The Happiness Myth_ An Expose - Jennifer Hecht [7]
Euphoria is the spice of life: you don’t need much, but most of us really need some. There are people who are religious their whole lives, carried through by a personal experience of the holy that lasted twenty minutes in 1978, when they had a vision while on a hike at church camp. There are people who base their philosophical understanding of the universe on three ten-hour hallucinogenic-drug trips they took in college and the subsequent reading of an essay on Kant. Intense experiences are full of information and can last a lifetime. The memory of euphoric sex has carried many couples across long periods of dearth. One day of a blissful community festival can forge allegiances to an idea or a place that can go on to animate a lifetime. The emotion of ecstasy is shockingly potent stuff. It is a good thing the effect lasts so long, because ecstasy is not easy to obtain. There are only four kinds of ecstasy in our common lexicon: drug induced, sexual, spiritual, and bacchanalian. They are all hard to get, tiring to keep, and rare to have repeated, and they may be followed by some sadness, or at least dry mouth and a headache. Certain subsets of the population also try to achieve extreme bliss through physical effort and danger (warfare and dangerous sports) or through the heights of artistic experience. But mostly, the term ecstasy is associated with intoxication, orgasm, mystical elation, or ancient festal frenzy. In any form, ecstasy is either hard to invoke or comes with a price of pain and real danger. There are domestic heights of joy—weddings, for example—but note that they are self-limiting by nature. We can create more joy if we try: in the mid–twentieth century, the psychologist Abraham Maslow offered ideas about how we could cultivate more “peak” moments. But there is a point where the effort becomes like trying to make rarity more common. This is okay, though, because you need only a few euphoric events to flavor a whole life with happiness.
This is what I mean by a careful sketching of ideas. I think we all make these kinds of analyses on the fly, every day, as we wake up and decide what to do with ourselves. I also think that having some theoretical structure can help people make better decisions, perhaps new decisions, with more understanding and fewer regrets. If you wanted to peer into the universe or the atom, you might find yourself without the right lab equipment; but if you want to be a scientist of happiness, you have already been assigned a testing subject—yourself. But you do have to actually carry out experiments; that is, just thinking about them will not suffice. We today have all sorts of reasons for not going to the parade or the spa, but if you want to know what kind of effect these places have on people, you have to go. Behaviors that have stood the test of time as conducive to happiness have got to be looked at carefully. Although a lot of them are available to us, we do not understand them as happiness vehicles, and thus we either avoid them as a waste of time or we engage in them, but without making ourselves aware of their potential to make us happy. Once you know that caffeine was powerfully associated with happiness in the days, and centuries, before our devotion to productivity, you will find yourself experiencing coffee differently.
We need to pay careful attention to our modern, unhelpful myths so that we can make better choices. The way we do happiness is too constrained by faulty assumptions. These are not matters we can choose to either deal with or ignore.