Are you happy? It’s a deceptively simple question, but for me, at least, a difficult one to answer.
Another tough question: Why is it so hard to be happy for so many? Despite a culture full of wellness influencers with their happiness hacks and mind-set tricks, all of the indicators show that we Americans are less happy than ever. It’s as if the more energy we focus on trying to feel happy, the harder it is to achieve.
So what is going on and what can we do about it? I put these questions to Laurie Santos. Santos is a cognitive scientist and professor whose class on happiness quickly became the most popular in Yale’s history. And through her podcast “The Happiness Lab” and her free online course called “The Science of Well-Being,” Santos’s reach has extended far beyond the classroom.
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Lots of philosophers have tackled the question of happiness going back to ancient Greece, and there are two main types of happiness according to ancient Greek philosophers as far as I can tell: hedonic and eudaimonic. Can you explain the difference? Hedonic happiness is what a lot of laypeople mean when they say happiness — just a sense of good feeling. Often when we’re thinking of hedonic pleasure, we’re thinking of the really basic stuff: good food, good sex, a feeling of accomplishment. Eudaimonic happiness is bigger. It’s about living a good life. Happiness that comes not just from your own success, your own pleasure, but from other people and from building character. If you look back at the ancient folks like Aristotle, they knew about both, but when push came to shove they were like, Go for the eudaimonic.
In ancient Greece, the big philosophical debate was also if happiness was nature or nurture. What does science say? Are certain people more predisposed to be happy? The way scientists study this is they do these classic studies with twins, and what they generally find is that happiness is heritable. The important thing to know, though, is that the heritability factor is pretty low. It’s about the same rate as what you’d see for religiosity or risk-taking. If your parents were super religious, maybe you’re more likely to be super religious, but it’s not set in stone. That’s the message of happiness: There’s probably some component that’s a little built in, but so much more of it is under our conscious control.
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The other thing I hear people say about why they don’t interact more socially is that they enjoy being alone. They interact with people all day for work and just prefer their downtime to be more calm, more peaceful. I do sometimes wonder if people are just kidding themselves, though. [Laughs] Well, there’s actually some lovely new work on this topic by Micaela Rodriguez. Her work focuses on this flip side of the loneliness crisis. She’s a little younger than I am, and she’s like, My whole generation has spent all this time hearing about how bad loneliness is. It’s so terrible. It’s as bad as 15 cigarettes a day. And she’s like, Two things: One, let’s jump back to Aristotle, Buddhist texts and so on. Those folks were into contemplation. They were into solitude. They were into the benefits of having the time and the bandwidth to notice what’s going on with yourself, to think, to be bored. They knew that there were some benefits to alone time.
Second thing is that we know from so much literature and psychology that how you frame something affects how you experience it. If I’m a student who’s alone in the dining hall, and I sit down and think, My gosh, this is my me time, I can contemplate, I can gather my thoughts before class, that’s great. But if you’re seeped in everything that social scientists like me have been saying, it’s like: This is the loneliness crisis! Look at you! You’re sitting in the dining hall by yourself? You’re going to feel crappy, right? You’re going to judge yourself. You’re going to have all those nasty meta-emotions that we talked about before. Micaela said there’s something damaging about this narrative. I don’t think we necessarily want to justify it fully — pretty much every available study of happy people suggests that happy people have some strong relationships — but that doesn’t mean we have to be in social connection all the time.
Read the complete article and listen to the podcast at The New York Times
