The Happiness Myth_ An Expose - Jennifer Hecht [1]
Our times are not exactly like any other time in history. We are very special. But not as special as we think. The fact that you can send a probe to Mars doesn’t mean you are better at living a normal life. It is true that modern experimental science can turn up new kinds of information, but brain scans and scientifically constructed questionnaires answer only the questions that you ask. Happiness is a subjective matter. How superior, then, are we to those of earlier centuries who analyzed happiness using observation and contemplation? Historically, people have studied happiness from their own point of view. That may seem subjective, but when you yourself judge the happiness of fifty people you have known, it is always the same person playing judge. That is a big benefit. When, in the style of modern experimental science, we ask the fifty people to report their own experiences, they may each have such varied expectations that their reports are meaningless. Such studies have shown that a lottery winner and an accident victim left paraplegic both return to their genetic happiness “set points” a year after the event. Historically, we have always known of “happy types,” but the modern idea of set points may go too far.
Perhaps you can look at your life and say that you were reasonably happy in most periods. But ask yourself whether you were happier when things were going your way than when you suffered a major setback. We may thank science for reminding us that good and bad luck do not change things as much as we fantasize and worry that they will. But the old intuitive pattern—good stuff is better—holds up well. Our present-day affection for the idea of happiness “set points” also seems a bit disrespectful to the countless people who have left records saying that events or society had stolen much of the happiness they should have had. The evidence for a “set point” is a study of identical twins separated at birth, some of whom seemed to have very similar mood ranges. The evidence against it comes from millions of attestations over thousands of years. Our science of happiness can be fascinating, but it is not definitive. Our forebears had other ways of judging what makes people happy, and future generations will have others still. We may think we are much more sophisticated than people in the past, but the happy truth is that we can learn a lot from history.
Our era believes that happiness requires a particular relationship to physical exercise, legal and illegal drugs, food, public decorum, sexual normality, and material and media culture. It has no more claim to truth on these matters than any other. People argue about the details but accept the basic modern assumptions as true, based on science and common sense. This book seeks to prove that the basic modern assumptions about how to be happy are nonsense and that we do not have to listen to people argue about the details. That is a big claim, I know. But I am convinced both that it is accurate and that it is a wonderfully therapeutic idea if you can fully take it in. All disciplines, from physics to comedy, may be said to progress, but all disciplines do not equally generate useful ideas that must be understood by the next generation if the game is to be advanced. Once the whole idea