The Happiness Myth_ An Expose - Jennifer Hecht [6]
A Good Day A good day can be filled with many mild pleasures, repeatable and forgettable, and some rewarding efforts.
Euphoria Euphoria is intense, lasts powerfully in memory, and often involves some risk or vulnerability.
A Happy Life A happy life requires a lot of difficult work (studying, striving, nurturing, maintaining, negotiating, mourning, and birthing), sometimes seriously cutting into time for a good day or for euphoria.
Anything we do may facilitate one kind of happiness and inhibit another. Researchers have plaintively wondered how people can report that they are so happy watching television when by other tests we find that they are only semiconscious when doing so. Yet every one of these people will tell you they prefer life to death; they want to be here. The answer is simple: The three kinds of happiness are not only very different; they are often at odds. They can be united in one experience, but more often than not a euphoric experience is also a painful or difficult one; a good day includes more playing than would add up to a happy life if you did it all the time; and arranging for a happy life is effortful and often unpleasant. We get confused when we forget that these three kinds of happiness can rarely be served at once. If you live every day as if it is your last, you miss out on all the happiness connected with effort and building, and will be struck by all the trouble that euphoria entails. If you attend only to one kind of happiness and find yourself generally unhappy, you should look to the other kinds.
Modern expert advice, with its obsession with longevity and productivity, is hopelessly devoted to “happy life” happiness. When we reject expert advice, it is in deference to the other kinds of happiness. A lot of what looks like a lack of willpower is, from another perspective, a series of positive choices in favor of one of the other kinds of happiness. Again, I risk seeming to be an apologist for laziness or bad behavior, but I think the risk is worth the danger. This is happiness we are talking about—too important a subject to fudge at the edges for the sake of propriety. The content of happiness advice in our culture features some fascinating schisms regarding how real people—scholars, jocks, jerks, and grandmothers—actually behave. We all act like we fall short of various ideals to various degrees. Isn’t that strange? Compare how you feel about seeing a policeman on the street as you walk through town with how you feel when you are driving and you spot a police car; most people walking down the street are not breaking any laws, but many people do exceed the speed limit while driving, and do make the occasional illegal turn. When you drive, you accept the cultural assignment to feel a bit guilty when you see the police. Regarding our own happiness, we have accepted the cultural assignment to feel a bit guilty.
The commonly expected story is that, though we all accept the values of happiness advice, we fall short because of failures in self-control. A common idea from Augustine to Freud, and one still generally held today, is that within us are several people fighting each other: a party animal, a drill sergeant, and a heart-of-gold observer. It is a fruitful metaphor, but of course we are not several people, but one person making decisions about life’s many choices. The information about those choices changes by the moment. On Monday morning you decide to renounce eating cake until you are as thin as you were in youth. On Monday morning this decision serves long-term happiness, and without much cost, because you are not in the mood for cake anyway, and you recognize that the loss of a little pleasure in any given day can easily be tolerated. But on Thursday night you have different, equally valid information: now you very much desire some cake; indeed, it seems that you could give yourself a big rush of good-day happiness, possibly even bordering on the