The Economics of Enough_ How to Run the Economy as if the Future Matters - Diane Coyle [23]
He too believes that Western societies are missing something, the richly woven tapestry of shared values and the sense of virtue they had in the past. What’s more, he argues that the cultivation of a virtuous character through socially engaged activities such as altruism or voluntary work is one way for people to experience the sense of flow.51
These thoughts have taken the research agenda of positive psychology from the recording of data that link individuals’ feelings to their activities during the day to much broader hypotheses about the nature of society—about the way work is structured, the impact of cultural diversity, and the importance of a sense of wider meaning in life. As Ed Diener and Robert Biswas-Diener put it: “Humans are unique among animals in many respects; perhaps chief among them is the ability to live virtuously and find purpose in life. As humans, we actually require a sense of meaning to thrive.”52
The importance of meaning, which underpins our happiness via our sense of “flow,” is clear in studies of how people feel about their work. For example, Csikszentmilhalyi, along with Howard Gardner and William Damon, looked at whether certain professions can be classed as “healthy” or “unhealthy”—to be the former, doing well professionally and doing good need to be in line. The researchers found that this was true for geneticists but not for journalists, for example; the former had a sense of social meaning and purpose in their work. The diary methods for collecting happiness data, described earlier, show that about half the time people in a wide range of jobs do experience a sense of flow at their work, whereas outside work they do so only about a fifth of the time. These results had the social gradients you might expect, with managers and professionals experiencing the good emotions more frequently than manual and low-status workers. Yet in a seeming contradiction people also say much more often when they are at work than outside that they’d rather be doing something else. Csikszentmilhalyi concludes: “When it comes to work, people do not heed the evidence of their senses. They disregard the quality of immediate experience, and base their motivation instead on the strongly rooted cultural stereotype of what work is supposed to be like.”53 In other words, for many people, their job does not intrinsically give them a sense of purpose—it is an imposition on them made by someone else, making them prefer activities outside work.
The salience of meaning or purpose emerges in other aspects of life apart from work. Jonathan Haidt argues that happiness depends on “coherence” between our psychological and cultural conditions. Some of his research makes him wonder whether in the efforts of many modern societies to embrace demographic diversity, we’ve created too much moral diversity and ignored the need to create a common shared identity in society. “Diversity is like cholesterol: there’s a good kind and a bad kind, and perhaps we should not be trying to maximize both.”54 We would be happier in general if we had causes to fight for which unite us, he argues. Ed Diener asked his students to compare the happiness they derived from a purely hedonistic activity such as going out to party and a virtuous activity such as volunteering; the former was fun but the happiness was ephemeral, while the latter was not enjoyable at the time but created a lasting feeling of satisfaction.
So the positive psychology movement has brought this debate full circle to the views of many philosophers over the ages—for example to Aristotle’s emphasis on the importance of behaving virtuously in everyday life, and thus developing a virtuous character, and to the long tradition in many religions of activities that underpin spiritual meaning. Just as in the standard economics