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NEW YORK
MAGAZINE
July10, 2006
Some Dark Thoughts on
Happiness
By JENNIFER SENIOR
They say you can’t really assign a number to
happiness, but mine, it turns out, is 2.88. That’s not as bad as it sounds.
I was being graded on a scale of 1 to 5. My score was below average for my
age, education level, gender, and occupation, sure, but at exactly the 50
percent mark for my Zip Code. Liking my job probably helped, being an
atheist did not, and neither did my own brain chemistry, which, in spite of
my best efforts to improve it, remains more acidic than I’d like. Unhappy
thoughts can find surprisingly little resistance up there, as if they’ve
found some wild river to run along, while everything else piles up along
the banks.
The
test I took was something called the Authentic Happiness Inventory, and the
man who designed it, Chris Peterson, is one of the first people I meet at
the Positive Psychology
Center at the University of Pennsylvania.
Unlike many who study happiness for a living, he seems to embody it, though
he tells me that’s a recent development. He offers me an impromptu tour of
the place (walls of salmon and plum and turquoise; tables piled high with
complimentary granola bars), then wanders toward his office, absently
hugging an orange-juice bottle to his stomach as he drifts, having
graciously offered to check, at my request, which Zip Codes are the
happiest and the most miserable in his 350,000-person database. At the end
of the day, I check in with him.
The happiest, he reports, is Branson, Missouri’s.
“But
please appreciate—and this is a formal disclaimer—that these are not
representative respondents,” he says. “These are just people who logged on
to our Website and took our happiness measure.” In other words, hundreds of
mental patients from Chicago
could have decided to take the test, while only fifteen Buddhists in Baja
did the same, which would result in a very skewed
perception of the well-being of Chicagoans and Bajans.
I ask how many people from Branson took the test. “A small number,” he
warns. “I think it was two or three. And the other happiest Zip Codes are
also represented by a very small number of respondents. Nonetheless, I
think the results are kind of interesting. Missoula, Montana.
Rural Minnesota.
Rural Indiana.
Rural Alabama.
Savannah, Georgia. The Outer Banks. Is
there a theme here? There’s a theme here. It seems to run through the Bible
Belt and go straight up north. And if you want to know the absolutely most
miserable Zip Code—and this is based on a very large number of people—it
seems to start with 101.”
That’s
the prefix assigned to many of the office buildings in midtown Manhattan. “Staten Island is also miserable,” he adds.
So
what does this say about New York?
I ask.
“I
don’t know,” he says. “Maybe that if you make it there, you can make it
anywhere, but you won’t be happy doing it.”
This
past spring, the Boston
Globe reported that the single most popular course at Harvard was
about positive psychology, or the study of well-being. Its immense appeal
took everyone by surprise. Just one year before, the instructor, Tal Ben-Shahar, offered the course for the first time, and
although it was certainly a hit, with 380 students enrolled, no one could
have imagined that the following year the number would have jumped to 855.
There’s
a theme here, too. Back in the mid-1840s, a Scot by the irresistible name
of Samuel Smiles was invited to lecture before a class in “mutual
improvement” in the north of England—a class, he later noted in a book,
that also began with two or three young men but grew so large it took over
a former cholera hospital. That book is called Self-Help, published
in 1859. It is considered by many to be the first of its genre. Today, it’s
still in print, and has even come up in Ben-Shahar’s
Harvard class. He has tremendous respect for it.
"For
many years,” says Ben-Shahar, “the people who
were writing about happiness were the self-help gurus. It had a bad rap. It
was all ‘five easy steps,’ rather than dignity and hard work. What I’m
trying to do in my class is to regain respectability for the concept of
self-help. It’s a great thing, if you think about it literally. It’s what
this country was built on.”
The
pursuit of happiness was indeed at the heart of America’s conception. But the
study of happiness—as a science, with random-assignment, placebo-controlled
testing—is a far more recent phenomenon. And right now, it’s booming. At
least two basic positive-psychology textbooks are being published this
fall, one written by Peterson, the other by a University of Kansas professor
named Shane Lopez, whose publisher estimates that roughly 150 colleges will
be offering some kind of positive-psychology course next year. Since 2000,
the University of Erasmus at Rotterdam
has been publishing the Journal of Happiness Studies (whose editorial
board is represented in curious disproportion by Californians and Germans).
At Barnes & Noble, there are three excellent books about happiness now
sitting on the shelves: the divinely readable Stumbling on Happiness,
by Harvard professor Daniel Gilbert, about how hopeless we are at
predicting our moods; The Happiness Hypothesis, by University of
Virginia professor Jonathan Haidt, about the ways
that ancient wisdom about flourishing intersects with the modern; and Happiness:
A History, an intellectually elegant work by historian Darrin McMahon,
which is exactly as it sounds, but darker.
