Action(s) for Happiness

A lot of jokes about happiness are mean. For example, an anonymous post on an Internet joke site says, “What 's the difference between a Dementor and marriage? One will suck out every good feeling, every happy memory and drain the remaining peace, hope, and happiness left inside you. The other is a dark creature from a children’s fantasy novel.”

And that’s one of the less cringe-inducing ones.

There’s irony in operation here because many of the subjects that get mocked most – male/female relations, marriage, child-rearing, social participation – are elements of life that have been proven to promote happiness and well-being.

Perhaps “happiness” is an obvious victim for this sort of thing because it sounds so kittens and rainbows. Plus, we might live in a self-help culture, but many of us still feel a little squeamish when it comes to talking about emotional topics. It’s awfully earnest. And, even if you get past that, it can still seem uncomfortably narcissistic. I’ve worried about that very thing in an earlier blog.

But there’s an interesting organization called Action for Happiness that’s trying to change this perspective. AFH is ambitious. Their goal is to create happier societies. Practically this means achieving a whole number of secondary goals: shifting the tone of public discourse, overturning our assumption that we should measure citizens’ progress and well-being by GDP, sifting through insights from fields as diverse as economics and psychology to put together broad patterns of understanding, disseminating information about happiness, and nudging public policy in directions that have been proven to promote happiness and well-being.

The people behind AFH are no self-styled prophets or happy-clappy, bead-wearing hippies. The movement was founded in 2010 by Richard Layard, a Labour peer and professor of economics at the LSE, Geoff Mulgan, chief executive of The Young Foundation, and Anthony Seldon, master of Wellington College, an independent boarding and day school in the UK.  Each is a leader in their field, well-poised to influence public debate. If you will, they are the Establishment, albeit a progressive side of it.

The ethos on the AFH website is that we can cultivate happiness through action. Indeed, at several points on the site, the quote the Dalai Lama saying, “Happiness is not something ready made. It comes from your own actions.” To that end, the website features resources designed to motivate people to do things to boost their happiness. For example, visitors can download a “Happiness Action Pack” created to put “the science of well-being into practice.” This action pack condenses insights from positive psychology into ten areas in our lives in which we can do things to boost our happiness. The first five relate to how we engage with our bodies and the world. It includes things like giving, connecting to other people and exercising. The second five relate more to managing our outlook and emotions, which includes setting goals, being positive and accepting oneself.

Perhaps because of the apparent simplicity of these messages, combined with the fact that one could imagine seeing this sort of thing in some of the fluffier women’s magazines, critics have suggested that AFH’s approach is facile. Writing in The Guardian last year, David Harper, a Reader in Clinical Psychology at the University of East London, said that AFH’s approach is “based on two flawed assumptions: that the source of unhappiness lies in people’s heads – in how they see the world, and that the solution lies in change at the level of the individual.”

To be sure, this line of thinking exists in AFH and in the wider world. It’s even got quite a pedigree. The Stoics said something along these lines. Buddhism does too. WB Yeats wrote that the soul is “self-delighting, self-appeasing and self-affrighting.”  And, thanks to YouTube, we’ve recently seen a surge in attention for David Foster Wallace’s famous commencement speech, “This is Water,” in which he urges graduates to take the opportunity to choose what they think about in order to transcend the boring, crushing or soulless moments of our lives.

This perspective probably has endured for some thousands of years because there’s some truth in it.

But it’s not the whole truth. For, while we do have remarkable abilities to school our minds, hearts and bodies to cultivate behaviors that help us cope with suffering and embrace happiness, of course the external world has an impact on us.

And this is where AFH’s critics aren’t quite being fair. In fact, AFH’s work is so interesting precisely because they acknowledge both sides of the coin. They seem a lot less interested in pushing all the responsibility either to society or the individual, and a lot more focused on simply seeing how the science of happiness tallies up and what we can actually do about it.

Some of the action does need to come from industry and government: no question. People are happier when they’re valued, so dehumanizing work processes are going to foment unhappiness. People feel happier when they live in clean and secure environments, so public policy that allows environmental degradation is going to spread misery. But even here we’re theoretically not entirely subject to the whims of state, at least, not in democracies. We can vote. We can create campaigns. We can create art. We can write stories. We can find ways to enter the public debate and try to influence happiness-promoting practices and policies.

