We CAN be good at happiness

Dan Gilbert's Stumbling Upon Happiness is one of the most important books on happiness. It basically shows all the ways in which we sabotage ourselves in our quests for happiness.

He has an excellent TED talk where he rifles through some of his ideas. (thanks Stephan Stegeman!)

He says that we have terrible happiness simulators. For example, given a choice between winning the lottery and being paraplegic, we'd pick winning the lottery. The following graphic represents how most people therefore simulate their happiness about the situation:



The actual results are the following:



Lottery winners are no more happier than paraplegics. Who would've thought?

Does that mean we're stupid? No.

Does that mean we have terrible happiness simulators? Maybe.

Does that mean we shouldn't seek happiness? Absolutely not.

Here is my problem with what he's saying. What happens if you seek to make yourself a paraplegic? You will be unhappy. Here's how it would go down.

Let's say I decided right now, "okay, tomorrow, I'm going to make a plan to make myself a paraplegic." What would happen is that I would have a really restless sleep tonight. Tomorrow, when I start making the plan, my body will slow down and I'll feel incredible anxiety about my plans. As I'm about to paralyze myself, I will have incredible doubt, so much so that I probably won't have the discipline to execute on it. If I do finally execute it, then first it would be really painful. Second, the initial 2-3 months will be physically and financially grueling—not to mention emotionally—as I readjust to the world. And thirdly, even if the guilt wears off (as I'm sure people who became paraplegics because of their negligence do eventually shake the regret), I'd still be depressed because I'd have the knowledge that I'm the type of person that seeks to sabotage myself. And I wouldn't feel happy until I figured out how to make myself someone that is protective toward himself. People who treat their bodies well are the kinds of people who are happy.

THAT's my happiness simulator.

Happiness lives in the good choices you make about the future, not in the things that have happened to you in the past. Evolution wouldn't have it any other way.

The whisper of liberation from depression

Most cases of depression have to do with actual events going on in that person's life and not in the person's attitude toward them. If someone is married to the wrong person, or has the wrong career, or is in the wrong town, they don't need therapy. They need to get out.

And this shouldn't be controversial.

If you're married to someone insensitive, you won't be happy. If your boss is an abusive jerk, you should quit, even in this economy.

But how do we know what defines "should"?

Before you let this quibble write off everything, let's lay a principle foundation.

My theory of happiness is that when we're doing what's appropriate, we are most happy. It's based on this principle:

How can you be happy if you don't proceed in the direction of your most important wants/needs/values?

Which is also based on this principle:

Happiness and depression have more to do with where we're going than where we're at.

Even if you think what I'm saying is akin to an amoralistic, "Do what thou wilt" thelema, it still holds true. Take even the most extreme case: if someone believes that it's important to be a homicidal maniac and doesn't act on it, he won't be happy, virtue-be-damned. Conversely, that doesn't mean the homicidal maniac will be happy if he does act on it.

People are often too scared to recognize what it will take to make a meaningful change in their life. Instead they turn to the idea that "it's all in my head." They think that if they can just "focus on setting their boundaries" or "reverse their ingrained beliefs" they won't have to do the unthinkable.

This image from Luis Borges's Inferno, I, 32 is the situation that most of the depressed find themselves in:

From the twilight of day till the twilight of evening, a leopard, in the last years of the thirteenth century, would see some wooden planks, some vertical iron bars, men and women who changed, a wall and perhaps a stone gutter filled with dry leaves. He did not know, could not know, that he longed for love and cruelty and the hot pleasure of tearing things to pieces and the wind carrying the scent of a deer, but something suffocated and rebelled within him.

My problem has been that I've often had little ideas and dreams that I was simply too scared or weak to embrace. I just left them shelved for the sake of an easier life. When I found myself depressed with work, I would yell at myself, "Come on, you spoiled brat, anybody would be happy to be doing what you're doing!" But then I started to look deep inside myself and began summoning up the courage to do what I truly wanted to do. After overcoming my initial hesitation anxiety, I developed the immense joy of finally feeling connected to what I've been doing. Looking back now, I can't believe that I let myself drift on the supposed "golden path" for so long. And now, the more time that I've put between me and that supposed golden path, the more I find myself with new foundations, such that the current way no longer seems especially exalted or fanciful. It simply feels more true.

