More Thoughts on Happiness: Part 1

After having a go at redefining happiness, I started thinking about what practices may help bring it about. This is dangerous territory: the Net is full of advice on how to be happy, as though it were something you could learn from YouTube like folding fitted sheets. Most of this either summarises recent research (a valuable service, but not what I want to do here) or simply lists "happiness hacks" which can be fun and useful but again aren't what I'm interested in at the moment. What I am interested in is (to borrow a term from Albert Ellis) "elegant solutions". What I mean by this is practices and attitudes that promote long-term happiness and are not dependant on particular circumstances, rather than quick hacks (like listening to happy music) or situational changes (like moving to the country). I'm going to phrase these as imperatives not because I would presume to give my readers advice on the subject, but because that's the easiest way to write them and because they are, to an extent, imperatives to myself. I may not have attained perfect happiness, but I've noticed that I'm a hell of a lot happier than I was, say, ten years ago, so it's worth analysing and evaluating the various things I've tried that may have had a hand in that change, and writing them down as quasi-maxims may help reinforce the process. And who knows, they may even be useful to someone.

Since I'm a bit of a Tim Ferriss fan, I'll be applying the 80/20 rule: if you imagine the maximum happiness you can achieve and the amount of work needed to achieve it, it's a fair guess that 20% of the work will provide 80% of the happiness. The remaining 20% includes the ability to be happy under increasingly unfavourable circumstances, for which you may need to go and meditate in an ashram for thirty years or something. I've wasted a lot of time over the years worrying about how to get the last 20%,or even the last 1%, while I could have been spending it much more effectively on the 80% of happiness that will get you by in most everyday circumstances. While I would love to know what enables the wise man to be happy on the rack (as Epicurus put it), from a practical point of view its best to concentrate on the things that let you be happy in a traffic jam.

1. Have suitable goals in accordance with your values

Going back to the definition I proposed, "Happiness is a condition engendered by realisation of a valued state," it is clear that goals need to be compatible with values if their achievement is to make us happy. Take watching TV. Everybody does it; nobody values it. Nobody's last words were "Damn, I wish I'd watched more TV." If you don't think watching TV is a valuable activity, then watching will not make you happy; at best it will provide momentary pleasure and relaxation. But wait—is it really true that no one values watching TV? What about Trekkies, Whovians and Browncoats? They may not value the act of TV-watching in itself, but they sure as hell value the things they watch. If you want to see someone really pissed off on their death-bed, whisper in the ear of a dying Browncoat "They're bringing out a new season of Firefly next year." So actually, yes, TV can make you happy. Those who would argue otherwise are either using "happy" in a radically different sense from its normal usage, or simply cannot conceive of Star Trek (let alone Firefly) as a thing to be valued. As I said in the last post, arguments about happiness are often in practice arguments about what we should value. There are a lot of happiness snobs around who say that X won't make you really happy when what they mean is that X is not something they happen to value. (To recap, I'm using Gary Watson' definition of value as "those principles and ends which [we regard] as definitive of the good, fulfilling, and defensible life," and no, I'm not going to get into an argument about whether there is such a thing as objective value.)

We don't experience a lot of choice with regard to our values, but we can select our goals. Here I'd say the main criteria for suitable goals, apart from compliance with values, would be challenge, achievability and variety. Challenge is important to engage us, and activities which engage our skills at the right level famously lead to flow. Achievability relates to this; obviously unachievable goals lead to frustration and maybe even depression. It's fine to decide you're going to be an Olympic high jump champion when you're 13, but you may want to set the bar a bit lower later on.

Goals should also vary in difficulty, as any game designer will tell you. Not every quest can end with a boss fight—sometimes you need to spend some time crafting or recovering Pigwyt the Alchemist's potions from the mischievous kobolds. We have a tendency to place high value on goals which are hard to obtain, but in that case we need to have a few low-value-low-difficulty goals as well. You might have spiritual enlightenment or world revolution as your highest-valued goal, but you might want to put losing weight or learning Japanese in there too. Hell, there are days when getting out of bed is at the right level. If low-difficulty goals contribute to high-difficulty goals, so much the better. Again, any game designer (or educator) will tell you that.

There are also a couple of tricks which can make goals more fulfilling and progress toward them more reliable (if you read the first post you may remember that awareness of progress toward a goal is the most common form of happiness). The first I call the Stoic Twist. Epictetus said famously

Some things are in our control and others not. Things in our control are opinion, pursuit, desire, aversion, and, in a word, whatever are our own actions. Things not in our control are body, property, reputation, command, and, in one word, whatever are not our own actions. The things in our control are by nature free, unrestrained, unhindered; but those not in our control are weak, slavish, restrained, belonging to others. Remember, then, that if you suppose that things which are slavish by nature are also free, and that what belongs to others is your own, then you will be hindered. You will lament, you will be disturbed, and you will find fault both with gods and men. But if you suppose that only to be your own which is your own, and what belongs to others such as it really is, then no one will ever compel you or restrain you. Further, you will find fault with no one or accuse no one. You will do nothing against your will. No one will hurt you, you will have no enemies, and you will not be harmed.

