Finding Happiness in Evolutionary Imperatives
Now that we’ve discussed the purpose of happiness, we can turn to the question of exactly what makes us happy. Because evolution shaped our motivational system, consideration of our evolutionary imperatives should give us some traction on how to lead a good life.
Given our particular imperatives, you may think an evolutionary guide to happiness would be a pretty short pamphlet, or perhaps even just the simple equation:
Food + Sex = Happiness
No doubt there is some truth to this equation, but the story is also much more complex. Happiness may be a matter of meeting our evolutionary imperatives, but these imperatives are often at cross-purposes with one another, and a good deal of wisdom and self-knowledge is required to navigate successfully among them. This challenge can be seen most readily in our two paramount goals of reproduction and survival. Despite the fact that we must achieve both to pass our genes on to the next generation, reproduction is the currency of evolution, and survival is important only to the degree that it serves that goal.
The challenges inherent in managing our evolutionary urges are magnified by numerous other complexities, some ancient and some modern. On the ancient side, although our imperatives are universal, our strategies for achieving them are not. For many species there is only one way to get ahead in life. If you are a male dung beetle, you must be able to roll a ball of feces that is many times your body weight. If you are a male moose, you must be able to knock other moose on their bums when you butt heads. But for humans, the number of strategies available to us is limited only by our imagination. Do I curl, straighten, or cut my hair? Do I whiten my teeth or spend my money on braces? Do I pose for my Tinder photo next to my stamp collection or my boxing trophy? To understand how to achieve happiness, we need to understand how our personalities, proclivities, and abilities each can make us a success. Not every road leads to happiness, but different roads suit different people.
On the modern side, our highly technological world continues to develop new tricks to short-circuit our pursuit of happiness via what Robert Trivers calls phenotypic indulgences. Phenotypic indulgences, while pleasing, are really just surrogates for our evolved preferences. Alcohol and drugs, television, and even potato chips are all phenotypic indulgences. They mimic ancient pleasures without delivering the outcomes that made those ancient activities adaptive and hence pleasurable. (Think of the difference between watching Friends and having friends.)
If the notion that humans have evolutionary imperatives strikes you as overly deterministic, it is important to remember that we also evolved to be the most cognitively flexible species on the planet. As I discuss in chapter 2, humans need to learn an extraordinary amount of information to survive and thrive, and more than any other animal we chart our own life course. That doesn’t mean we can find happiness in everything we do—most of us cannot—but it does mean we get to decide the importance of happiness in our life as well as the most fruitful way to pursue it. Understanding human nature through the pressures exerted by our evolutionary past can guide us in this pursuit and also help us understand happiness itself.
An Evolutionary Guide to Happiness
Evolution depends on reproduction, first and foremost. But that fact has led to two common misconceptions. The first misconception is the belief that we must have children of our own if we are to pass on our genes. In fact, we can also be an evolutionary success if we enhance the reproductive success of our relatives. Evolutionary pressures can lead people to be a good uncle or auntie in the same manner as a good parent, and the outcome is much the same. Helping nieces and nephews ensures that copies of the good uncle’s or auntie’s genes will have a better chance of making it into the next generation.
The second misconception is the widespread belief that evolution gave us a desire to reproduce. Just because evolution relies on reproduction doesn’t mean that humans evolved a desire to have children. Until very recently in our evolutionary history, we had no idea that sexual relations created children, so evolution would have achieved nothing by giving us a desire for children. Rather, evolution gave us a strong desire to have sex, and then (because we are a species that requires parental care) tossed in a tendency to feel fond of any children we produced. By evolving sexual desire plus nurturance, we arrived at the same outcome as we would have if we’d evolved to want children and knew how to produce them. This combination of wanting sex and feeling nurturant toward resulting offspring works for us and every other mammal (or at least every other female mammal; biparental care is pretty rare among our furry cousins).
You might argue that a desire for sex in the absence of a desire for children is inefficient, and indeed it is. Humans (and other primates) have all sorts of “wasteful” sex that cannot possibly lead to reproduction. I suspect that the evolution of hands was followed forty-five minutes later by the invention of masturbation, which would have been impossible with hooves and too risky with claws. Nevertheless, so long as we engage in enough of the reproductive sort of sexual activity, the wasted energy cost of nonreproductive sex is likely to be low.
Due to the central role of sex in reproduction, frequent sexual activity (particularly if you can arrange it with someone you like) is a key to the good life. But frequent sexual activity alone is insufficient to successfully reproduce, and hence insufficient for a happy life. The long period of dependency in human children dictates that parenthood is also critically important for reproduction. In fact, children are so difficult to raise that parents are barely sufficient, and thus evolution invented the grandparent.
As I discuss in the prologue, Lahdenperä and her colleagues found that our ancestors were more likely to survive childhood and mothers were more likely to have children in rapid succession if they had the help of a grandmother. How did evolution create grandmothers? By preventing women from producing more children of their own while they still had plenty of life in them, evolution gave them the opportunity to focus on their grandchildren rather than their children.* This is why human females evolved menopause.
