Happiness is not a Warm Puppy

(First published in Bali Advertiser, February 1, 2006)

I don’t know why we are here, but I’m pretty sure that it is not in order to enjoy ourselves. – Ludwig Wittgenstein

Happiness is one of those Zen things: You cannot find it if you go looking for it. That’s not psycho-drivel. American university research studies cited by psychology professor Timothy D. Wilson in the International Herald Tribune (Dec. 30) confirm what wise men have been telling us all along.

People asked in one of the studies to analyze and evaluate a romantic relationship usually ended up less happy than people asked to give only a gut reaction on their satisfaction with a romantic partner. Two groups of depressed college students in another study were asked to spend eight minutes a day either thinking about themselves or about something else, such as “clouds forming in the sky.” Not surprisingly, the group that contemplated clouds was happier.

The researchers should have just read some of American writer Nathaniel Hawthorne: “Happiness is like a butterfly which, when pursued, is always beyond our grasp, but, if you will sit down quietly, may alight upon you.”

Or maybe they could have read this bit from the French Algerian writer and philosopher Albert Camus: “You will never be happy if you continue to search for what happiness consists of. You will never live if you are looking for the meaning of life.”

My question -- what of the researchers themselves, who studied happiness to learn that happiness dissipates as it is analyzed and evaluated? Are they happy? Or does happiness research kill it for them, too?

Personally, I distrust ‘happy’ people, always have, I think. I told university classmates to be wary of anyone that smiled too much, and thought it sage advice. And I liked what a small-town university rebel-hero said when he heard a mutual friend was happy most of the time. “I thought you were smarter than that,” he told her.

Nothing wrong with me, after all – I was just too intelligent to be happy. It caressed my ego to use that to explain my twenty-something angst. But not setting happiness as a goal isn’t the same as setting out in the other direction in a leap of extrapolation -- if the intelligent cannot be happy, geniuses must be miserable. Still, I feel somewhat vindicated that the research indicates the less one thinks about happiness, the less one tries to analyze it, the happier one is. It makes me feel less inadequate at not knowing what to answer people when they ask, “Are you happy?”

I don’t like the question, and I don’t like the whole happiness, self-help industry, which promises happiness if you buy into a particular creed, a certain brand of personal management, one regimen of meditation and diet, a single philosophy of auras, aromas, oils, crystals, and essences. Once you are hooked there is always one more therapy session, one last instructional booklet, one final initiation rite that will complete the process to a new, shiny, happy you.

What are the secrets of happiness? There are none; at least, there are only open secrets that we have to be reminded of now and then. It is as simple as Jesus and Buddha said. The university researchers confirmed that as well: people who do kind things for other people are generally happier than the rest of us – as long as they don’t stop to think they might be doing kind things to other people only to make themselves happy.

Maybe the kindness-happiness link is innate, and we forget it when we grow up and recall it in old age. One of the youngest people I know, my son, offers some of whatever he’s having to everyone in the room. And one of the oldest people I know, a Balinese farmer who passes our gate everyday, sometimes brings us duck eggs or coconuts just because he likes to do it.

“Being good to others will ultimately make us kinder, happier people – just so long as we don’t think too much about it,” wrote Timothy D. Wilson in the IHT.

Or take it from George Bernard Shaw: “The only way to avoid being miserable is not to have enough leisure to wonder whether you are happy or not.”

And the best way to keep yourself busy seems to be to take a neighbor some fresh duck eggs and a young coconut. Or maybe you could offer everyone in the room a warm bottle of soya milk. It will make you happy. Trust me. It’s been proven by science.

(Quotes taken from www.quotegarden.com and www.wisdomquotes.com.)

Copyright © 2006 Lee Roy LeRoi