Now this is an overstatement if ever there was one; in reality control is a pretty subjective thing, and we should not forget that the brain is a physical mechanism subject to forces which are definitely not in our control, but Epictetus is still making a good point: the more you make your goals dependant on your internal state, the less you become a target of the disruptors and railguns of outrageous fortune. The Stoic Twist, then, is to choose as a goal, not some external event, but an internal attitude. That doesn't guarantee success, but it does put more of the variables in your hands. It's the difference between playing to win and playing to play.

The other trick is the Platonic Twist. In both The Symposium and The Republic, Plato (via Socrates) talks about how we can start by desiring a particular beautiful person, then beautiful people in general, then beauty in general and so on, all the way up to the Form of the Good. Now I don't want to get all Platonic here, but I do think Plato was onto something. Coming back to our Firefly example, if you only love Firefly, then you are doomed to a life of misery because there will never be another series. Ever. On the other hand, if your love is for the works of Joss Whedon, you may have better luck, but your happiness options are still limited. Heaven forbid, but the creator of all those wonderful TV series could drop dead tomorrow. So it makes more sense to think about the qualities that make us love a certain TV programme, just as Plato recommends that we think more about beauty than a particular beautiful person, or that we try to aim for justice in general rather than just perform one specific act that happens to be just. This also brings goals closer to values, since values tend to be higher-order phenomena ("principles and ends").

More Thoughts on Happiness: Part 2

[continuing the excessively long post started here.

2. Appreciate what you have

All this talk of goals may seem very, well, goal-driven. Isn't there room also (I wondered) for the joys of purposelessness? After all, I once gave a TEDx talk on why life doesn't have to be seen as a journey, and we might do well to appreciate aimless wandering as well. I mentioned that the bulk of happiness is the perception that we are moving toward some valued state, and it is here that clear goals are useful. The other components are the achievement of that state (which is necessarily brief) and the appreciation of the state, by which time you don't want to be thinking about goals. Unfortunately appreciating what we have isn't so easy. The brain, we are told, evolved for solving problems, so it doesn't make evolutionary sense for it to waste energy on non-problems; nevertheless, this is a good way to sabotage what psychologists call "the hedonic treadmill".

Some years back I went to a workshop by the Turkish musician and yogi Seda Bağcan, who stopped dead in front of me and asked "Do you consider yourself fortunate?" (Actually the Turkish translated literally as "Do you feel lucky?" but that sounds too Dirty Harry.) I was stumped and responded "I don't know." Some parts of my life were good; other parts weren't going so well … the usual story. Seda's question remained wiggling in my brain like the wiggly thing in The Wrath of Khan until I came across a Bektashi injunction to imagine all the good things God has given you in your right hand and the bad things in the left—the pile in the right hand is going to be much bigger. (Well actually both piles are going to be astronomical; you have to employ some kind of visual scaling mechanism.) Suddenly I got what Seda was on about and went on to construct my own little mental exercise, which consists of iterating "I am fortunate because $x." Possible values for $x include:

• my kidneys work
• I have a good Internet connection
• I have enough to eat
• it's sunny
• I can walk
• I have an interesting job
• my house has drinkable water.

As you can see, there's no system here; the aim is to knock out the mind's tendency to seek problems by bombarding it with random desirable states, and this brings us back to the definition of happiness as "a condition engendered by realisation of a valued state." I'm not sure how well this would work for everyone, but it has worked for me, most definitely as a temporary mood-lifter but also I suspect as a long-term raiser of happiness (which is why it is included here under elegant solutions rather than categorised as a hack, though it certainly is that too).

As an aside, this method is very like the currently popular focus on gratitude; it just skirts round the question of who or what we should be grateful to (and whether we should blame them for bad things that happen).

The hedonic treadmill can also be sabotaged by refreshing sensory experience, enabling us to appreciate things anew. Buddhist mindfulness meditation may do the job here, but since I haven't practised it much, I can't comment on it. I have, however, tried various sensory awareness exercises and concluded that they work well. In fact, I suspect any aesthetic experience works well. My old art teacher once said "You're not drawing what you see; you're drawing what you think is there," and this is the problem in a nutshell: habit and preconception muffle the senses. You can have a breathtaking sunset spread out before you, but if your mind just goes "sky", your breath will not be taken away. Paying attention to what we are actually seeing, hearing etc. breaks the habit, or as Blake put it, cleanses the doors of perception. (Note: this is not an invitation to take mescaline.)