continuously looking for better options and things to change. Instead he recommends “satisficing” –looking for a job that is ‘good enough’ and then, he says, you should do your best to appreciate it
But wait!
Is Schwartz presenting a false-choice? Basically, he is saying we can either give-up (striving for a better life) and be happy (with what we have), or else we can struggle for something better for ourselves and be miserable. I went searching for a different approach, or at least some middle ground.
The creative person basically has two kinds of jobs: One is the sexy, creative kind. Second is the kind that pays the bills. Sometimes the task in hand covers both bases, but not often. This tense duality will always play center stage. It will never be transcended. (Source)
This very practical approach balances pragmatism (don’t quit your day job) with the need to try to make things better for ourselves (take a risk or do something you we love as a hobby). We don’t need to strive for perfection in all areas at once. This is advice our cab driver would have appreciated.
Update: I just watched this old commercial from Monster.com and thought it would go form a good P.S. on this post. Don’t loose track of what you REALLY want to do.
Okay, one more video. This one won’t help you with your career at all. It’s just funny.
Running a country is not easy. As hard as you try, you simply can’t make everyone happy. Or can you?
In the late Eighteenth century, Englishman Jeremy Bentham suggested a Utilitarian approach –governments should aim to bring the greatest happiness to the greatest number of people. His contemporaries in the New World agreed and declared “the pursuit of happiness” as an inalienable right. They were off to a good start.
But this focus on good feelings was not to last. The new nineteenth century thinkers found happiness too hard to measure and thus an impractical way to judge progress. Governments backed off and shifted their focus to less subjective metrics like economic growth and crime rates. And that might have been the end of it if not for another Englishman, a Psychologist named Adrian White. In 2006, Mr White published a surprising study. Using data from 80,000 respondents, he ranked all of the countries of the world on their peoples’ relative happiness. It didn’t shock anyone that Denmark, with their high standard of living, came out on top or that a war-torn country like Burundi came last. But what confused many people was that the remote Himalayan kingdom of Bhutan came in 8th place, a comfortable 15 places ahead of the United States.
Bhutan did this despite ranking near the bottom of the world on quality of life measures. Bhutan comes 134th out of 177 countries in the Human Development Index rankings, for example. To put that in context, people born in Bhutan die about 20 years earlier than those born in Canada. The difference, I suppose, is that in Bhuan they’re dying a little bit happier.
How much happier? Only 3% of Bhutanese report being unhappy. This is quite a figure considering that psychologists say that 1 in 10 people suffer from some form of mental illness (most commonly depression). Even depressed people, it seems, are happy in Bhutan.
So how do they do it?
Quite simply, the government in Bhutan targeted the increase in their people’s Gross National Happiness (GNH) with a single-mindedness that would actually make us in the western world a little bit uncomfortable. Not only do they measure alongside Gross National Product (GNP), they put people’s happiness above everything else. (Update: I’ve just discovered that in 1990, Bhutan expelled 100,000 ethnic outsiders from the country –apparently in an attempt to boost the country’s average happiness. To me that seems a bit of a cheat. This is one of the dangers of putting too much stock in one measure of success. Human rights and everything else is overlooked. As a school teacher I’ve had a lot of similar discussions about how we measure success in schools.)
The government and the people of Bhutan deliberately sacrifice economic growth, tobacco, plastic bags, foreign investment and television –just to name a few– because they are seen as impedements to contentment.(Update: However, despite these limitations Bhutan had the second fastest economic growth of any country in the world in 2007).
Clearly these kinds of limits wouldn’t be easy for us to swallow in the west and yet we’d like the government to do more. A BBC survey recently indicated that 81% of British people think the government should focus more on making them happier, rather than wealthier. But again, I might not want them to go as far as taking away my TV.
I’ve been reading a lot about Bhutan, trying to figure out what lessons we could practically apply over here to give us a bit of the happiness they enjoy. The best thing I’ve uncovered is summed up in this quote by a western-educated Bhutanese man; he says, “the real appeal of Bhutan is that we feel human” (Frontline). To me that says a lot.
When you have a community of people committed to an ideal, even something as simple and obvious as trying to make their country a happier place, that’s a powerful thing. Part of that power is the willingness to make sacrifices.