If the final design for humans was to simply think our way to happiness, we would have never survived this long as a species. Nor can we imagine a higher being who would have that kind of plan for us.

How Tarot cards and vacations make us happy

I remember a Friday in college, when I noticed one of my dormmates wandering around depressed. "What's going on?" I asked her. "I don't know," she replied and left it at that. I had a sneaking suspicion it had to do with her and her best friend competing for my roommate, something I was uniquely privy to. Before I could confirm that with her, she disappeared for two days.

On Sunday, she popped up out of nowhere. "Where the hell were you?" I asked. "I just went out to the beach," she replied. "Are you still depressed?" I asked. "Nope, I figured some stuff out, and now I'm good." She then turned around and left.

This cryptic exchange has always stood out in my head. I think because I was going through my own depressions at the time. I was confused how she could liberate herself in just two days, when I felt like I was doing the right thing by staring out the window dwelling on my problems for hours on end. I couldn't explain why she could be depressed on Friday, and not depressed on Sunday simply by "getting space" and "figuring it out." What did she figure out?

But now, I think I'm closer to understanding the mechanics of how this kind of liberation happens. And I think it has something to do with what I learned from Tarot.

I first got into Tarot a year ago, when my friend Rusty gave me a reading. My question for him was, "What do I have to do to achieve more work-life fulfillment." He laid out the cards, walked me through the meanings, asking me questions about this or that, and I found my mind breaking through barriers, and focusing in on certain things that were really powerful for me. Around that time, the iPhone App Store was about to launch, and I was wavering between trying to make my own stake as an independent developer, or continuing being an unhappy freelancer. The cards and the readings just kept whispering to me to pursue my dreams, to do something that scared me. For me, this meant creating my own ideas, rather than working on other people's. And this was even before the App Store opened.

While the conclusion of this story is that I decided to make an iPhone app for Tarot—which turned out to be a hit—the real story is that for two months after that reading, I felt charged with a renewed sense of purpose in work, something that had previously been a rare experience for me since 1998. And I knew I could credit Tarot for doing this, that somehow it had triggered life-change in me.

And here's how I explain that transformation. Our consciousness is like a fisherman on a lake. We spend most of the time gliding around the surface, looking for answers to our problems. But we often never really find them until we stop, make a guess that there's something deep down there, and cast our line to grab them.

In a Tarot reading, the cards branch out all over the place in your mind, triggering associations beneath the surface that you may have never considered for years. It then drops hints at you that here, right here, is where you might want to cast your line. Tarot is called a divination tool, which reminds me of those divining rods that people used to carry that would pull them to an obscure source of water.

I think that taking a vacation does the same thing. It removes you from the currents and eddies running through your life, and allows you to take a casual scan of your entire lake.

Or to put it in engineering terms, only when all the noise in your life is quiet, does the signal finally emerge.

All in all, I've summarized this idea into two principles that relate to each other:

How can you be happy if you don't proceed in the direction of your most important wants/needs/values?
And then this one:
Introspective devices, like soul-searching, give quiet, but important voices a platform.
I believe that it is absolutely essential to our happiness to find within ourselves the ignored and marginalized voices that are whispering to us every day about our dreams and aspirations. Those voices need to be recognized and given a megaphone. Whether you take a vacation, get a Tarot reading, or meditate, somehow you must clear everything standing in the way of what you genuinely want in life. The blockers could be anything, from fear, to distractions, to being set in your ways, or discouragement from others. Whatever it is, we must have the courage to plumb the depths of our souls to find what it is that we truly want.

The greatest love of all

There is hidden wisdom in seemingly cliché advice. Even if the expressions don't have an impact on you, if you watch the eyes of people who say them, you can see the words locking into place like keys. Here are some examples:

• Life is short.
  
• God will take care of it.
  
• Focus on you.
• Be yourself.

These clichés are so prevalent that they come at you like an echo throughout your life. You start to wonder if the world is trying to tell you something.

