Looking for Happiness in All the Wrong Places?

Most of us aspire to be happy. We see it as a major goal in our lives, something we’re willing to work for. Our American Constitution proclaims its pursuit to be everyone’s chartered right. For commercial culture, it's the rationale behind the various products and experiences we consume. Happiness, we believe, is the measure of personal fulfillment.

In that context, it seems strange that there is so little agreement about what happiness is or what conditions promote it. For the most part, we are left to devise our own strategies for becoming happy. Some of those strategies are good ones; others are terrible.

Be clear that different societies envision happiness differently. That is the focus of a recent major study of happiness in 63 countries. Eschewing the common approach of assessing which countries are happiest, Gwendolynn Gardiner and her colleagues explored the different standards that their 15,000 respondents used to judge their lives. Of particular interest to the researchers was the division between happiness commitments in Western and Eastern societies.

Western societies, like the US, advocate what the authors call “independent happiness.” That is, individuals are expected to manufacture or “achieve” their own sense of well-being. Pointedly, happiness is usually thought of as a “high arousal” emotion. When we’re happy, we have strong feelings of accomplishment, pleasurable excitement, and self-esteem.

That quest, which may seem normal to readers, is paramount only in what others have called “WEIRD” countries, those that are Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich, and Democratic. Non-WEIRD countries — essentially, most of the world — exhibit different strategies.

In that light, Eastern societies, like Japan, emphasize what the authors call “interdependent happiness.” That is, subjective feelings are understood to be interpersonal or relational matters. Versus high-affect emotions, Eastern societies value “quiescence,” subjectivity that is quiet and restorative. Similarly, there is respect for “embeddedness,” centering oneself in ordinary or routine settings. In essence, relationships — especially family and good friends — matter. One doesn’t find happiness by escaping to exotic and adventure-filled settings far from home. They meet it by refining the conditions they have.

To be sure, people across the globe understand, and have some taste for, both styles of happiness. However, they usually accommodate themselves to their society’s favored approach. And that vision of the "good life" may also be modified by regulations regarding ethnicity, class, religion, age, and gender.

In that context, consider here four basic strategies for finding happiness.

Fun: The happiness of play

Many of us associate happiness with zestful or spirited activity, where we’re fully focused and pursuing some goal in pleasureful ways. Play is perhaps the best example of such an endeavor.

When we play, we commit ourselves to the momentary. We set aside routine cares and obligations. Under our own steam, we make choices and explore consequences. We put on silly costumes and follow arcane rules. Special meanings of time and space apply. And, ideally, we quit the enterprise just as easily as we began it.

More than that, play offers us the chance to experience alternative versions of ourselves. For a few moments we become characters — sports stars, prima ballerinas, chess wizards, and skulking villains. Sometimes, those characters we play seem truer to our “real” selves than the more compromised identities we typically maintain.

Exuberant, committed play is a wonderful thing. It encourages our creativity. It tests our resolve. It allows us to experience a wide range of emotions, many of them of the “high arousal” sort. Critically, fun of this sort causes no enduring harm.

Western societies celebrate this activity. Life should be spent in a kayak, sailboat, or fast car. Let us strain and shout and afterwards laugh about the perils we faced.

However, fun-seeking of this sort is in its nature episodic and inconsequential. Often, it’s self-centered. It shifts easily into aimlessness and foolery. Be careful spending too much of your life on the adventurer’s trek.

Satisfaction: The happiness of work

There are other people who feel happiest when pursuing projects that are serious, protracted, and consequential. Workers see the world as something to be confronted and changed. They conduct their tasks not for the pleasures of so doing — though these may be substantial — but for “needs” or “interests” beyond the enterprise itself.

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Work that we are paid for is one important example of this spirit. Many of us take pride in the jobs we’ve done, how long we held those positions, and what consequences they had for other people’s lives. Commonly, those commitments are sources of income, status, friendship, and public respect. Few would claim their occupations are routinely “fun”; most would acknowledge they provide significant satisfaction.

Important also are jobs we aren’t paid for, such as tasks around the home, service for others, and self-maintenance. Arguably, most of life is composed of these errands and chores.

Some people are wealthy enough to outsource many of these chores (though they must still confront the task of arranging the services). Others are reconciled to doing things like housework or yardwork but claim to “hate” them.

There is a long tradition of glamorizing work that has high status and high pay. By that standard, menial tasks are grim necessities. Although I don’t agree with that viewpoint, I won’t romanticize tasks — taking the car in, going to the dentist, grocery shopping — that most people find tiresome. Still, there are satisfactions in doing things well, or at least to our own standards. That is why we decorate and maintain our living quarters as we do, keep our possessions in good repair, and work out at the gym.

That spirit of “doing little things well” is a key element of happiness. That said, too much work can make both Jack and Jill dull. People become trapped in their own routines and efficiencies. The pathway becomes a rut.

Joy: The happiness of communion

Western societies typically depict play and work as self-directed endeavors or, at least, as ones that individuals “get something out of.”

That vision of a self-managed life isn’t really accurate; even work and play have important social aspects. And it conflicts directly with our commitment to communion, activities where we make it a point to be in other people’s presence and to experience what they offer. To that end, we gather with friends to chat or watch the game, go to festivals and concerts, and stroll through markets and parks. These are times to “meet and greet,” offer respects and condolences, and drift in and out of conversational circles.

Oddly, Western or WEIRD societies don’t emphasize this basic need for human bonding. But non-WEIRD ones do. In most of the world, public life is as important as private life; solitude is less gleeful escape than problematic isolation.

Without other people, it is very difficult to experience such profound emotions as gratitude, blessedness, hope, and joy. These are feelings of connection that require support from others. When others minister to us, they expand our understanding of what is possible. They make us acknowledge our common humanity.

Trained to be independent, many of us are suspicious of the opposite condition. However, we are strengthened by the knowledge that others stand with us.

Notably, there are other important forms of communion, such as engagement with nature. And the desire to be with others is, at worst, only a burble of sociality. Ideally, happiness comes both from mutual respect and from creative endeavors springing from that support.

Rapture: The happiness of ritual

Are there realms of order that provide not only feelings of connection but also directions for how to live? When we commit ourselves to rituals, that is our intention. We want to find frameworks for living that free our minds for more specific kinds of problem-solving and self-expression.

Once again, WEIRD societies don’t emphasize this theme. Commonly there, innovation trumps tradition. The past, even recent history, is disregarded. Religion, beyond loose spiritual yearning, is problematic.

However, the great moments of life — births, marriages, and deaths — still receive formal recognition. Organizations like schools and businesses mark the transitions of their members. Daily rituals — think of conversational forms, eating customs, and bathroom arrangements — help us make our way from one moment to the next.

Primarily, these are not patterns to make us feel good. They are forms that mark our changing status in social situations. They tell others how to treat us and us how to treat them.

At best, rituals transport us to another level of being. Empowered by that sense of orderliness, we feel less anxious. Everyday discomforts seem less important. That quality of “quiescence” or equanimity is the stuff of happiness.

At worst, rituals become overly constricted. They block possibility rather than enable it. They honor social and cultural forms instead of the people inhabiting those forms. At such times, ritual becomes “dead.”

All of us recognize these different strategies. The challenge is to recognize the merits of each and avoid the dangers of excessive commitment to any one form.