The Surprising Science of Happiness
There is a strange problem with happiness. Most of us spend enormous amounts of time pursuing the things we believe will create it: the promotion, the house, the relationship, the vacation, the financial goal, the next accomplishment. Somewhere underneath all of those goals is a quiet assumption: when I get there, I'll be happier.
And sometimes we are. You get the promotion, buy the house, reach the goal, or finally take the vacation you've been planning for years. For a little while, life feels fantastic. Maybe even like a 10. Then life returns to normal. The new job becomes your job. The new house needs repairs. The vacation ends. The accomplishment that once seemed enormous becomes part of your résumé, and before long your brain starts asking, "What's next?"
Psychologists call part of this hedonic adaptation. Human beings are remarkably good at adapting to changes in our circumstances. Something that initially creates excitement gradually becomes familiar, and its emotional impact fades. This ability helps us recover from difficult experiences, but it also means that many of the things we thought would finally make us happy eventually become normal.
Jordan Grumet describes this with a simple idea. Imagine rating your happiness from zero to 10. We tend to believe the goal is to somehow create a life that stays at a 9 or 10. But perhaps a better goal is learning how to move our normal experience of life from a 5 to a 6 or 7. At first, that doesn't sound particularly inspiring. Who wants a seven out of 10 life? But a 10 was never meant to be ordinary. A 10 is the wedding day, the birth of a child, getting the job you desperately wanted, or accomplishing something you weren't sure you could do. Those moments are extraordinary precisely because they aren't ordinary.
The problem comes when we expect extraordinary feelings from ordinary life. We accomplish something, adapt to it, and raise the bar. The promotion becomes the next promotion. The house becomes the bigger house. The accomplishment becomes the next accomplishment. Without realizing it, we can spend decades moving the finish line and telling ourselves, "I'll be happy when..."
Arthur Brooks offers a different way to think about happiness. Rather than defining it as simply feeling good, he describes three important ingredients: enjoyment, satisfaction, and meaning. He calls them the macronutrients of happiness, and a good life needs all three.
Enjoyment is more than pleasure. Pleasure is immediate: food tastes good, a purchase feels exciting, or a show entertains us. Enjoyment is richer because it often adds relationships, attention, and appreciation. A great meal can be pleasurable. Sharing that meal around a table with people you care about, laughing for two hours, becomes something more. We live in a world extraordinarily good at delivering pleasure, but more pleasure doesn't necessarily create more happiness. You can have a wonderful life and barely notice it.
Satisfaction usually comes from effort and progress. You train for the race, finish the project, learn the skill, raise the child, build the business, or solve the difficult problem. We need experiences that allow us to say, "That was difficult, and I did it." But satisfaction doesn't last forever either. Think about one of your biggest accomplishments from five years ago. How often did you think about it this week? This is where high achievers can get trapped. The answer isn't to stop achieving. It's to stop asking achievement to do a job it cannot do. Your résumé was never designed to make you happy.
The third ingredient is meaning. Meaning asks different questions: Why am I here? Who needs me? Why does what I do matter? Meaning is interesting because it doesn't always feel good. Raising children can be meaningful and difficult. Caring for someone can be meaningful and exhausting. Building something important can involve years of uncertainty. A happy life doesn't require the absence of difficulty. Some of the experiences that give our lives the greatest meaning are also some of the hardest.
Which brings us back to the 6 or 7. Imagine an ordinary Wednesday. You go to work, solve a few problems, talk with someone you care about, exercise, drive home, eat dinner, laugh with your family, and go to bed. Nothing extraordinary happened. You might rate the day a 6.
But look again. You had people you cared about. You had useful work to do. Your body allowed you to move. Someone needed you. You laughed. You had somewhere to go home to. Maybe 6 isn't mediocre. Maybe 6 is a remarkably good life that we've stopped noticing.
Our brains naturally pay less attention to things that become familiar, which means some of the most valuable parts of life can gradually become almost invisible: the spouse you've awakened next to for years, the friend who always answers your call, the healthy body that carried you through another day, the child walking through the kitchen, the job you sometimes complain about but once desperately wanted. None of those things may feel like a 10. Together, they may constitute a very good life.
So instead of continually asking, "Am I happy?" perhaps we should ask three better questions: What am I enjoying? What am I working toward? What gives my life meaning? There will still be difficult days, and occasionally there will be those breathtaking 10s. Enjoy them when they come, but don't demand that tomorrow reproduce them.
Most of life happens somewhere in between. Maybe happiness isn't waiting for us at the next promotion, purchase, accomplishment, or finish line. Maybe one of the secrets to happiness is learning to recognize how much of it is already present in our ordinary lives. Maybe a 6 or 7 isn't something we should be trying to escape. Maybe it's a very good life.
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