Ellen Langer, a professor at Harvard, ventures that the explosive interest
in positive psychology is, like so many cultural curiosities involving
self-obsession, a boomer phenomenon. “There’s a feeling of, ‘I’m not going
off to some nursing home,’ ” she says. (And she should know: During the
seventies, she found that the more control nursing-home patients had—over
watering their plants, for example—the longer they were apt to live.) And
there are undoubtedly other factors at work. Universities, for example,
have become more sensitive today to the intense pressures on their students
(at Harvard, the chief of mental-health services recently came out with a
book called The College of the Overwhelmed). Economics has also
started to take the discipline of psychology seriously again—Malcolm Gladwell’s books are a sure testimony to this—and the
psychology of positivity and productivity were a perfect fit for the ethos
of the bubble years. (Recently, I’ve come to wonder whether positive
psychology isn’t also the perfect discipline for the era of George Bush,
the decider, the man who remains shinily
optimistic no matter how many red lights are glowing on his dashboard.)
But the happiness-studies boom may have an
even simpler explanation: In 1998, an enterprising, highly established, and
press-savvy psychologist from the University
of Pennsylvania, Martin Seligman, convened
a group of his peers in Mexico,
hoping to help shift the emphasis of psychology away from pathology and
toward functionality, resilience, and well-being. He coined the term positive
psychology to describe the scientific study of these things—the study
of happiness, in short—and because he was president of the American
Psychological Association, he was able to shore up prestige and grant money
for its pursuit.
“What’s
unique about Seligman is that he’s not only a great psychologist but a
great organizer, a leader,” says Ben-Shahar,
who’s also got a book about happiness in the After five minutes on the
phone with Ben-Shahar, I can already sense that
he’s a warm, intelligent man and that the plants in his house grow faster
than those in my own. But convincing people that positive psychology is not
merely the cryptoscience of sunniness—or
its featherbrained pursuit—is one of the most persistent challenges he and
some of his colleagues, particularly those closely associated with
Seligman, face. No longer should we think of ourselves as tin cans of
sexual chaos, as echoing caverns of repressed wishes and violent desires;
rather, we should think of ourselves as the shining sum of our strengths
and virtues, forceful, masters of our fates. All that nattering we’ve been
doing in therapists’ armchairs, trying to know and exorcise our darker
selves—it’s been misguided. It’s our better selves we want to know.
Peterson,
the inventor of the Authentic Happiness Inventory, is clearly aware of how
easily these ideas can be trivialized. The afternoon I visit him in Philadelphia, he
lingers in his doorway before saying good-bye, telling me he has one final
request.
“Harvey
Ball,” he says, “was a Massachusetts
graphic designer who was commissioned to do an ad for an insurance company.
He was paid a whopping $45 for it. Neither he nor the company thought to
trademark it. It belongs to the world.”
Interesting,
I tell him, though I’m uncertain where this is going.
“He
created the yellow smiley face,” he says. “Please don’t use it to
illustrate your story.”
To wade into the literature on happiness is to wade
into a world of control groups and volunteers, questionnaires and ratings
scales, cases of the fortunate and cases of the medically extreme. From
Seligman’s Authentic Happiness, I learn about a perverse form of
facial paralysis called Moebius syndrome, which
makes it impossible for its sufferers to smile; from Stumbling on
Happiness, I learn about something called alexithymia,
whose literal meaning is “absence of words to describe emotional states.”
From many sources, too many to count, I read about a survey of nuns, which
showed that those who expressed faith and optimism in their journals were
apt to live far longer than those who didn’t. And from Barry Schwartz’s The
Paradox of Choice: Why More Is Less, I come across the most compelling,
persuasive, and revolting study of them all: Two separate groups of men,
when given colonoscopies, reported less discomfort if the instrument sat in
place for a few seconds after the procedure, even though it prolonged the
exam. The reason is that the final moment involved less pain. Apparently,
we define and remember our experiences by their highs, lows, and how they
end.
Other
findings from the emerging field of happiness studies: Married people are
happier than those who are not, while people who believe in God are happier
than those who don’t. On the former point, Seligman’s book cites a
35,000-person poll from the National
Opinion Research
Center, in which 40
percent of married Americans described themselves as “very happy,” compared
with just 24 percent of unmarried Americans who said the same. (Of course,
he allows, happy people may be the ones who get married to begin with.) On
the latter point, he cites a study showing that the faithful are less
likely to abuse drugs, commit crimes, or to kill themselves. The act of
worshipping builds community—itself another source of happiness—and belief
systems provide structure, meaning, and the promise of relief from pain in
this life.
