The Happiness Myth_ An Expose - Jennifer Hecht [117]
Even the most scientific of the happiness instructions has to pass the test of being interesting if it is going to get on the front page. Newspapers can’t sell copies headlining the same commonsense information over and over; scientists and reporters both need for the advice to keep changing. But it is obvious, it seems to me, that you should eat food that agrees with you, that makes you feel good, that doesn’t lead to illness. Munching grassy foods all day and then having to take a pill for the gas, going to a restaurant expecting to leave in pain—these are not rational decisions. Why do you want to eat all that spinach anyway; and the rest of you, why take on that oversated pain? Is it about the food, or what the food means? I’d say the meaning thing. In the first case it is a matter of chewing one’s way to a mythic vision of lifelong happiness. In the second case it is an aggressive choice of good-day happiness over the others, a dyspeptic overstuffing in response to the parsimoniousness of life. If you are tired, you should sleep more. But, shy of eating things and portions that cause you pain or damage your ability to breathe well or take a walk, the rest of health and happiness is overdetermined. There are so many factors influencing them that the variables win against the brain; we really cannot say what specific things “caused” the outcome.
Even if you fail to follow the best advice in a whole range of ways, your successes may outweigh your failures: you may eat junk food but be free of the eroding effects of stress. We have seen studies showing the longer lives of Americans who are female, married, rich, white, exercising, not red-meat eating, educated, red-wine drinking, stress free, and optimistic. So if I’m a married African-American man, successful but not educated, very stressed but optimistic, and I rarely exercise, eat red meat, or drink red wine, how am I doing? How much does it matter if I was breastfed, or live near a highway, or have a dog? What if you are unusually beloved?
Researchers test the health effects of prayer at a distance(!) but could not begin to tell you about the life-sustaining properties of different kinds of love. Through history women have allowed doctors to dose them to help them manage the frustrations that go along with the joys of doing full-time childcare. That sounds bad, right? Yet women live longer. Is it the drugs, or the love? You need a computer—metaphorically, a microscope—to see the longevity effects of regular exercise, but women have been obviously outliving men, in plain sight, and we all assume it is because of an absence of what the men have: the men have work stress, so they die faster. Maybe it is the other way around. After all, there is no such thing as “stress.” We made it up in order to talk about things. It is a metaphor. It may not be the most helpful metaphor.
As a final thought here, consider that at the end of the nineteenth century and into the twentieth there were birthrate scares all over Europe and the United States. Women in industrialized countries were having fewer babies. (The populations were still growing, but more slowly than before.) In places where the birthrate seemed to be slowing as compared with other countries—France, for example—there was real hysteria over the matter: huge government conferences, magazine articles, whole journals on the question, a fortune spent researching the matter and trying out methods to coax women to have more babies. The effort never had much of an impact on how many babies women