But perhaps one of the most interesting spheres for action that AFH talks about is that which lies right at the meeting point of the individual and his or her community. It’s not policy, it’s not just positive thinking…it’s the stuff we do daily as we interact with the people around us. In an interview for the digital commons site openDemocracy, Geoff Mulgan alludes to the idea that engagement spurs well-being.* And the actions that AFH’s website encourage include examples of these small-scale but meaningful points of engagement: between parents and children, people and their workplaces and people and their communities. Just to take one example, they suggest volunteering. They cite the science that shows how volunteering boosts happiness and they provide a whole heap of resources to get people going. It’s not that sexy, but it’s right.

Mean humour, alas, might provoke a wry smile, but it doesn’t promote happiness. But connection and engagement do. And if Action for Happiness is as successful as they deserve to be, we’ll all be feeling the positive effects of their efforts.

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* I am taking a few liberties with Mulgan's extremely interesting interview here, but I think this is very much in the spirit of what he says.

How to Thrive: Insights from a Conversation with best-selling author Dan Buettner

Dan Buettner is the New York Times best-selling author of The Blue Zones: Lessons for Living Longer from the People Who've Lived the Longest (with a terrific second edition just out) and Thrive: Finding Happiness the Blue Zones Way. He is one of those rare people who is simultaneously a reflective thinker and a super-charged ball of positive energy. A National Geographic Fellow, he’s thought hard about, and traveled the world to explore, questions that matter to all of us. Are there genuine secrets to living longer, healthier lives? And can we foster happiness and well-being? He’s sought to answer these questions by examining the behaviors and lifeways of people in “Blue Zones”, that is, exceptional pockets of the world where, statistically, people live the longest or report greater life satisfaction than the average.

Recently, Dan was good enough to speak with me about his work, and the lessons we can extract from it to think about what really matters in creating a good life. While the whole conversation was fascinating, I thought I’d post one of the segments that I found most compelling, where Dan talks about the choices we can make to promote well-being in our own lives, and the importance of cultivating belonging.

LMR: What do you see as the fundamental relationship between health and happiness?

DB: Happiness is worth about 8 years of additional life expectancy. There are a few behaviors that contribute to both. For example, we know that the happiest Americans are socializing six hours a day. We also know that loneliness takes years off your life. Loneliness is as bad for you as a smoking habit. So by proactively going out and surrounding yourself with healthy friends, it’s not only going to make you healthier – because health is a positive contagion – it’s also likely to make you happier.

And also physical fitness. Going out and taking a walk. It triggers endorphins. It makes you feel good. But we also know that walking is associated with anywhere from 4-6 extra years of life expectancy.

I didn’t set out to find these things, but both books were kind of worldwide meta-analyses of populations who are the paragons of happiness and longevity. So I tried to get all the data in the world and find the best. And then distill down what they do. And if you boil down longevity, and you boil down happiness, and you overlay them, you see about an 80% overlap.

LMR: Do you feel, when you see that overlap, you’re seeing something about what it means to be human?

DB: I see the overlap of what it takes to have a rich life. What it means to be human is to procreate, from a strictly evolutionary point of view.

LMR:  So when I hear your stories, I wonder if they’re telling us something about the nature of our humanity. The kinds of things are so deeply or necessary to us they tell us something about our nature or being?

DB: One easy answer is socializing. We’ve succeeded as a species because somewhere along the evolutionary arc, we’ve figured out that collaborating increases our chance of survival. And, like so many things, when you satisfy that thing that increases our chances of survival, our bodies are hardwired to reward us. When you’re thirsty and we drink, it feels good. When you’re hungry and you eat, it feels good. When you’re horny and you have sex, it feels good. And these are all things that make it more likely that we’ll have kids. I think it’s this reward loop. Well, the same thing with socializing. We cooperate. When you look at the Blue Zones around the world, they typically are in pretty harsh environments. And the reason they survived is because they cooperate. You look at the Sardinian shepherds, for example. They don’t even all own their own parcel of land. But they live in tiny villages and they get together. So, when it comes to our humanity where…it’s realizing that there is a genetic satisfaction that comes from good social connections. And we should always favour that over consumption.

LMR: When you were in doing research…this is primarily directed at the longevity populations, did the people you were talking to ever have an articulation of the good life the way we would use it? Was there a sense of what life was all about that they collectively shared?