Smarter
people aren’t any happier, but those who drink in moderation are.
Attractive people are slightly happier than unattractive people. Men aren’t
happier than women, though women have more highs and more lows.
Surprisingly, the young are not happier than the elderly; in fact, it’s the
other way round, with older people reporting slightly higher levels of life
satisfaction and fewer dark days.
Money
doesn’t buy happiness—or even upgrade despair, as the playwright Richard
Greenberg once wrote—once our basic needs are met. In one well-known
survey, Ed Diener of the University of Illinois
determined that those on the Forbes 100 list in 1995 were only slightly
happier than the American public as a whole; in an even more famous study,
in 1978, a group of researchers determined that 22 lottery winners were no
happier than a control group (leading one of the authors, Philip Brickman,
to coin the scarily precise phrase “hedonic treadmill,” the unending hunger
for the next acquisition).
As a general rule, human beings adapt
quickly to their circumstances because all of us have natural hedonic “set
points,” to which our bodies are likely to return, like our weight. This is
true whether our experiences are marvelous—like winning the lottery—or
shattering. Not only did Brickman and his colleagues look at lottery
winners but also at 29 people who’d recently become paraplegic or
quadriplegic. It turned out the victims of these accidents reported no more
unhappy moments than a control group. (This exceptionally counterintuitive
finding, however, has not been replicated in a published paper—and
subsequent studies have certainly shown that the loss of a spouse or a
child can dramatically depress our happiness thermostats, as can sustained
unemployment.)
There’s
surprisingly little in the happiness literature about raising children,
which in and of itself is odd. Odder still is that most of it suggests
children don’t make parents any happier. Gilbert wrote only three scant
pages about this in Stumbling on Happiness. But he says he’s been
asked about it on his book tour more than almost anything else. “It really
violates our intuition,” he says. “Yet every bit of data says children are
an extreme source of negative affect, a mild source of negative affect, or
none at all. It’s hard to find a study where there’s one net positive.”
(One possible explanation, he says, is that children are sources of
transcendent moments, and those highs are what people remember.)
Paradoxes
abound. Nebraskans think that Californians are happier, but a study done by
the Princeton Nobel Prize winner Daniel Kahneman suggests they aren’t. One
might expect the homeless of Fresno to be
happier than the slum-dwellers of Calcutta,
but another study suggests they aren’t (probably because Indians don’t live
in social isolation, as our homeless do). In a 2003 poll by the Roper
organization, the Danes, the Americans, and the Australians rated
themselves the happiest (Australian buoyancy, such an enduring
mystery—they’re like an entire nation of people who can’t relate to
Chekhov). Other polls have found the Swiss happiest, and the Canadians
always do well (hardly a surprise to anyone who knows Canadians). Compared
with their purchasing power, Latin and South Americans are much happier
than one would imagine, and the Japanese are less so, though being happy in
Japan
might not be a value per se. And every survey agrees on one point: That the
people of Eastern European nations—Lithuania, Estonia, Romania, Latvia,
Belarus, and Bulgaria—consistently rank themselves the least happy, with
Russia coming in especially low. (This might explain my own desolate moods.
You can take the girl out of Vladivostok,
but you can’t take Vladivostok
out of the girl.) Yet people in the happiest countries are more likely
to kill themselves.
And
no matter where they live, human beings are terrible predictors of what
will make them happy. If Stumbling on Happiness tells us anything,
it’s this. “Imagination,” says Gilbert, “is the
poor man’s wormhole.” Our imagination has an odd knack for Photoshopping things in and airbrushing things out,
which is why we think that getting back together with our exes is a good
idea; it also tends to mistake our present feelings for future ones, which
is why, when we decide to marry the right person, we find it unthinkable
we’ll ever be tempted to sleep with anyone else. At the same time, we
forget that our imagination has a miraculous ability to rationalize its way
out of grim situations—which is why we’re more likely to take a positive
view of things we did than things we didn’t (so go ahead and ask that woman
to marry you), more comfortable with decisions we can’t reverse than ones
we can, and more apt to make the best of a terrible situation than a merely
annoying one.
Because
our imaginations are limited, we can be disappointed by the things we covet
most. But it also means—and this is the gorgeous part—that we’re much more
likely to cope well with situations we never thought we’d be able to
survive. Perhaps the most profound study Gilbert cites is about the disabled, showing that those who are permanently injured
say they’d be willing to pay far less to undo their injuries than
able-bodied people say they’d pay to prevent them. It’s possible, as
Gilbert notes, that they may even find some silver lining in their
experiences, as when the late Christopher Reeve memorably said, “I didn’t
appreciate others nearly as much as I do now.”
