The U.S. Constitution does not guarantee happiness. In part that’s because the whole “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness” thing is from the Declaration of Independence and not from the Constitution. But another important reason is that while a government can ensure the right to pursue happiness (or at least the thought makes brilliant propaganda), nothing can guarantee the attainment of this happiness. So as you sit on your couch tonight reading this book and looking back on your day, ask yourself: are you happy?
First ask yourself whether “happiness” is really what you want. If you’re sitting there despondent, it sure seems like it is. And even if you’re sitting there pretty contented, you gotta admit that you could always be happier, right? I mean, as you’re reading this, are you or are you not lying in a hammock on the beach with a margarita at your right elbow? And if you are, how is the temperature? Is the breeze conducive to your happiness? At what magnitude of happiness are you truly happy?
Aristippus, a Greek philosopher who lived in the fourth century BC, asked the same question and came up with the simple answer that if you feel good more than you feel bad, you are happy. To him the goal of life was to maximize the times you feel happy while minimizing the times you feel sad. Recently, the field of economics has provided a ton of evidence that this is exactly what we do. In many ways, humans are simple creatures who “maximize utility” by seeking pleasure over pain, to the point that famed Princeton economist Daniel Kahneman recommends measuring your happiness by recording your day in a diary and counting how often and how powerfully happiness overbalances unhappiness.
But might happiness be more than simply feeling good without feeling bad (and maybe the lingering afterglow of smugness)?
That’s where the eudaemonists come in. No, eudaemonists are not crackpots who look for hidden meaning in the mathematical ratios of Egyptian pyramids, nor are they people who wear masks and participate in weird orgiastic rituals in Oliver Stone films. Or if they are, it is independent of what makes them a eudaemonist. A eudaemonist is a person who believes, like Aristotle, that there is more to life than the knee jerk of our desires. You can almost hear the cheering of Sam the Eagle from The Muppet Show as he describes the benefits of things like strong moral fiber.
From the eudaemonic perspective, happiness can really suck. Take Panama. According to UNICEF statistics, in 2012 Panama had a per capita income of $9,910, only forty-five Internet users per hundred people, and 6.6 percent of the population living below the international poverty rate of $1.25 a day. Compare that with the mighty United States, in which UNICEF stats pegged our 2012 selves at $50,120 per capita, eighty-six Internet users per hundred, and an immeasurably low percent of people living on less than $1.25 a day. Obviously with more money and the ability to view things like the Nyan Cat video, people in the United States are happier than people in Panama, right? Not according to the 2013 Gallup-Healthways Index, which polled 133,000 people in 135 countries to come up with a report titled The State of Global Well-Being. When you look at the well-being of nations’ citizens, Panama was first on the list. The United States was forty-first.
That’s because in addition to the in-the-moment experience of happiness, the Gallup poll took into account domains like purpose (liking what you do each day and being motivated to achieve your goals), social (having supportive relationships and love in your life), financial (managing your economic life to reduce stress and increase security), community (liking where you live, feeling safe, and having pride in your community), and physical (having good health and enough energy to get things done daily).
According to the report, the well-being of people in the United States is bolstered by purpose and by social well-being but dragged down by lack of well-being in community, physical, and financial domains—apparently, despite our economic juggernaut, American people feel as if we can’t make ends meet. War-torn Syria and Afghanistan round out the bottom of the list, with only 1 percent of people “thriving” in each. At the top of the list, after Panama come Costa Rica, Denmark, Austria, and Brazil.
Let’s imagine that well-being and not happiness is what you want. What can you do about it? One thing you can do to improve your well-being and thus do your small part to improve the well-being of the United States is to find a long-term partner, which boosts the chances of an American scoring among the “thriving” from a dismal 13 percent to a still dismal (but at least suddenly able to look down on someone) 17 percent.
Physical well-being in the United States is also dismal … and in an interesting way. Yes, we’re talking about obesity, and this is one example of many in which you may have to trade happiness for well-being. Take Twinkies. If you maximize your happiness by sucking back ten or twenty of these delicious cream-filled sponge cakes, you are likely to experience immediate happiness followed by a dip in well-being including but not limited to self-loathing and projectile vomiting. The Twinkie case shows that what feels good isn’t always best.
But it’s so damn easy to put happiness on one side of a teeter-totter and sadness on the other, and mark the seesaw’s tilt as the measure of a happy life! Too bad, sucka: we live in an age of equivocation, and even something as pure-seeming as happiness has been dragged into the muck along with other unassailable goodness like trans fats and the U.S. Congress. And in this equivocal world in which neither money nor education nor under-five mortality is an absolute measure of personal or societal happiness, how you evaluate your life may come down not to what happens to you but to how you frame it. Studies of personality show that “characteristically happy people tend to construe the same life events and encounters more favorably than unhappy people,” wrote researchers Richard Ryan and Edward Deci in 2001.
In the immortal words of Bobby McFerrin, if you want to be happy, be happy now. Happiness is in the pursuit, and the choice to pursue it is up to you.
Hack Your Well-being
Want ways to boost your well-being? The following list may sound banal, but every item has been proven, study after study, to help you feel better about yourself and your life in a meta way: take care of your body, find opportunities to laugh, express emotions rather than repressing them, live according to your values, practice gratitude and forgiveness. (Oh, and shorten your commute.)