What Makes Us Happy?

by Lynne Dale

Delivered at Northwest Unitarian Universalist Congregation

on September 28, 2014

What makes us happy? Thatā€™s a good question.  And it should not be that hard to answer, right? I mean surely we know what makes us happy. Yet, it is probably one of the most perplexing questions in life we confront. One thing for sure, all is NOT as it appears.

So many of us seem to live in a constant state of ā€œif only.ā€ If only I had a better job. If only I had a better mate.  If only I had a bigger house. If only I had the money to fix up the house I have. Why canā€™t we just be happy?

David Lee Roth, from Van Halen, said itā€™s true, money canā€™t buy happiness, but ā€œā€¦it can buy you a yacht big enough to pull up right alongside it.ā€

Perhaps. But happiness is certainly not like math. X plus Y equals Z.  If happiness were like math, celebrities would be the happiest people on earth. Money, power, fame. Yet from what I can see, the whole darn lot of them are pretty miserable. They keep punching out photographers and OD-ing on drugs.

So whatā€™s going on here? A psychologist and a PhD from Princeton analyzed the answers of 450,000 people to questions about happiness and money. What they found was fascinating  – money does buy happiness, but only up to a certain point. The point being about $75,000 a year. People below that level of annual income were noticeably unhappier than people at or above that line. But ā€“ hereā€™s the interesting part – increasing income did not correspond to an increase in happiness. In fact, they found happiness pretty much leveled off at 75 grand. Their conclusion was that after money buys you food, clothes and shelter, it doesnā€™t do that much more for you in terms of happiness.

In fact, according to Paul Piff, an associate professor from the University of California, money may actually make you mean. His group looked at what happens to people as they gain wealth. They did simple experiments, observing peopleā€™s reactions and behaviors as they got richer. What they found was that as peopleā€™s level of wealth increased, their feelings of compassion and empathy went down. And their feelings of entitlement and self-interest went up.  His conclusion was,  ā€œThe wealthier you are, the more likely you are to pursue a vision of personal success, of achievement and accomplishment, to the detriment of others.ā€

Thatā€™s a very disappointing finding. Youā€™d think it would be the opposite. The more money you have, the more secure you would feel. And the more secure you feel, the more capable you are of reaching out to others in need. But Piff is saying thatā€™s not what happens. I think itā€™s because when money does not buy happiness, we just think itā€™s because we donā€™t have enough. So we try to get more. Thereā€™s no way we can give any of it away, heck no! We are still not happy. The pursuit of happiness through material means can resemble the pursuit of a drug addict trying to score his next hit.

I remember getting a flash of this truth way back in my 20ā€™s. I was married to a man very briefly ā€“ you know the ill-fated first marriage. This man I was married to was upwardly mobile. For me, having come from a very humble background where money was always an issue, it was like a breath of fresh air to have plenty of it. My then husband got in the habit of buying me expensive pieces of jewelry on special occasions. I was thrilled with my growing collection.  Then I remember asking myself when I would have enough, when would my collection be complete? And my answer startled me. ā€˜Never,ā€™ came the thought. I would always want more.

Huh? What did that mean, I wondered?

Undeterred, I set out on my own and became upwardly mobile myself, working my way up the ladder in television network news. In about a decade and a half, I had it all ā€“ big house ā€“ well two of them, actually – big job, money in the bank, everything I needed or wanted. But I couldnā€™t shake the growing sense inside me that there was no there, there, if that makes any sense. I felt like I had been single-mindedly climbing this ladder with blinders on, and that I finally reached the top, looked around and discovered there was nothing there.  I was not happy.

But I can see now that this was not a random bad call on my part or even a series of them. What happened totally followed the pattern of the microcosm of my jewelry collection. I could never have enough. What made me happy one day, did so less the next day, and even less the next. I had always blamed myself for this. I thought it did not speak well of my character. I seemed ungrateful.

And then I read about these studies that explained this phenomenon, and I felt a little better. Sociologists found that the big lottery winners are about as happy as a person can getā€¦for about two months. Then their happiness drops back down to their baseline level, wherever they came from. Interestingly, the inverse is also true.  They found people who become paralyzed from the waist down are about as sad and depressed as a person can getā€¦at first. But in a few months, they float back up to their baseline level of happiness. So whether we are really happy about our big new house with the swimming pool or really sad about never being able to walk again, we gradually get used to it, and we return to our pre-existing levels of happiness.