Like most New Yorkers I know, I can’t imagine living
in most other places in the world. My troubles would surely be aggravated,
rather than solved, by relocating to Branson. But reading the literature of
happiness studies, I can’t help but wonder whether we aren’t all in the
grip of some strange false consciousness. From the point of view of the
happiness literature, New Yorkers seem to have been mysteriously seduced
into a way of life that conspires, in almost every way, against the most
basic level of contentment.
The large points first: Most happiness
researchers agree that being surrounded by friends and family is one of the
most crucial determinants of our well-being. Yet New York, as surprisingly neighborly a
city as it is, is still predicated on a certain principle of atomization.
Being married would help in this instance, obviously. But New York City’s percentage of unmarried
adults is nine points higher than the national average, at 52 percent.
Then
there’s the question of the hedonic treadmill, such a demonic little term,
so vivid, so apt. Isn’t that what New
York, the city of 24-hour gyms, is? More
charitably put, one could say that New
York is a city of aspirants, the destination
people come to to realize dreams. And of course
we should feel indebted to the world’s dreamers (and I thank each and every
one, for creating jet travel, indoor plumbing, The Simpsons), but
there’s a line between heartfelt aspiration and a mindless state of
yearning. Darrin McMahon, the author of Happiness: A History,
shrewdly points out that the Big Apple is a perfect moniker for the city:
“The apple is the cause of the fall of human happiness,” he says. “It’s the
symbol of that desire for something more. Even though paradise was
paradise, they were still restless.”
Which
is where the subtle thesis of Barry Schwartz’s The Paradox of Choice comes
in. He argues, with terrible
persuasiveness, that a superabundance of options is not a blessing but a
certain recipe for madness. Nowhere do people have more choices than in New York. “New Yorkers
should probably be the most unhappy people on the
planet,” says Schwartz, a psychology professor at Swarthmore. “On every
block, there’s a lifetime’s worth of opportunities. And if I’m right,
either they won’t be able to choose or they will choose, and they’ll be
convinced they chose badly.”
Economists
have a term for those who seek out the best options in life. They call them
maximizers. And maximizers,
in practically every study one can find, are far more miserable than people
who are willing to make do (economists call these people satisficers). “My suspicion,” says Schwartz, “is that all this choice creates maximizers.” If that’s the case, New York doesn’t just attract ambitious
neurotics; it creates them. It also creates desires for things we don’t
need—which, not coincidentally, is the business of Madison Avenue—and, as a
corollary, pointless regrets, turning us all into a city of counterfactual
historians, men and women who obsessively imagine different and better
outcomes for ourselves.
My
favorite study in Schwartz’s book was about jam. One weekend, a Columbia University researcher named Sheena
Iyengar set out six different kinds in a high-end gourmet store. She
invited people to try them, promising them a dollar off any jar they liked.
The next weekend, she did the same, but laid out 24 different kinds. More
people tried the jam the weekend there were 24, but only 3 percent of the
samplers bought any. The weekend there were six jars, by contrast, 30
percent of the samplers bought some.
As
I read this, it was hard not to think of New York City dating life. Everyone comes
here for the jam. But no one buys it. Then I discover that Iyengar has
examined speed dating, too, and similarly found that women who sat at
smaller tables of potential mates were inclined to go on second dates 50
percent of the time, but if the group got bigger, they followed up on only
a third of the candidates (though the men, curiously, remained content to
follow up on 50 percent no matter how big the sample).
Other
subtler points: Although many economists agree that money doesn’t make
people happy, disparities in income make people miserable, according to
most happiness literature. Happiness, in other words, “is less a function
of absolute income than of comparative income,” as Gilbert puts it. “Now,
if you live in Hallelujah, Arkansas,” he continues, “the odds are good that
most of the people you know do something like you do and earn something
like you earn and live in houses something like yours. New York, on the other hand, is the most
varied, most heterogeneous place on earth. No matter how hard you try, you
really can’t avoid walking by restaurants where people drop your monthly
rent on a bottle of wine and store windows where shoes sit like museum
pieces on gold pedestals. You can’t help but feel trumped. As it were.”
Yet
most of us insist that New York
is the only place we’d be happy, just as parents insist their children are
their greatest sources of joy. Maybe the same phenomenon is at work: New York creates
moments of transcendence, and that’s all that matters. Or maybe the belief
that New York
is the best place on earth is what Gilbert calls a super-replicator—a myth
necessary to the flourishing of a culture, just as certain genes are
necessary to the flourishing of the species. Gilbert theorized that our
beliefs that money and children will make us happy are
super-replicators—without them, civilization wouldn’t survive. Modern
civilization wouldn’t survive without its large cities, either. (Take that,
red states.)