DB: Yeah, I think it’s a profound sense of belonging to where they came from. And if you look at the Sardinians, life is about my kids. I work, not to get ahead in the world, not to buy a second vacation home, not to have a nicer car. I don’t…if I have free time, it’s never at the expense of my family. And we heard this over and over. I don’t have massive data, other than…I have an N of about 50 people. And you saw the emphasis of the family among those populations.

LMR: Interesting. The sense of…going back to what you said about having a profound sense of belonging to where they came from…do you mean from within a familial lineage, or also within a cultural or even an environmental, like a connection to place?

DB: The latter. In other words, they weren’t just rebels without a cause. They’re not the type of people who bounce through life, move around. They’re planted.

LMR: I also wondered if you think that not having an icki gai [a purpose in life] can cause people pain? And I ask that because clearly having one is the presence of a positive, so is not having one just the absence of that positive, or is it the presence of a negative? Do people wind up feeling…I mean, I guess this is just going into hypothesis-land, but more lost, or feeling like there’s something absent in their life that causes them pain?

DB: Yeah, I think there’s an existential pain in that unrootedness.

LMR: And, with the work that you’re doing with the Blue Zones communities [“a systems approach that brings together the citizens, businesses and institutions of a given community to foster well-being”], are you saying that we can self-consciously create some of these things?

DB: Yes. First of all, you can choose where you move and I think that’s…people dismiss that. “Oh…I’m not going to move.” Well, the average American, and probably the average Canadian, moves ten times in a lifetime. So you can choose to live out in some culturally barren suburb, or you can find a neighborhood where neighbors know each other and there are parks and playgrounds full of people. And a place where you’re going to be nudged into social…you can walk down to a café, or a store…. That’s going to have a bigger impact on your happiness, and I argue your longevity, than just about anything else you can do. So, OK, well, what else? All right, your husband lives in a suburb and he ain’t moving. The next line of proactivity you can pursue is finding…build your own social network. You don’t have to hang out with the toxic woman who bitches about her life, or the friend that sits and watches reruns of Gossip Girls all day long and drinks Diet Coke. We can all create our own social networks and support that give energy to the positive.

Towards a New Model of Health and Well-Being: Practice Makes Perfect

Anthropology News published an article of mine today as part of their series on health, well-being and happiness.  It argues that the dominant, consumption-based vision for the good life in North America is making us sick and that, moreover, our individualist model for understanding health and well-being all too often compounds rather than helps the problem. That’s the bad news.  The good news is that there’s a new way of thinking about the good life that actually sets us on to a much better path for health and well-being.  We can see it in the work of writers like Mark Bittman and Laurie David, and articulated brilliantly by the philosopher Albert Borgmann.  Theirs is a vision of a good life characterized by activities that engage and connect us to each other and the world around us.

The article is publicly available at this link http://www.anthropology-news.org/index.php/2012/03/15/towards-a-new-model-of-health-and-well-being/ if you’d like to read more!

Is Happiness the Goal?

Well, someone’s got to ask it. We are in the midst of an explosion of interest in happiness.  The UK and Canada, among other countries, are now measuring their citizens' well-being as earnestly as they do GDP.  Books about how to get and stay happy sit contentedly on best-seller lists.  Happiness think tanks are springing up like mushrooms, like the Wellbeing Programme at the London School of Economics.  The introductory statement on their website says, "People want to be happy.  But do we know what makes us h appy, or how society is best organised to promote happiness?"  They take it as axiomatic that happiness is the goal:  the only question is how.

Even if one is supremely disinterested in this movement, it’s coming for you. The other morning, I received a new magazine called “What Makes You Happy” inserted into my Globe & Mail newspaper.  I’m professionally immersed in this subject, and even I was amazed at the breadth of happiness articles:  happiness at work, raising your children to be happy, global happiness averages, etc, etc.

On the face of it, questioning whether we really want to be happy seems absurd.  Look at it the other way:  “Do you want to be unhappy?” Of course not!  And yet, as the get-happy steamroller bears down on us, it’s worth digging in our heels a little, at least long enough to ask an important question:

What exactly do we mean by happiness?

This is where it all gets a bit woolly.  In some respects, happiness is one of those things that we’re just supposed to “get” because everyone has experienced happiness and unhappiness at some time.  This is presumably why the LSE can so boldly state that all people want to be happy, and also why there really isn’t any social pushback or qualification to the happiness trend.

