The Pursuit of Happiness

‘It’ was so important to the founding fathers they designated ‘it’ an unalienable right in The Declaration of Independence. “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.”

Aristotle said, “Happiness is the meaning and the purpose of life, the whole aim and end of human existence.”

Happiness and the pursuit thereof is undeniably a big part of the business of being human. Unfortunately, the pursuit of happiness proves to be an elusive one to a lot of people. Easier said than done, Aristotle and Mr. Jefferson.

So, what is happiness? What is it not? How do you get happiness? Why is it so many people want to be happy, but aren’t, in spite of the fact it’s free for the taking?

A decisively un-scientific survey

If you want to get some attention on Facebook, just pose the question in your status box. What is happiness, you all? I got thirty-five responses in short order.

Donald Barnes, an account manager for a technology firm said, “Happiness is when you close a $250,000 deal with your customer in London, before 9am! Beeeotch!”

Byron Lentz, an electrician, summed it up thus: “Happiness is when the check you got for the last job you did, clears.”

A successful bowel movement puts a grin on friend’s face.

Many of the responses cited extending kindness, gratitude and service to others as the key to happiness. “Caring for and giving to others actually prompts the release of oxytocin, better known as the love hormone,” said Angela Brazeal, a massage therapist by trade. “That makes me happy.”

A few responses were down-right Zen in tone. “Happiness is fleeting, like a butterfly settling on your shoulder, reach for it and it’s gone. Taking pleasure in the ordinary, everyday things is key, like writing this comment,” stated Mad Mike’s own, Holte Ender.

One response was more psychological in nature. Donald Barnes isn’t all about the money. “Happiness is not a person in certain of set of circumstances, but a person with a certain set of attitudes,” he said.

The self versus the world: Defense mechanisms

For the last thirty years, the psychiatrist, George Vaillant, M.D., has studied adult development at Harvard University. He has been the director of a study that has followed 824 men and women over the span of sixty years.

As a result of his stewardship the study, Vaillant was prompted to wonder why some subjects seemed to have adjusted to life better than others, and why some seemed incapable of ever possessing anything like sustained happiness. He was the first mental health professional to really wonder about that, and make it a focus of study.

According to Vaillant, we each fall into one of four categories, ranked from least mature to most mature, with regard to how we respond to the pressures of life. He calls them defense mechanisms. Depending on which category we act on life and absorb it from, has everything to do with how happy we are, or not.

Vaillant’s taxonomy designates the first level of defense as “pathological.” In a grown adult the manifestation of the pathological defenses is overtly psychotic. They include refusal to accept external reality, gross reshaping of reality to fit one’s internal needs, splitting all things in a dichotomy of good or evil, and the gross projection of one’s own faults and deficiencies on others.

The next level up is called “immature.” “Immature” behaviors include acting out impulsively, a tendency to retreat to fantasy in order to deal with conflict, and passive-aggressive behavior, and the tendency to idealize others as having more positive qualities than they actually possess, just to name a few.

The most common level for adults is the level that Vaillant calls “neurotic.” Most everyone you meet is hindered from achieving authentic happiness for employing the following defenses: Displacement (yelling at your spouse, because you had a bad day at the office), hypochondria, intellectualization (the over emphasis of the intellectual qualities of a situation to distance one’s self from emotional impact), rationalization (or making excuses), regression (lapsing into the previous two levels under stressful circumstances), and isolating one’s feelings in a given event in favor of a dispassionate relationship with the facts.

Happiness is most likely to be found in the level that Vaillant calls the “mature” level. Characteristics of the “mature” person are altruism, realistic planning for future discomfort, the ability to employ humor as a coping mechanism, the ability to transform negative emotions and behaviors into positive ones, and the ability to temporarily set aside feelings and emotions in order to deal with the task at hand.

Positive psychology and authentic happiness

The way psychologist, and professor at the University of Pennsylvania, Martin Seligman, explains it, historically, psychology has always been about “spot the looney.” Previously the province of psychology was to “make miserable people less miserable,” Martin told an audience at a Ted Talks event in 2004.

Now, psychology has a new dimension in addition to the disease model. Martin calls it Positive Psychology.

Positive psychology deals with what makes ordinary people happier. Another way to think of it is how do you take someone at Vaillant’s neurotic level and bring them up to the mature one. Positive psychology claims to have the alchemical recipe.

According to Seligman, there are three paths to happiness, and he calls these the pleasant life, the life of engagement and the meaningful life.

The pleasant life is all about nurturing positive emotions. Seligman claims the pleasant life, one more robust with pleasure, can be achieved through mindfulness exercises, learning to savor the good things in life, and by nurturing a sense of gratitude for what one already has. That requires a person to not focus so intensely on all the negatives that life throws at him or her.

Anyone who has a hobby they enjoy, creative people engaged in creative endeavors, or those precious few that actually love their jobs, understand the engaged life. “You can’t feel anything; you are one with the music; time stops; you have intense concentration,” is the way Seligman describes the engaged person. It is essentially the “flow” state achieved by intense absorption in an activity that psychologist, Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, has studied and written about extensively.

Seligman prescribes that one should know their strengths–discover those activities that are most likely to deliver a flow state to a given individual. Once those strengths are known, a person should look to develop their lives around them so that a person has more opportunity to be “one with the music.”

The last path to happiness is by living the meaningful life. Seligman describes this as, “knowing your strengths, and using them in the service of something larger than you are.” Not only does service to a larger purpose than one’s self foster altruism, but it takes us out of our own ego and stretches consciousness into something larger than it would be otherwise.

Joy and faith

Tim Owens, M.S., has spent the last twenty years as a counselor, and is the managing partner and lead trainer of The Owens Group, specializing in relationship management issues.

Owens prefers the term “joy” to “happy.” “Happiness to me is a somewhat shallow and temporary emotion.” Happiness is a fleeting state that comes and goes with the ebb and flow of fortune. “By contrast, joy is a deep and abiding state of being based more on internal choice and perspective rather than external circumstances and consequences.”

He’s seen his share of troubled people over the years, noting that people who lack joy in their lives tend to be self-centered, never satisfied, overly pessimistic, always complaining, stressed out, and ultimately difficult to be around.

Joyous people, “don’t get to low with the low’s of life, nor too high with the high’s of life, because they understand that whatever they are experiencing is only temporary and will change,” says Owens. “They manage their emotions by managing their perspectives. They look for the opportunity in every challenge. They remain optimistic. They focus more on improving the quality of life of others than on themselves. They value and appreciate what they have. They look for ways to enjoy life one moment at a time.”

Owens believes the good life–a joyous one–is accessed via the spiritual at a point where he sees psychology and faith intersecting. For anyone who takes issue with faith, Owens says, “All knowledge is ultimately based on on faith.” Owens would prescribe that a person believe in something greater than one’s self in a way that meshes best with an individual’s state of mind.

Owens claims his own faith supplies him with the courage to pursue the things he is passionate about in life. “Knowing that there is someone or something apart from me, who is significantly more powerful than me, who has my back, creates the foundation upon which joy as a continual state of being is overlaid.”

The way Owens sees it, “most people in the U.S. are happy sometimes, but rarely do they have joy.”

Beyond neurotic

If Aristotle was right, happiness (or joy, if you prefer) is the alpha and omega of human existence. If Thomas Jefferson, and the other authors of The Declaration of Independence are on point, the pursuit of it is one of the most important rights a person can have.

Thanks to people who make it their business to think and work with the issue, like Tim Owens and Martin Seligman, we don’t have to settle for being ordinarily neurotic.

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