And maybe, too, there’s something to all
this abundance, all this aspiring, all this choice. For all its confusions,
choice is also a source of hope, and for many of us, hope is itself
happiness, whether it’s predicated on truths or illusions. This isn’t the
sort of thing that gets borne out in surveys. But it’s the stuff of
fantasies, novels—of being human. As Julian Barnes asks in Flaubert’s
Parrot, “Isn’t the most reliable form of pleasure . . . the pleasure of
anticipation? Who needs to burst into fulfillment’s desolate attic?”
I almost became a professional philosopher,” Martin
Seligman says. “I had a fellowship to Oxford.
I turned it down.” I’d read this about Seligman. He’s a short man and
former high-school outcast who looks a bit like Norman Mailer; today, the
day I meet him, he’s wearing a silky Versace shirt of powder blue.
“My
education was Wittgensteinian,” he continues. I’d
heard this about Seligman too—how fascinated he was by Ludwig Wittgenstein,
a famous depressive who nevertheless told his landlady as he was dying, Tell
them it’s been wonderful. Seligman’s interested in many famous
depressives—Lincoln, Oppenheimer. He identifies himself as a depressive,
too. “But in retrospect,” he continues, “I think Wittgenstein suborned
three generations of philosophy, including mine, by telling us that what we
wanted to do was puzzles and that somehow by solving puzzles, problems
would get solved. I spent 40 years struggling out of that mode.”
Seligman
spent almost as long struggling out of the mode of traditional psychology.
Like most psychologists of his generation, he began his career looking not
at well-being but pathology. He co-authored the standard
abnormal-psychology text that’s used in colleges around the country (for
the 101 course of the same name, fondly called “Nuts and Sluts” when I was
at school), and he did his most revolutionary work on helplessness in dogs,
discovering that those who received electric shocks in a high-walled pen
(from which they could not escape) probably wouldn’t try to escape once
they were moved to a low-walled pen, even though they could. This
phenomenon, which he called “learned helplessness,” earned him an enduring
place in the field. It was a heartbreaking, pathbreaking
finding, one suggesting how easy it is for living things to become
prisoners of their own habits, virtual shut-ins of their own minds.
But
today, Seligman is not interested in dogs that lay helpless in their pens.
He’s interested in the ones that tried to escape. “Lying awake at night,”
he says in his introduction to Authentic Happiness, written in 2002,
“you probably ponder, as I have, how to go from plus two to plus seven in
your life, not just how to go from minus five to minus three.” Going from
minus five to minus three was in fact the goal of Freud, who famously
declared that converting “hysterical misery into common unhappiness” was
the goal of psychoanalysis. (Woody Allen, similarly, divides life into the
miserable and the horrible.) “If you are such a person,” Seligman
continues, “you have probably found the field of psychology to be a
puzzling disappointment.”
It
is Seligman’s contention that psychology’s emphasis on pathology has
marginalized the study of well-being. But long before he invented the term
positive psychology, men and women were doing research on resilience and
functionality. “The indictment of psychology’s entire history in order to
make an important place for this movement is a travesty,” says Gilbert.
“This movement has enough good things to offer that it does not have to
make the case that it is revolutionary.”
What’s
even more complicated—and unnerving to many of Seligman’s peers—is that
Seligman not only studies happiness for a living but treats it as a goal,
and is captain of a cottage industry dedicated to its pursuit. His books Learned
Optimism and Authentic Happiness were best sellers, found on self-help
racks and published in twenty languages; until a year ago, he had a
life-coaching concern, in which he trained 1,000 people at a clip in
positive-psychology techniques, by conference call (and at $2,000 per
head). One of his Websites, reflectivehappiness.com, charges subscribers
$9.95 per month for his materials, questionnaires, and forums. (“We are so
confident that this program will help you, we’ve developed a no-obligation,
limited-time offer to try Dr. Seligman’s powerful program for one month
free,” the Website assures.)
This
is a highly unusual position for a tenured academic—to position oneself as
both impartial scientist and impassioned healer, to be the one both in the
lab and out on the streets, peddling the cure. It means Seligman hasn’t
just started an academic discipline but a movement, and movements, although
useful in popularizing ideas, also can trivialize them—and arguably collide
with the aims of research.
“In any scientific endeavor,” concedes
Seligman, “the big conflict is between what the facts of the matter are and
wanting your theory to be right. The only defense against that is to tell
the truth and to try to underpromise. And even if
you underpromise, people will still call you a
guru, and I guess you live with that.”