One cliché in particular has to do with loving yourself. You hear it in different forms:

• Love thyself.
• The greatest love is self-love.
• Love yourself, for if you don't, how can you expect anybody else to love you?

If you really want to drive home a message, engage more than one sense. This video by Whitney Houston drives the point home:



While there is wisdom in something simple like, "love thyself," the message is a little incomplete. It lacks a "Why?" Why should I love myself? If you give a concept meaningful reasoning, then it starts to form a principle.

Here is a principle that I discovered that captures the importance of self-love:

How can you take care of yourself, if you don't love yourself?

If you don't love yourself, then you start to treat yourself poorly. This makes you unhappy, which by extension, makes you unhappy at yourself. As you can see, this is a vicious cycle. You will often find that those who are constantly struggling in their lives, also have poor self-evaluations. They simply keep burdening themselves with stresses and worries. For example, if you constantly think you're not "good enough," you will never feel like you deserve the finer comforts in life. If you can't stand to look at yourself, then you are likely to abandon taking care of yourself.

The people who maintain themselves and their level of happiness the best, are the same people who have an abundance of positive feeling toward themselves. It's hard to have one without the other.

Happiness can be measured

I think happiness can be measured through self-examination. I've been trying this now, for the past four weeks. I take the following list:

POSITIVE FEELINGS

**future
faith
hope
optimism
trust

**present
awe
calm
confidence
ecstacy
flow
joy
passion
pleasure
zest

**past
contentment
fulfillment
pride
satisfaction
serenity

NEGATIVE FEELINGS

**future
dread
fear

**present
agony
angst
anxiety
boredom
depression
jealousy
dysphoria
discomfort
fear
frustration
hate
sadness
stress
tension

**past
dissatisfaction
embarassment
guilt
regret

Once a week, I score myself from 1 to 10 on every emotion, and assess what needs help on.

So far, I think it's working out well. I was able to assess problem areas and fix them over subsequent weeks. In addition, it's always surprising to myself how extreme some of my scores get.

It's in an excel spreadsheet right now, let's see how long I stick with this.

Solving problems with the "pursuit of happiness"

Having happiness as a goal seems to pose problems for people, as it does for me. There is a vast "learned helplessness" that makes people feel like they shouldn't be happy.

I think the strategy is to frame happiness as the following:
1) a means to an end
2) a measure of good performance in things that matter.

AREA 1

Happiness provides energy, encouragement, and a cooperative bent that are all useful for most productive goals. Pursuing happiness is therefore expedient.

AREA 2

Happiness is a wealth of positive feeling, and your goals are there because they make you feel positive. For example, altruism, success, sex, etc.. are all important to me because I know they make me feel good. Happiness is a measure of that good feeling. So by pursuing happiness, I'm asking myself to do all of the things that make me feel good.

What is happiness? Here is my definition lifted from Seligman, the psychology master.

Happiness is:
1) satisfaction about the past
2) enthusiasm in the present
3) optimism for the future

All three are partially controlled by the actual content of events and partially controlled by your own perspective.

For example, in the case of satisfaction about the past, if you are in jail for child abuse, I don't think you could get over it mentally and be satisfied with yourself. Or if you are not in loving relationships or have no family by the time you are forty then it is hard to be optimistic and enthusiastic.

With regard to enthusiasm in the present, part of it is finding work to do that you are passionate about. Another part, though, is actively enthusing yourself about things.

Studies in cognitive therapy show that we can pump ourselves up about things. In other words, content <-> emotion <-> thought is a multi-directional freeway. Hardships can upset you and cause terrible thoughts. Emotions can cause you to mess up your life and create bad thoughts. And thoughts can ruin your emotions and distract your productivity. Everything affects everything in both directions.

The important lesson I learned is that happiness is half-perspective and half-good works. If you engage in commerce with the world you will have a much better chance at being happy. If on top of that, you are grateful for what you receive, you will be even happier. Same thing with relationships. A good partner will up your happiness a notch, but your active enthusiasm and emotional investment into the relationship will make you even happier.

These ideas are instructed from Seligman's Authentic Happiness. Check it out for an even overview of happiness. Note, I left out "pleasure in the present," an important piece of happiness. However, I doubt the people reading this have trouble with indulgence.