But look a little more closely, and one sees that there are a lot of hidden assumptions at work in all this happiness business.  First, everyone seems to be running with Aristotle’s argument that, no matter what goal we believe ourselves to be striving for, like financial success or building a family, we’re really doing it because we believe that it will make us happy.  Thus, happiness is the real goal.  While more than a little hesitant to take on Aristotle, I’m not actually 100% convinced of that.

But whatever the case, based on my recollections from my undergraduate years and a quick refresher at the website of The Pursuit of Happiness, a non-profit organization dedicated to promoting human happiness, Aristotle also said that we don’t really know we’ve achieved happiness until the end-game, when we’ve lived our whole life and can look back on it.  It’s not a temporary state of happy-happy-joy-joy at all, it’s a life goal.

My sense is that the majority of the merrily bubbling happiness literature doesn’t look at it this way at all…mostly it seems to be promoting happiness right here, right now.  And this is where I begin to get a little uncomfortable.  In this vision, it seems like it’s too easy for happiness to devolve into the ultimate individualist, consumerist quest.  It’s all about me!  And we elevate our feelings to the level of obsession, using fleeting moments of what we perceive to be happiness as sort of a litmus test for the worth of an activity or commitment.  There’s a fair argument to be made that this is just plain narcissistic.  But more than that, I’m not sure it’s making any us feel better.  It may even be perpetuating the problem.

So what else can we develop that elevates the discussion beyond individual happiness?  This is where the idea of an excellent life, a rich life, comes in.  To me, this implies something beyond an individual’s feelings, because, as I see it anyway, a rich life is one defined by interconnection.  You can also assess it in a much more clear-cut way than happiness…is your life rich with people, work, community engagement, purpose, ideas, activity, connection to place and so on?

To be fair, a few of the well-being indices do some version of this.  For example, the Canadian Index of Wellbeing, based at the University of Waterloo, measures factors such as living standards, community vitality, health, environment, time use, democratic engagement, leisure and culture and environment.  This is a step in the right direction.  But I’d love to see us take the idea of interconnectedness head on, and measure the worth of activities and pursuits by how much they connect us to things.

Because I think this is the goal.  Yes, as individuals we’re mired in our own feelings and experiences, and we’ll all do our final reckoning about our lives at the end.  But in the meantime, we can passionately seek connection…to others, to this beautiful world of ours, to creative expression, to all the things that can elevate our humanity, and that really are worth striving for.

The Joy of Raclette

It’s like a double decker bus - that you can cook on.  Yes, I’m talking about a Raclette grill.  I gave one to my husband, Stefan, for Christmas, and due to various logistical reasons (including not wanting to lug it all the way to Berlin, where we spent Christmas), he only opened it this past Saturday night.  He introduced me to Raclette years ago, and is a bit of a devotee himself, so I thought he’d be pleased when he saw the gift.  He was, but the children, who knew nothing of this thing called “Raclette” were indifferent, preferring instead to focus on popping the bubble wrap it came in. But that indifference melted away (like a slice of yummy cheese) as soon as they started to see the principle of Raclette.  All the typical stuff of dinner – in this case vegetables and potatoes – but topped by bubbling melted cheese!  And they could choose just to which degree they wanted to melt their cheese…bubbly, sticky or almost crispy.  Mira was so overcome, she threw her hands up in the air, yelled, “Yummy Raclette!” and then proceeded to faux fall off her chair and on to the floor.

Now, in terms of ingredients, this was a pretty humble dinner.  We had the Raclette cheese, of course, but we ate it only with boiled potatoes and grilled zucchini and orange peppers.  And yet somehow it was incredibly delicious and fun.  I loved the food, but honestly, a lot of my fun came from how much Mira was enjoying it.  Not only was she in ecstasies from the food in front of her, the approach to cooking  food and “topping” it with something sparked some incredible latent creativity in her.  After dinner, she lay right down on the kitchen floor and started creating a list of all the things she’d like us to try cooking.  Here are a few of her ideas:  fry eggs and peppers, and melt Monterey overtop;  grill shrimp and top with melted butter seasoned with chili and lime; make crepes and top with melted chocolate, whipped cream and raspberries; grill bananas and top with melted chocolate and rum (OK, the rum was my idea).  Not bad for a seven year old!