So can
happiness be taught? Literature based on twin studies seems to suggest that
roughly 50 percent of our affect is determined by genetics. If you’re like
me, a pessimist, that seems like a depressing lot. Optimists, of course,
would argue that 50 percent is a lot of room to play with, and that through
a combination of acts of will and shifts in fortune, our happiness levels
can change substantially. (In fact, happiness researchers frequently use
the equation H = S + C + V, or happiness equals our genetic set point plus
our circumstances plus what we voluntarily change—a tad too reminiscent,
for my taste, of a certain “Far Side” cartoon: “Einstein discovers time
actually is money.”)
Seligman
is most interested in V. And because he’s a self-identified depressive, or
perhaps because he’s a philosopher, his idea of happiness is much more
comprehensive than positive emotion. By engaging and cultivating our
strengths, he says, and by deploying our virtues, we can lead a fulfilling,
meaningful life—a notion not unlike Aristotle’s, who defined happiness as
“an activity of the soul that expresses virtue.” He makes the critical
distinction between pleasures, which make us feel good, and gratifications,
which, oddly, may not involve positive emotions at all, but rather the
blunting of them. Eating a Mars Bar is a pleasure; doing something that
engages or enhances our strengths is a gratification, whether it’s
swimming, welding, or listening to a friend in need. Optimally, when we’re
in a state of high gratification, we’re experiencing what Seligman’s
colleague, Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi
(pronounced “cheeks sent me high”), calls flow—a state of total absorption,
when time seems to stop and the self deserts us completely.
When
Seligman taught his course on positive psychology at the University of Pennsylvania,
he had his students isolate their “signature strengths,” using a test again
devised by Peterson, and figure out creative ways to use them daily. He
also had his students keep gratitude journals, so that they could keep a
nightly record of the people and the experiences they were thankful for.
The highlight of the semester, he says, was “gratitude night,” an evening
when his students read aloud a long letter to one of the people who meant
most to them.
Seligman
is a big believer in these techniques. He himself writes gratitude notes
and counts his blessings in the evening.
“I’m
addicted to it,” he says.
In the last paragraph of The English Patient, Hana, the protagonist, stands alone in her house and,
because her hair flies in her eyes, accidentally knocks a glass from the
cupboard. Meanwhile, halfway around the world, Kip, the man she loves,
catches a fork an inch off the ground, similarly brushed off the dinner
table by his daughter. Some of us are Hanas. Some
of us are Kips. My friend Sarah is a Kip. When the two of us went to Guatemala
together, I couldn’t get over the karma she brought along—never in my life
have I traveled with so few wrinkles, so few glitches. I left her side for
only 40 minutes that trip. In those 40 minutes, I was harassed by a
policeman and shat on by a pigeon.
I
am a Hana. I’m convinced that if I didn’t work
for my luck, I wouldn’t have any at all, and would instead be borne
backward on a conveyor belt, the sort who always watched her candy bars get
stuck in the vending machine and got Canadian pennies for change. It is
entirely irrational, this feeling, one that flies in the face of every
objective data point in my life. Yet I’ve felt this way for as long as I
can remember. How small we are when our minds develop minds of their own.
I
went to see Carol Kauffman because I was curious about the techniques of
positive psychology, curious whether a person like her could make a person
like me feel less like a person like Hana.
Kauffman is a positive-psychology coach who has an office in Arlington, Massachusetts,
near Harvard, where she works as an assistant clinical professor at McLean Hospital. She has clients all over
the world, from L.A.
to São Paolo, many of whom she consults by phone (“High-level people often
don’t have time to drive”).
My
first consultation with Kauffman was on the phone. She assured me that her
approach was eclectic and admitted outright I might not be the best
candidate for this kind of thing. So she proposed, as a modest goal, that
we aim only to find ways that “would put one or two more positive moments
in your day.” Her goal, she said, was to reverse my focus every once in a
while, to “find pockets where you did things right, where you might have
actually been using a strength.”
It was a lovely idea and, as it turns out, a
bit ambitious. In our next phone conversation, she asked what I’d done
right since we spoke. A long, sitcomlike silence
followed. I’m sorry? I couldn’t think of a thing, including paying a
long-overdue cable bill—and the next thing I knew, I was silently checking
the television to see if it was working. It wasn’t. Shit.
I
don’t want to trivialize Kauffman’s skills or my commitment to this
quixotic enterprise. When I met her for our third session, it was in her Arlington
office—an office not unlike a shrink’s, with an Oriental rug and Indian
artifacts—and I quite liked her style, though I winced when she used the
word empower for the third or fourth time (“I’m a
positive-psychology nag,” she explained). We didn’t discuss my parents, my
boyfriend, or any of the usual psychoanalytic staples. What we discussed,
instead, was how to plan on making my days a bit nicer—something a person
like me actually has to plan. She occasionally stopped me mid-sentence to
show how my mind worked. A good deal of the hour, in fact, became a
discussion about the bum habits of my mind, and how to stop it from always
circling back to the blacker things, like a tongue running obsessively over
a sore tooth.
