I don't think this is really about smart people [as the headline says] so much as it is about apparently successful, affluent people : the middle classes. The interview does mention the extreme cases where of course you do need a certain amount of basic (bodily and emotional) needs to be fulfilled to be happy, but focuses on the perhaps more interesting cases of people who aren't happy despite living in relative comfort.
... if you get a huge raise this month, you might be happy for a month, two months, maybe six months. But after that, you're going to get used to it and you're going to want another big bump. And you'll want to keep getting those in order to sustain your happiness levels. In most people you can see that that's not a very sustainable source of happiness.
There are expectations that if you achieve some given thing, you're going to be happy. But it turns out that's not true. And a large part of that is due to adaptation, but a large part of it also is that you see this mountain in front of you and you want to climb over it. And when you do, it turns out there are more mountains to climb.
Reminds of Chris Hadfield's book where he describes that it was crucial to enjoy the process of astronaut training and not see it as a means to an end. I almost felt he thought that getting into space would have been a nice bonus, but that even if it wasn't possible he would have still found the process rewarding.
What I recommend is an alternative approach, which is to become a little more aware of what it is that you're really good at, and what you enjoy doing. When you don't need to compare yourself to other people, you gravitate towards things that you instinctively enjoy doing, and you're good at, and if you just focus on that for a long enough time, then chances are very, very high that you're going to progress towards mastery anyway, and the fame and the power and the money and everything will come as a byproduct, rather than something that you chase directly in trying to be superior to other people.
If you were to go back to the three things that people need—mastery, belonging, and autonomy—I'd add a fourth, after basic necessities have been met. It’s the attitude or the worldview that you bring to life. And that worldview can be characterized, just for simplicity, in one of two fashions: One extreme is a kind of scarcity-minded approach, that my win is going to come at somebody else's loss, which makes you engage in social comparisons. And the other view is what I would call a more abundance-oriented approach, that there's room for everybody to grow.
Ultimately, what we need in order to be happy is at some level pretty simple. It requires doing something that you find meaningful, that you can kind of get lost in on a daily basis.
When you observe children, they are very good at this. They don't get distracted by all those extrinsic yardsticks. They go for things that really bring them a lot of enjoyment. In my book I talk about when we got my son a little mechanical car when he was about 3 years old, because he saw a neighbor get that car. He was into the car for about three days. After that he wanted to play with the box in which the car came. It was just a box. He didn't have any idea that the car cost more, or was more valuable, or more technologically advanced. He was into the box because he saw a character on a TV show called Hamilton the pig, who lives inside a box. He wanted to replicate that life for himself.
https://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2016/04/why-so-many-smart-people-arent-happy/479832/
Thing is, lots of smart people don't seek happiness. Greedy people, stupid people, they can't resist the early payoff. They never read any philosophy, of poetry they are blankly ignorant, they don't understand the fatal trap of seeking happiness. Smart people, they understand this.
ReplyDeleteHappiness is sorta like frosting without cake. Happiness is at best an illusory goal. Usually, it's a vision thrust upon us by the advertisers: consume our goods and you'll be happy like the guy in the advert: look, the girls admire him, he possesses a Status Item. Which you could possess, too.
Happiness is best seen in the rearview mirror.
I've never been wealthy - oh I've been comfortable - but I have travelled in the circles of extremely wealthy people. With one exception, all of them started out un-wealthy. I remember a conversation with one of them, a man a little older than myself. He said he could only trust people who he'd known before he became wealthy; everyone else only saw his money. I replied, well, you don't exactly flaunt your wealth and most of it is tied up in investments - what makes you so distrustful?
The reason they couldn't be trusted was less than obvious. The fawners and flatterers and flim-flam artistes, each with a good use for his money - would undermine his own sense of himself.
Start believing your own press reports and you'll get lost in the funhouse of mirrors and never find your way out.
Raghunathan points to something obliquely which I'd like to straighten out and make more obvious: we have these social comparisons and other yardsticks of success. We all want to be "the best". Nothing particularly wrong with that, in and of itself.
But that "being the best" takes on a slightly sinister overtone, much in the way of the Grimm's Fairy Tales, when wishes are granted. There's always a catch. So you've gotten wealthy or famous or become, in the words of Frank Zappa, an Over-Nite Sensation.
Now what?
That whole Sophomore Album problem arises. People are now looking to you as some avatar of Success. You're the Best. A thousand people are trying to tell you so.
I think I could handle Fortune. Life's been pretty good to me, oh I've had my ups and downs. But I'm not hurting for anything now. But Fame? Success on a larger scale? I'd self-destruct in a heartbeat and I know it.
TS Eliot, from Four Quartets:
"It seems, as one becomes older,
That the past has another pattern, and ceases to be a mere sequence—
Or even development: the latter a partial fallacy
Encouraged by superficial notions of evolution,
Which becomes, in the popular mind, a means of disowning the past.
The moments of happiness—not the sense of well-being,
Fruition, fulfilment, security or affecton,
Or even a very good dinner, but the sudden illumination—
We had the experience but missed the meaning,
And approach to the meaning restores the experience
In a different form, beyond any meaning
We can assign to happiness. I have said before
That the past experience revived in the meaning
Is not the experience of one life only
But of many generations—not forgetting
Something that is probably quite ineffable:
The backward look behind the assurance
Of recorded history, the backward half-look
Over the shoulder, towards the primitive terror."