There's More to Life Than Being Happy
In my latest piece for The Atlantic, "There's More to Life Than Happiness," I write about a new study that examines the difference between a happy life and a meaningful life. People who live happy lives tend to be more selfish and "taking" than people who live meaningful lives, who tend to be selfless and "giving." Interestingly, having kids is associated with low levels of happiness but high levels of meaning.
So which type of life is better--the happy life or the meaningful life? Using info from the study and the life of Holocaust survivor Victor Frankl as an example, I argue that the meaningful life--even if it leads to low happiness, as it often does--is better than the merely happy life.
Here's an excerpt of my piece:
In September 1942, Viktor Frankl, a prominent Jewish psychiatrist and neurologist in Vienna, was arrested and transported to a Nazi concentration camp with his wife and parents. Three years later, when his camp was liberated, most of his family, including his pregnant wife, had perished -- but he, prisoner number 119104, had lived. In his bestselling 1946 book, Man's Search for Meaning, which he wrote in nine days about his experiences in the camps, Frankl concluded that the difference between those who had lived and those who had died came down to one thing: Meaning, an insight he came to early in life. When he was a high school student, one of his science teachers declared to the class, "Life is nothing more than a combustion process, a process of oxidation." Frankl jumped out of his chair and responded, "Sir, if this is so, then what can be the meaning of life?"
As he saw in the camps, those who found meaning even in the most horrendous circumstances were far more resilient to suffering than those who did not. "Everything can be taken from a man but one thing," Frankl wrote in Man's Search for Meaning, "the last of the human freedoms -- to choose one's attitude in any given set of circumstances, to choose one's own way."
Frankl worked as a therapist in the camps, and in his book, he gives the example of two suicidal inmates he encountered there. Like many others in the camps, these two men were hopeless and thought that there was nothing more to expect from life, nothing to live for. "In both cases," Frankl writes, "it was a question of getting them to realize that life was still expecting something from them; something in the future was expected of them." For one man, it was his young child, who was then living in a foreign country. For the other, a scientist, it was a series of books that he needed to finish....
According to Gallup , the happiness levels of Americans are at a four-year high -- as is, it seems, the number of best-selling books with the word "happiness" in their titles. At this writing, Gallup also reports that nearly 60 percent all Americans today feel happy without a lot of stress or worry. On the other hand, according to the Centers for Disease Control, about 4 out of 10 Americans have not discovered a satisfying life purpose. Forty percent either do not think their lives have a clear sense of purpose or are neutral about whether their lives have purpose. Nearly a quarter of Americans feel neutral or do not have a strong sense of what makes their lives meaningful. Research has shown that having purpose and meaning in life increases overall well-being and life satisfaction, improves mental and physical health, enhances resiliency, enhances self-esteem, and decreases the chances of depression. On top of that, the single-minded pursuit of happiness is ironically leaving people less happy, according to recent research. "It is the very pursuit of happiness," Frankl knew, "that thwarts happiness."
This is why some researchers are cautioning against the pursuit of mere happiness. In a new study, which will be published this year in a forthcoming issue of the Journal of Positive Psychology, psychological scientists asked nearly 400 Americans aged 18 to 78 whether they thought their lives were meaningful and/or happy. Examining their self-reported attitudes toward meaning, happiness, and many other variables -- like stress levels, spending patterns, and having children -- over a month-long period, the researchers found that a meaningful life and happy life overlap in certain ways, but are ultimately very different. Leading a happy life, the psychologists found, is associated with being a "taker" while leading a meaningful life corresponds with being a "giver."
You can read the full thing here.
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Comments:
Jun '11
Re: There's More to Life Than Being Happy
Notional definition of happiness: The full use of one's abilities toward meaningful ends.
This would separate happiness from pleasure.
Jun '11
Re: There's More to Life Than Being Happy
Mar '11
Re: There's More to Life Than Being Happy
"Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Meaningfulness" doesn't have quite the same ring to it. Frank has explained why the framers didn't frame it that way.
May '10
Re: There's More to Life Than Being Happy
I think the distinction goes to the definition of happiness. In the shallow modern world, sensual thrills seem to dominate the perceptions of happiness, primarily due to the immediate gratification mindset born of atheistic sensibilities.
But "happiness" traditionally better matches what CS Lewis described as "joy", with its foundation of deep-seated contentment. And that makes more sense to me than the small-"e" epicureanism that dominates the hipster culture.
Sep '12
Re: There's More to Life Than Being Happy
Many of the childless elderly people I know try to get in on the life of a young person in some way. They want someone to care about and a stake in the future. They need someone looking in on them and taking care of them and someone to care when they die. They want someone to attend their funeral. In this age of smaller families, however, most younger people have their hands full with taking care of their parents. I'd like to see a study of people older than 78. How do people regard decisions about having or not having children when they are about to die? Where do the meaning/happiness numbers land then?
Mar '11
Re: There's More to Life Than Being Happy
I'll stick with εὐδαιμονία.