It
occurred to me later that what we were doing was quite literally the
opposite of psychoanalysis. Instead of encouraging patients to reenact
their habits through transference, she was crudely modeling a new way to
think and behave. She acknowledged, again, that I was a hard case. “But anything
you practice sets up a memory trail,” she said, “whether it’s a golf swing
or a piano piece.”
I
spent the day feeling great. It didn’t last, of course. It may just be a
matter of practicing my golf swing—I have no idea how I’d feel if I spent a
year chatting with her on the phone, trying to change my thinking habits.
Three sessions is hardly enough to tell. My sense is that it’s a crapshoot,
an art more than a science—like any talking cure.
When
I came home the next day, I found an e-mail from Ben-Shahar,
the teacher of the Harvard course. I’d written him first, mentioning I’d
ordered Samuel Smiles’s book, Self-Help,
now an Oxford Classic. His reply was brief, and it was perhaps the only
time in my life I’ve laughed at the use of an emoticon: You’ll enjoy Smiles
:)
Like
every religion, movement, and interesting idea, positive psychology has its
own creation myth. One day, says Seligman, his daughter Nikki took him to
task for scolding her while he was working in his garden, when it was clear
she’d done little to annoy him. She reminded him that she’d given up
whining on her 5th birthday, and it was the hardest thing she’d ever done;
he, on the other hand, remained a grouch. That was the day, Seligman says,
that he realized two things: First, he had to change, and second, raising
children didn’t just mean correcting their failings but isolating and
nurturing their strengths.
It
makes sense that a man like Seligman would come to this conclusion. He has
tremendous faith in the power of human agency. During our interview, he
describes himself as a “launcher of ships” and an “intellectual
entrepreneur.” He knows lots of people, moves around in high places; in the
course of our conversation, he refers to Jeffrey Epstein, a money manager
and close friend of Bill Clinton’s, as “Jeffrey,” and talks about going
swimming with Michael Crichton. His desk at work has two computer screens
to maximize his efficiency, and at home, he has four. When we get to the
subject of Methodism, he waxes rhapsodic: “I think what Methodism did is take this terrifically important premise, which is that
we can participate in our own grace. That we can do things to be better
people.”
But
is change something that can come about by a simple act of will? Agency
requires start-up energy, something depressives aren’t necessarily going to
have if they’ve spent their time rattling around a bell jar. I mention this
to him.
“I
have to fight to get up in the morning, too.”
I
ask when he wakes up.
“Between
six and nine. If I could, I’d stay in bed until nine, but usually I’m up at
six or six-thirty.”
Seligman’s
an interesting standard-bearer for his cause. He’s thoroughly engaged with
the world, a huge success, and an extremely generous and creative
conversationalist. But managing anger seems like a key part of managing
depression, and so does maintaining a healthy sense of proportion about
one’s own needs. At some point, I ask whether his kids from his first
marriage feel robbed, because he had his epiphany about changing his own
behavior during his second marriage. Did he ever write them notes of
apology or explanation? Something along the lines of his gratitude letter?
There are about eight seconds of silence.
“No, we’ve never really talked about it. Huh. That’s a good idea. There’s
no reason not to . . . ”
Well,
there’s no reason to do it, either, I say, if it’s not something you feel
particularly guilty about . . .
“Well,
my first wife and I made this agreement that we would not bad-mouth each
other, which she violated from day one, but I never did. And a real
conversation with my kids about it would involve some bad-mouthing of her.”
Why
would a conversation about your regrets as a father involve bad-mouthing
your ex-wife?
“I
don’t have regrets,” he says. “I would choose to do the same thing. That
was the time of my life in which I needed to do my work, the foundation,
and I would do it again. And it just happened they were victims of that.
No, it’d be a conversation much more about what the marriage and the
child-rearing was like and how we felt about each other.”
Even
if you don’t have regrets, you can feel bad, I say.
“Yes.
I feel bad. But I would do it the same way. I was married to my work, and I
should have been married to my work.”
A
launcher of ships.
Philip Brickman, the man who did the famous lottery
study, was also a launcher of ships—or at least a launcher of careers, a
mentor to many. In his work, he focused a lot on happiness and what it took
to achieve it. He was creative, collegial, a nurturer; his obituary
mentions that one of his favorite topics of discussion was what constituted
“the perfect day.” On May 13, 1982, when he was 38 years old, he climbed to
the roof of the tallest building in Ann
Arbor and jumped. His colleagues were stunned.
There’s an untold distance between knowing happiness and knowing about it.