As a parent, it was fascinating to see how much more engaged the children were in dinner when they got to participate in cooking it themselves.  They often help in the kitchen, so it wasn’t just the power of lending a hand, I think it was the fact that we were all in it together, and we could all share and discuss our micro-choices and approaches like how gooey or toasty we wanted our cheese, or whether the cheese went better with potatoes or zucchini.  The Raclette gave us a central focus, and literally gathered us towards its warmth and fragrance.  We all loved being a part of it, and I think that intense inclusion – expressed in delicious food, of course - is what Mira is trying to replicate with her flurry of creative recipes.

We also found it conducive to telling stories.  Of course, I had to tell the children how I’d never heard of Raclette before I met their father, but also how we used to joke that, if the world ever got too much for us, we thought we’d just go off to some college town somewhere and open a Raclette restaurant. What could be nicer than that?  Mira, entranced, pressed her recipe ideas into my hands.  “Here you go, Mama,” she said, “Recipes if you ever do it.”

Food, togetherness, stories, creativity, dreams:  I think we might be eating a lot of Raclette this winter.

Do you suffer from fun schizophrenia?

Fun is a great engine to help us switch-on. This should be cause for celebration, because fun is theoretically accessible to everyone, but there’s a hitch:  we are deeply culturally schizophrenic about fun.    On one hand, we regard it with suspicion, as if it’s a fast-moving train that’s going to take us straight to the towns of distraction, decadence and ruin.  This is because most of us over 40 were raised to believe that work and fun are opposite things, with work being the more virtuous.  Case in point: when I was in grade seven, my class had to chant “Long-term satisfaction is better than short-term gratification!” until we got it firmly planted into our little thirteen year old heads.  While this might have been a bit extreme, this ethos, derived from the Puritan work ethic, is built into the foundation of our culture, from various folktales involving better outcomes for squirrels that spend their days collecting nuts instead of playing, to arguments about the importance of restraint and self-discipline in everything from dieting to financial planning.  We might have varnished it over with a glossy layer celebrating leisure and conspicuous consumption, but it’s still there, orienting our thinking and behavior in all sorts of ways.

On the other hand, that varnish of leisure and consumption is really, really shiny.  It dazzles us with promises of pleasure and fulfillment.  In this world, fun is perhaps the most desirable goal, suggesting as it does, that one is beyond needing to worry about being a sensibly-minded squirrel.  Thus, we admire and envy people, like celebrities, who look like they’re having more fun than we are, we dish out small fortunes to buy fun experiences like trips to Disneyland, and we’re suckers for advertising that promises us “fun”, whether it be in our cars, cheese sticks or airlines.

That’s quite a tension to build into one little thing called fun.

And what is this thing anyway?  “Fun” is everywhere, but for all that, it’s strangely undefined.  We have fun dentists, fun workplaces, fun parks, fun cruises, fun buses and fun facts, but as of October 2010, Wikipedia didn’t have a distinct entry on fun - one simply got redirected to “recreation”.  While Wikipedia has since updated it, at the time of writing, their entry on fun is 99 words.  That’s pretty sparse!  (By contrast, Wikipedia’s entry on the Doppler Effect is 2790 words, and includes a handy animated illustration reminiscent of Sheldon’s Doppler Effect costume in the Big Bang Theory.)

Fun also just sounds kind of…inane.  Words like “happiness” and “joy” come trailing clouds of significance and even virtue.  Fun doesn’t.  Typically, when we think of fun, we think of pleasant amusements, entertainment, children’s games, and maybe a little mischief.  Most of us don’t associate it with health and happiness.

But what if we’ve got it all wrong?  What if this is a classic false dichotomy?

I think it is.  Fun isn’t just indulgence, it is the means to health and happiness, and also to creativity and flexibility.  Think about how you feel when you are having fun.  You might feel alert, engaged, uplifted and delighted.  You might be laughing, or smiling, or excited.  Or you might simply feel good, and happy to be alive and in the moment.

Happily, here in the early 21^st Century, there is a rising sense of fun’s importance, as exemplified by Daniel Pink’s claims that fun helps to develop creative, right-brained thinking, Jane McGonigal’s belief that fun can lead us to inspired problem-solving and Brian Sutton-Smith and Stuart Brown’s belief that play is adaptive.  Knowing this, we have an argument both to have more fun and to make a claim for it as necessary, both to our own well-being and even our culture.

So, at the start of this holiday weekend for North Americans - banish fun schizophrenia!  You don’t need to be the prudent squirrel, or the hedonistic reality-TV star.  You can be you, through joy.