Aug '10
Re: There's More to Life Than Being Happy
Great. Now I've got another book to add to my Amazon wish list, all thanks to Ricochet.
;-)
May '10
Re: There's More to Life Than Being Happy
Aristotle described virtue as fulfillment of purpose.
A knife is virtuous if it cuts well. It can be used toward other ends — as a paperweight or screwdriver, for example. But it is most effective at the role for which it was designed. Some alternative uses (ex: the knife as a screwdriver) are likely to abuse it. The design of a specific object may reflect a specific role (fillet knife vs machete) while sharing a general purpose (to cut).
Happiness is a response to harmony between self and circumstances (external or internal).
Christians and Jews believe each person is designed by our Creator with both a general purpose (to know and love God) and specific, personal callings (sometimes in response to our own choices). Confucians and Taoists acknowledge no Creator nor immutable purpose, yet similarly believe contentment lies in harmony with forces great and small. Atheists often seek to create their own purposes, but tend to share Taoists' preference for practicality. Assuming that one perception is right and another wrong, I wonder at the affective implications.
Does lasting happiness (as opposed to pleasure) require virtue? Does virtue necessarily result in happiness?
Aug '10
Re: There's More to Life Than Being Happy
I read an article once that claimed that if someone's elder siblings have enough children, then that person's "biological clock" tends to beat much less loudly than otherwise
The idea is that, if the elder siblings have a critical number of kids, that means by implication that the younger sibling's genetics have indirectly been passed on to the next generation, since the younger sibling shares x number of genes with the older siblings.
Supposedly, it only works if there are multiple older siblings of either sex, and they in turn have to be quite prolific in their reproduction, in order to "share the genetic load", because one wouldn't share enough genes with only one sibling for the math to work.
So, presumably, childless folk who come from a big family of reproducers would feel less "guilt" than childless folk from small families of non-reproducers.
Jan '11
Re: There's More to Life Than Being Happy
There's another dimension at work, of course, for those who believe in God. It's one thing to be happy, another to be meaningful for oneself or others ... and yet another to develop a life of faith.
Obviously, you can be all three. You can have faith which drives you to service which in turn leaves you happy. You can't really separate them into mutually exclusive terms.
But whenever I come across such questions, I go back to St. Ignatius' teaching that "man is created to praise, reverence, and serve God, and by this means to save his soul." I've spent years meditating and contemplating on that spiritual exercise.
Tilling the soul and fostering the spirit is an approach to life that works in a different dimension than happiness or meaning. I call them all "dimensions" because they obviously touch on some common characteristics, but they work differently in each dimension.
May '10
Re: There's More to Life Than Being Happy
I've mentioned this many months ago, but for Ricochet's newcomers...
My favorite philosophy professor offered a course one semester called "The Philosophy of Happiness". It was an excellent course full of information, deep thought and debate. These are the books we read:
Authentic Happiness by psychologist Martin Seligman
The Consolations of Philosophy by Alain de Botton
A Brief History of Happiness by Nicholas White
There was another book I'm forgetting.
We also discussed numerous articles on the subject, including this one by Ricochet's own Dennis Prager: "Happiness Is a Moral Obligation".
Seligman offers one of the best insights into happiness. He cites research suggesting that personal happiness is to a great extent a consequence of personality. People who are generally happy are generally happy regardless of their circumstances, and unhappy people are resolutely unhappy.
Seligman also points out that some people have great ranges of happiness than others. A bipolar person, for example, might experience both higher highs and lower lows than the average person. And two people might have the same breadth of emotion, but one's range is predominantly happy and another's predominantly sad or angry.
Re: There's More to Life Than Being Happy
Hi Aaron,
Aristotle appears to separate happiness and pleasure in bk. I of the Ethics, but they are reunited in bk. X. Ronna Burger's book on the Ethics (Aristotle's Dialogue With Socrates) has a very helpful discussion of this issue.
This makes sense--why should happiness not be pleasurable? Socrates, Aristotle, Dante, and St. Thomas are all hedonists, but they are not hedonists in the vulgar sense of the term. They would all deny that pleasure in the sense of whatever feels good to a particular person is genuine pleasure. They would all maintain, rightly I think, that lasting happiness requires virtue.
Overt hedonists such as Lucretius, Hobbes, and Locke also maintain that virtue is required for genuine pleasure, but they are harder cases.
Of course I am not even attempting to explain what they mean by pleasure, happiness, and virtue. The beginning of understanding here lies in pursuit of knowledge of what Crow's Nest mentions--eudaimonia (Greek for happiness).
Aaron Miller: Aristotle described virtue as fulfillment of purpose. . . .
Does lasting happiness (as opposed to pleasure) require virtue? Does virtue necessarily result in happiness? · 2 hours ago
Dec '11
Re: There's More to Life Than Being Happy
I argue that the meaningful life--even if it leads to low happiness, as it often does--is better than the merely happy life.
Why should the two be mutually exclusive?