The Happiness Myth_ An Expose - Jennifer Hecht [169]
Our culture of what to do about happiness is full of double meanings, cheating, and secrets, because we are using the whole thing as a distraction. If we want to think clearly, with room for originality, we must notice that being obsessed with the stuff you do about happiness is a wrong turn, a terrible tangle of double talk and contrary information about how to make a happy life. We need to relax these polemics and try on different variations of behavior. Maybe it is okay to be fat. Maybe drugs are all both good and bad and you should try out a new relationship with them to see what makes you happy. Maybe you want to rethink whether what you get out of shopping has anything to do with buying a lot. Maybe common concerns about people who have a lot of sex or no sex are just noise and things are okay the way they are for now. Maybe we can stop feeling so conflicted about shallow American culture and recognize that we are lucky to have something shallow to share. Why not put your arms in the air and party like you just don’t care? You are a mammal with extraordinary potential, but we have to take care of you if you are going to fulfill that potential. You have to do some work—wisdom work, celebration work—and you also have to learn to be a truth detector, to know that the rules for happiness propagated by the culture at large are not to be allowed to take up too much time and energy. Wrote Montaigne, “The reason why we doubt hardly anything is that we never test our common impressions. We do not probe the base, where the fault and weakness lies; we dispute only about the branches.”1 He asked, “What am I to make of a virtue that I saw in credit yesterday, that will be discredited tomorrow, and that becomes a crime on the other side of the river? What of a truth that is bounded by these mountains and is falsehood to the world that lives beyond?”2 When it comes to happiness drugs and health, and happiness regimes, even the most scientific, I’d say go with skeptical fidelity at the very most, and maybe relax your vigilance or your guilt. Probably our belief in these laws and standards is unwarranted. By contrast, there are some things that will make you happy.
As I discussed in the introduction to this book, happiness has not increased since 1950. Plotted on a graph, all sorts of measures of living conditions climb in broad, steady strokes, but happiness just lies there. What if we built a situation that could be the best civilization ever but we could not quite function in it? What if we are finally rich enough (in some circles) and wise enough (in some circles) to look after all of society properly but we just cannot get it together and make it happen? The great meaning of the world is each individual person getting through life with some happiness. It is time to work out the ambivalence and complexities of how we feel about our abundance and then learn to make use of what we find, for the sake of our own happiness and the happiness of other people. Being terrified of all sorts of dangers makes it easy for us to hide from all our ambivalence, but for most of us, most often, being terrified is a waste of time.
We are tempted to assume that the difference in money-and-happiness ratios between the 1950s and the 2000s can be explained by concluding that money doesn’t buy happiness. But that’s not true: money can buy happiness. Yet we feel guilty and worried over our abundance. We ruin it all with anxieties. Anxieties are biological memories of the wolf. In the absence of the wolf, we attach the anxiety to new things. We have to cut this out. Having failed to improve from 1950 to 2000, are we going to make any happiness progress from the 2000s to 2050? What would progress look like? What would make more of us report ourselves happy with more aspects of our lives? It seems to me that to make progress we will have to be open to suggestions from science, but also much more mindful of what people actually do. Tomorrow’s happiness advice will be different from today’s. It won’t just tell you to do something weird in order