What is happiness?

In the last post, I discussed how we evolved to look outside ourselves for danger and opportunity, and how this creates a bias when we're looking for happiness.  But we bypassed a more fundamental question - what is happiness?  It seems like we should know what we're looking for if we want to have any hope of finding it.

I have the belief that Americans have a lot of trouble recognizing happiness, for several reasons.  As children, we recognize that getting what you want is more fun than not getting what you want.  There is a wisdom in this, actually.  We recognize enjoyment and beauty partly because they are often healthy for us. But as we grow, we are bombarded with advertisements that work to subvert this natural wisdom into something unhealthy - we are told that happiness comes from a bottle, a car, a lifestyle.  The programs between the commercials are little better - they teach us that happiness comes from how we look, "getting" the girl/boy, and how they look.  These reinforce our bias that we should look outside ourselves for a way to be happy, but they also teach us (1) to consume as the method for becoming happy, and (2) that having consumed, we need more, because happiness doesn't last.

This has at least two additional consequences.  It trains us to believe that happiness is a special kind of reaction to something, and that happiness is a very strong joyous feeling, like winning the Superbowl.

This is perhaps the most insidious of all the ways our natural wisdom is subverted.  We forget that there are many other things that happiness can mean.  It can mean comfort,  bliss, calmness, contentment, and enjoyment, but we tend to focus only on the more extreme side of elation, ecstasy, and euphoria.  By focusing on the extreme version of happiness, which we know can never last (partly because it is extreme), we set up an impossible goal for ourselves.  In fact, what strikes me as I see my children buying into this world view, is that getting what you want isn't happiness - it's actually a form of suffering!

When we look outside ourselves for something that will make us happy, what happens when we get it?  I don't deny that at the time of receiving it, we feel happiness.  We definitely do.  If we get that Ferrari we've always wanted, we'll be really happy about it for at least several days.   But we also know it will get scratched if we drive it around town.  We know some day it will break and cost us a lot to fix it.  We worry that others might envy us for it.  And after we've had it for a while, we become bored and start looking for something else that can make us feel as excited and happy as we once were with this.

Because the idea of happiness has been so co-opted by Hallmark, Disney, and movies like My Big Fat Greek Wedding, we haven't even questioned if part of the reason we feel unfulfilled so much of the time is because we are looking for the wrong thing.

Let me suggest a different definition of happiness, and see if you agree with me that it is both worth pursuing and more attainable than the ever-shifting definition that happiness is getting the right product/experience/person.  As I have grown in my practice, I have come to believe that what we really mean when we say we want to be happy is that we want "ease."  We want to be able to move through our days, our work, our challenges, our difficulties, our bodies, and our relationships with ease.  We want to have harmony with our minds, feelings, actions.  We want to be "in tune" with our friends, spouses, children, bosses, students, etc.  We actually don't want to sit on a beach all day every day sipping fruity drinks with paper umbrellas.  Sure, that's fun for a while, but most of us would probably start feeling unproductive, disconnected, and out of sync with others.  We want to be involved in all the parts of our lives, but we want to be able to go through them with ease.  When we are successful at this, we feel a great sense of contentment, achievement, and some joy -- namely, happiness.  When we are frustrated in our goals, have arguments with our family or co-workers, we feel ill at ease.  When our bodies get out of sync, we have dis-ease.  In fact, when we're not sick or injured, we're at such ease that we don't even usually notice how remarkable the sense of ease is - our bodies just do what we want easily.

As long as we continue to believe the lie that happiness comes from getting the "right" thing, we will never be able to achieve lasting happiness.  We are constantly changing, therefore the thing/person that we feel is "right" at this point in time, will not feel the same way in the future.  But if our goal is to feel at ease with ourselves, our partners, and our lives, then when we change, that peaceful easy feeling can go with us.

Of course, even if you accept this as a better definition for what we really mean when we say we just want to be happy, it doesn't tell us how to achieve it.  Here is where Buddhist practice can really help, as it has many methods to train us in how to become at ease with ourselves and our lives.  I'll talk about some in future posts.

Where does happiness come from?

It's hard to see our own biases and assumptions.  Sometimes they're right under our noses.  Sometimes they are our noses.

We all want to be happy, and we all want to avoid suffering.  It's a pretty simple goal.  Yet, most of us have a very hard time achieving it for more than a few days.  Why is it so difficult to be happy?

