“If humans are so intelligent, why are we so bad at choosing what makes us happy?”
That’s the central thought of Yale university’s most popular course. The most popular ever, when it was unveiled it received over two million applications for enrolment. It has gone on to become an online sensation. We’re going to see if we can distil it into this week’s few words.
What is happiness? It’s a question that has plagued humanity and philosophers through the ages. At its most simple, happiness is the absence of any sense of fear.
If we delve into that a little deeper, we can ask when did we ever feel total happiness, without any doubts, worries, concerns or fears about the future or other people? When was the last time you felt completely unencumbered by any internal or external concern?
It was an occasion as a child where you played, completely free of time, consequence, want or need. It was a moment or set of moments that allowed you freedom from any other action besides the total immersion in what you were doing. You weren’t thinking about the past, future or anything else. You were just living in the moment.
Happiness, according to the TV series Mad Men, is the smell of a new car. It’s a perfect depiction, if you understand what drives human psychology. At our most basic level we crave very few things but they are wired to be the most important. We want food, shelter, safety and to survive.
Survival doesn’t equate to happiness. If you survive you can procreate and continue your genetics. That’s the programming. Happiness doesn’t even matter in that equation, only survival does.
After survival comes acceptance by the group, herd or tribe, because there’s safety in numbers. There’s also potential to mate, and both together provide us with security for now and into the future.
Mad Men understood that in getting or buying things, we excite the part of our brains that temporarily confirms our place in the world. We feel like we’re doing as well as everyone else. We feel accepted because we’re normal or even slightly better than normal. In the herd, this would mark us as being a good candidate for procreation.
Happiness then, is the temporary release from the fear of not being accepted or not surviving. It doesn’t last though, because to stay happy you have keep achieving in order to keep up with the rest of the herd. You can’t be different either, because difference marks you out as odd and that decreases your chances of procreating.
So to go back to the opening question: we’re so bad at choosing happiness because it’s not a function of intelligence, but rather of evolutionary biology. These days we choose what we think will make us happy now, and therein lies the pitfall. It will never be a constant state because the new car smell doesn’t last and as it fades so does the hormonal high or approval. It’s no longer special and neither are you.
Happiness is transient. Learning ways to short circuit our brains though, can bring contentment, and that’s a whole different ball game. Contentment says: I have enough. It says there’s no point in giving excessive energy to the future as it may not happen or to the past as I can’t change it.
We look at the past like crows look at a dead crow. They gather round it in what’s called a funeral. It isn’t mourning though: it’s investigation. They want to know what happened so they can make sure it doesn’t happen again, or happen to them. (A group of crows is called a murder, so it’s a murder investigation!)
We pick at the corpses of our past mistakes because our brains want to ensure we don’t repeat what marked us as different, or less than or not a good option as a mate. Our brains are still working off evolutionary biology. The complexities of social interaction are still in their infancy in terms of our hard wiring. Understanding this, we can make a conscious choice to tell our brain a different story. Over time it begins to believe us. We worry about the future less, replay the past less and get to enjoy the present more.. just like when we were kids, playing.
We remove the hooks to the past while still planning the future. We just don’t become so dependent on the outcome that it can’t be different to expectations. I can still have expectations but if things work out differently, I work with that and I’m still able to be content.
It doesn’t preclude ambition but it does temper it. Most people we think of as successful in our modern world, operate in this way.
In life we can have contentment and still be working on happiness along the way. It’s the series of highs we experience, but they only work if they’re already underpinned by contentment, otherwise we are just chasing the addiction to the temporary high.
In everyday life making choices to balance the pursuit of happiness with overall contentment will serve you well. Ask yourself: does this action, these circumstances, these associations or goals, actually contribute to my contentment or is it eroded by them? Anything that looks to diminish contentment in favour of a high that won’t last, just isn’t worth what it will cost, and that’s the psychology of the good life.