And sometimes, to our blinking incomprehension, that distance can only be
measured in the space between this life and the next.
“There’s
no credible evidence that dispositional optimism is changeable,” says Julie
Norem, a Wellesley
professor and author of The Positive Power of Negative Thinking. Norem is one of the more outspoken critics of the
positive-psychology movement. “And the research shows that it’s
dispositional optimism that makes your life better,” she continues. “So if
it’s not clear you can change this kind of disposition, it’s not especially
useful to tell people about it.”
Norem is a researcher. One of her most interesting studies
involved giving anagrams to solve to both optimists and pessimists, first
listening to Mozart, then listening to a dirge.
The pessimists did better when they were listening to the dirge. “I’ve come
to think of them as the French,” she says. She has also given them a name:
“defensive pessimists.”
Another
very vivid critic of the positive-psychology movement is Barbara Held,
author of Stop Smiling, Start Kvetching.She’s more of a culture critic.
She detects a certain high-handed moralism in
Seligman’s work—a presumption that happiness is itself virtuous. “Can
Seligman’s claim that virtuous action produces well-being be tested
scientifically?” she asked during a 2003 positive-psychology conference, at
which both she and Norem were asked to speak.
Unlike Harvey Ball, who forgot to trademark the yellow smiley face, Held
trademarked the yellow smiley face with a slash running through it. She
made Seligman wear a T-shirt with it throughout her talk.
Until
extremely recently, happiness wasn’t even a value, much less an inalienable
right. Instead, it was something one got to experience only in death, after
leading a virtuous, and often self-denying, life. As McMahon points out in Happiness:
A History, the words for happiness in both ancient Greek—eudaimonia—and every Indo-European language include, at
the root, a cognate for “luck.” In English, it’s happ,
or chance—as in happenstance, haphazard, perhaps. The
implication is that being happy means being lucky. And luck is not
something we can entirely will.
“Happiness
is fine as a side effect,” says Adam Phillips, the British psychoanalyst
and lay philosopher whose latest work, Going Sane, examines
functionality and well-being, but from a much more literary and ruminative
perspective. “It’s something you may or may not acquire, in terms of luck.
But I think it’s a cruel demand. It may even be a covert form of sadism.
Everyone feels themselves prone to feelings and desires and thoughts that
disturb them. And we’re being persuaded that by acts of choice, we can
dispense with these thoughts. It’s a version of fundamentalism.”
Unlike
Seligman, Phillips declares happiness “the most conformist of moral aims.”
“For me,” he continues, “there’s a simple test here. Read a really good
book on positive psychology, and read a great European novel. And the
difference is evident in one thing—the complexity and subtlety of the moral
and emotional life of the characters in the European novel are
incomparable. Read a positive-psychology book, and what would a happy
person look like? He’d look like a Moonie. He’d be empty of idiosyncrasy
and the difficult passions.
“It seems to me that if you were to take a
rather stringent line here,” concludes Phillips, “then anyone who could
maintain a state of happiness, given the state of the world, is living in a
delusion.”
Funny he should mention this: One of the
most interesting bits of American research to surface—repeatedly—in books
about happiness is a study that shows depressives are far more likely to be
realists, while happy people are more likely to walk around in a mild state
of delusion. The study itself was fairly simple: A group of undergraduates
was given varying degrees of control over turning on a green light. Some
members of the group had perfect control; others had none—the light went on
and off of its own accord. The depressives accurately predicted, in each
instance, whether they were in control of the situation or not. The nondepressives, on the other hand, thought they had
control about 35 percent of the time over the situation in which they were,
in fact, 100 percent helpless.
To me, this study more or less explains our
current president—sunny and optimistic and full of faith, certainly, but
not quite able to see the world as it is. After I read it, I couldn’t help
but think that a different man, a slightly more pessimistic man, may have
been less inclined to believe that Iraq could be conquered,
subdued, and rebuilt as a flourishing democracy with just 150,000 troops.
I mention this to Seligman. He declines to
discuss Bush specifically, but says that he and his colleagues have
analyzed political speeches before and discovered that although more
optimistic candidates are likely to win presidential elections, it was the
presidents who gave the most pessimistic inaugural speeches who went down
in history as being great. “You have to be optimistic enough to get voters
to vote for you,” he says, “but you have to be pessimistic enough to do
serious, great stuff.”
At this moment, it doesn’t occur to me to
stop Seligman and ask him to further explain this observation. But later,
as I listen to our discussion on tape, the implication seems clear: Even
the director of the Positive
Psychology Center
associates pessimism with seriousness and greatness. He sounds as divided
about the question as his critics. It’s a conundrum, certainly. A
psychoanalyst might even call him conflicted.
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