Consider your senses - sight, smell, touch, taste, hearing.  Do you notice what they all have in common?  They are all directed outwards toward the environment.

Although this sounds simplistic, consider how profoundly it affects you.  Because all of our senses are directed outward, it creates an assumption that we should focus outward for the important things, including happiness and suffering.

Perhaps there is someone you work with whom you find annoying - you probably spend time alert to the external world to try to pay attention to when he/she will appear.  If you see this person, you may change what you're doing to avoid what you expect will be an unpleasant encounter.  You spot the potential for suffering in the environment, and adapt to avoid it.  Similarly, when we feel bad, we usually look for some stimulus on the outside to make us happy.  This might be chocolate, a person, a TV show or video game, a shower, new shoes, etc.

We carry with us a core assumption that our happiness/suffering is due to external stimuli.  When we get the thing we want, we feel happy (but only for a little while).  When we get something we don't want, we suffer and try to remove it from our immediate environment.  We have practiced this approach for our whole lives. We should be experts at it by now.  So why doesn't it seem to work for more than a day or two?

The reason, of course, is because happiness doesn't come from the external environment.  We have all seen this in children.  They believe that a new toy will make them happy.  When they get it they are delighted.  But that ecstatic joy fades within minutes despite the object still being in their environment.  Even the general happiness they have from owning it goes away within weeks (often days!), and they now want something different.  Of course, the media work to perpetuate this myth that owning/getting things makes us happy, makes us attractive, and makes us have good relationships.  In fact, under this assumption that external stimuli make us happy, even people are commodities - we "get" the girl, we "have" a husband, we "break up" our relationships.  We believe that having a relationship with a specific person (or type of person) will fulfill us and make us happy.  Yet, although relationships are definitely fulfilling, we still worry about what else we need to get or want to avoid.

If having things actually made us happier, then it should be easy to document that through research.  People with more money should be happier - not only should they have less stress about survival, they can afford more things.  Yet, national studies of happiness demonstrate that although Americans' buying power has tripled since the 1950s, their happiness hasn't changed at all.

Actually, America - the richest country on earth - doesn't even get into the top 10 for happiest countries!  We are tied for 13th behind the Phillipines.  This was out of 50 countries surveyed.  If the survey had measured all 200-some countries, we would have likely dropped even farther in the list.

TV ownership and happiness by country

Cell phones and happiness

Go ask some people what makes them happy.  Many of the things you will hear about will be external stimuli, like TV, iPhones, roller coasters, music, etc.  If external stimuli and experiences made us happier, then America should be top of the happiness list.  We are number one in roller coasters (with 624 in the US, compared to number two Japan at 240, who is 19th in happiness, by the way).  We are number one in the amount of time watching television each week (pathetic, but true...we're almost double the amount of daily TV viewing over number two Turkey, who is 20th in happiness).

Beer consumption and happiness

There is no correlation between the number of TVs owned and happiness.  There is no correlation between the number of cell phones owned and happiness.  Heck, there isn't even a strong correlation between the amount of beer consumed and happiness (although it's not zero - See graph to the left...).

Ultimately, all happiness that comes from external stimuli is unstable and temporary.  As soon as the stimulus is gone (eaten, breaks, leaves us, etc.), we lose that happiness.  Not only that, often we suffer because we worry about losing the external stimulus that we think causes our happiness.  So we can't really enjoy it even while we have it!  This strikes me as not truly being happiness.

So we have to stop believing advertising's basic message, which is that when you feel bad you should go shopping.  We even have to stop believing what we see, smell, taste, feel, and hear.  Happiness doesn't come from outside ourselves.  You know this.  You know people who "have it all" and yet aren't happy.  You probably also know people who have very little or have had terrible things happen to them but who are happy most of the time.

You probably expect that I'm going to say that happiness comes from looking inside, and you're already probably dissatisfied with that answer.  Why?  I think because we've been trained by our senses, our culture, and our beliefs that happiness should appear suddenly, like when you get a gift or when you get what you've been craving.  Our insides don't seem able to make us suddenly happy.

Whether happiness comes from inside or outside is really beside the point (and is a false dichotomy).

Here's the important point - Happiness is trainable.  
Here's even better news - Happiness is attainable.

We can talk about how to attain it in a future post.