Iā€™ve never won the lottery and Iā€™ve never experienced paralysis, but I can totally relate to this phenomenon. Iā€™ve lived it. And if we are wired to return to our baseline level of happiness, or unhappiness as the case may be, it explains a lot about how we act and react.  So buying things is never going to make us happy long-term. We either return to our normal levels of happiness or weā€™re going to have to buy moreā€¦and more.

So if stuff canā€™t make you happy, what about fame? Everybody wants to be famous, right? We seem to have this drive to be noticed, admired ā€“ whether itā€™s for the job we do, or the way we look, or even the good works that we do. Itā€™s like we think, once everybody knows how fabulous we are, then we can be happy.

Really? In 2009, psychologist Donna Rockwell did in-depth interviews with 15 celebrities. The celebrities told her of having a love/hate relationship with being famous and used words to described it like bizarre, surreal, scary, lonely and creepy.  Sounds really happy, huh? Yet Rockwell also found that the lure of adoration was attractive and that, after awhile, the celebrities couldnā€™t imagine living without it.  In fact, she identified an addiction phase, where the celebrityā€™s behavior was directed solely toward the goal of remaining famous. She found that eventually celebrities reached an adaptation phase, which often led to reclusiveness, mistrust and isolation. Yikes! Soā€¦why do many people want to get famous? And they do ā€“ look at all the talent shows and reality TV and Facebook, for heavenā€™s sake.  Itā€™s pretty sad when you think about it.

Okay, so material possessions and fame are out. What about pleasures of the flesh? Can sex make us happy? If you watch TV, sex is great ā€“ the more of it, the better.  But in 2004, two economists set out to answer the question, does more sexual variety lead to greater happiness? They examined data in interviews with 16,000 adult Americans. What they found was that, contrary to popular belief, married people have more sex than single, divorced, or widowed people, and that the number of sexual partners that yielded the greatest happiness was exactly one. And in case you are wondering, they also found that ā€œhigher income does not buy more sex or more sexual partners.ā€ So get that out of your head.

All these studies together show that money, fame and sex eventually bring us addiction, isolation and unhappiness. Yet scientists say it is in our DNA to want these things because we are supposed to procreate and populate the earth, and we need money, power and fame to do it. But hereā€™s the thing: Mother Nature doesnā€™t really care if we are happy or not. So our humanity drives us to these things that make us miserable. And if you want to steer clear of it all, it seems like itā€™s a constant battle.

What does free us from all this? I was talking recently with the mother of my son Jordanā€™s new college roommate. My new best friend. We were discussing how we were going to deal with our empty nests ā€“ with both our boys going off to college. She said that we had to find our ā€œflow activities.ā€  Say what? She told me a flow activity is one that inspires and challenges you, but does not cause you stress.  A flow activity is one in which you are so engaged that you lose track of time. It has to be an activity you think of as voluntary, enjoyable, but with clear goals to success. Could be taking up an instrument you always wanted to play. Painting. Taking care of dogs at a shelter. For my new friend, it was gardening.

Scientists say that there is a strong correlation between these activities and happiness.  This concept makes a lot of sense to me because I know there is no magic bullet to happiness. Otherwise we would all know it, right? But perhaps the reason that we donā€™t, is that itā€™s different for everybody. I donā€™t know what my flow activity is ā€“ I really donā€™t, I just work ā€“ but I know for sure itā€™s not cooking. For friends of mine, I know it would be.

What all these activities have in common is that none of them, on their face, move us in the direction of addictionā€¦or by definition, itā€™s not a flow activity.  It also strikes me that flow activities have a way of placing us in the now ā€“ weā€™re not jumping ahead to ā€œI wish I hadā€ or falling back to ā€œI wish I hadnā€™t.ā€ When we are absorbed in playing the guitar, sewing, studying plants in the woods, we tend to be in the present moment, living our life in that moment. And when you think about it, the present is all we really have. The past is gone. The future is a figment of our imagination.  Our life is in the now, and maybe thatā€™s where our true happiness lies as well.