Giving Happiness a Chance

The New York Times has an editorial today, All They Are Saying Is Give Happiness a Chance," that has to do with the elusive state we call happiness. The author, Eduardo Porter, notes that in the constitution the pursuit of happiness has lagged behind life and liberty.

He writes, "Despite all the wealth we have accumulated — increased life expectancy, central heating, plasma TVs and venti-white-chocolate-mocha Frappuccinos — true happiness has lagged our prosperity. As Bobby Kennedy said in a speech at the University of Kansas in March 1968, the nation’s gross national product measures everything “except that which makes life worthwhile.” In a society of unfettered consumerism, the underlying assumption is that consuming what we want will lead to happiness. This clearly does not obtain.

In fact, understanding happiness and what makes people happy is tricky business, indeed. In one experiment leaving a dime on a copying machine in which the subjects needed to copy a sheet of paper increased their happiness. Porter notes,

happiness seems to have little relation to economic achievement, which we have historically understood as the driver of well-being. A notorious study in 1974 found that despite some 30 years worth of stellar economic growth, Americans were no happier than they were at the end of World War II. A more recent study found that life satisfaction in China declined between 1994 and 2007, a period in which average real incomes grew by 250 percent.

As I've said before, I think pursing happiness is like pursing humility: the more you directly seek it the more it escapes you.