As can be seen in Figure 10.1, when Susan Alberts of Duke University and her colleagues compared humans with other primates, they found that we are unique among our primate cousins in the female tendency to outlive fertility. The other apes and monkeys on this graph all fall along the diagonal line, indicating that they remain fertile until they die. For example, the latest that chimp females tend to give birth is around age forty, and the longest they tend to live is also around age forty. The human example is from !Kung hunter-gatherers, who have little or no access to modern medical care and thus give us a better sense of how our ancestors lived than we could get from humans living in industrialized countries. Here we see that the latest age at which !Kung women tend to give birth is in their early forties, but the longest they tend to live is into their mid-seventies. If there were no need for grandparenting, it would be an unusual evolutionary arrangement for women to outlive their fertility by such a wide margin. (Remember, evolution doesn’t care about survival for its own sake.)
Figure 10.1. Female longevity and fertility in various primates. (Alberts et al., 2013)
Raising and teaching our children and grandchildren are thus an important source of life satisfaction. That doesn’t mean that we evolved to enjoy every moment we spend with them—when my kids were little, Monday morning and off-to-school-you-go couldn’t come soon enough—but it does mean that we get enormous satisfaction from seeing our children succeed in life. Just a few minutes at your child’s high school graduation or wedding provide ample demonstration of that fact.
This next point might sound sexist, but as I discuss in chapter 4, women have a much greater obligatory biological investment than men in creating and raising children. As a consequence, it is likely that raising children (and grandchildren) plays a larger role in female than in male life satisfaction. Be that as it may, it is in both men’s and women’s interest to facilitate the survival of their offspring and those of their close family, so providing for the next generation of kin is likely to be an important source of happiness for everyone. This is not to say that the day-to-day tasks of raising children are fun, as they often aren’t, but the knowledge that you’ve done the right thing for your children is a great source of life satisfaction.
So far this recipe for happiness, have sex and do a good job raising your children, probably seems inherently obvious to the most casual observer. But reproduction is more complicated than that, and so are its implications for life satisfaction. One of the most complicated aspects of human reproduction is finding the right partner in the first place. Choosing a long-term partner requires an ability to predict your preferences far into the future, and you need only consider your prior clothes or hairstyle to realize how difficult that task is. Indeed, I struggle at the fruit market each week trying to predict which bunch of bananas will ripen before they turn brown, a decidedly easier task than predicting if Courtney or Kim will be more likely to interest me for the next forty to fifty years.
The difficulty of this prediction problem is exacerbated in a species like ours, which forms enduring pair bonds, as partnership is a mutual decision. If we were laughing tree frogs (a real Australian frog, by the way), then every female could mate with the most desirable male, as his role in the process involves nothing more than fertilizing the eggs. But because we work together to raise our young, it is not possible for every woman to mate with the most desirable man, or vice versa. Rather, the resultant compromises necessitated by limited availability and mutual choice demand that we trade some preferred aspects for others, and of course different people are likely to make different trade-offs when choosing a partner. You might care more about kindness, I might care more about shared values, and someone else might be particularly concerned with brains, beauty, or finances.
The best way to solve the problem of mutuality is to be as desirable as possible, as that increases the chances that the one you love will love you back. For this reason, evolution motivates us to do things that improve our chances of attracting and keeping the person with whom we most want to have sex and children. In other words, we try to be what the other sex is looking for.
What the other sex is looking for often feels like one of Life’s Great Mysteries, but it’s really not so mysterious at all. Men and women want many of the same things in a partner; kindness and generosity are near the top of everyone’s list, and it doesn’t hurt to be sexy, fun, and smart. But as I discuss in chapter 4, it’s not enough to be smart or sexy. It’s critical to be smarter or sexier than the people around you, or you’re still going to be the last one chosen. All our attributes are relative. That doesn’t mean that you need to be tops in all domains, but it does mean that you need to stand out in those areas where you have the best prospects. In my own case, my towering five-foot-six stature combined with a nine-inch vertical leap meant that my prospects were poor in basketball, so I never put much effort into the game. But my prospects were better in tennis, and I put in a fair bit of time on the court in a (failed) effort at self-improvement.
It is important to keep in mind that I was never pursuing excellence on the court to get the girl (although the high school letter jacket and all that it entailed might have crossed my mind). I believed that I played tennis because I loved the game. Ultimately, though, it doesn’t really matter what we think our motivation is. What matters is the consequences of our actions. If being a great tennis player is attractive to others, then my “love of the game” would have evolved because it enhanced my reproductive success.
Similarly, the drive to be better than those around us often emerges in a desire for mastery. Mastery is important because our unique skill set differentiates us from others and makes us desirable as a mate. But the pursuit of mastery can be costly, as the underlying concern with relative status can easily put us on a hedonic treadmill, with each accomplishment quickly fading as we strive to keep up with (by which I mean surpass) the Joneses. Like our ancestor Crag, once we beat the Joneses, we set our sights on the Smiths. As a consequence, markers of success such as wealth have only a trivial effect on happiness unless we have more than those around us, suggesting that it is status and not money that we are really after. Two sets of findings illustrate this point nicely.
With regard to status, research on monkeys demonstrates that when they rise to the top of the status hierarchy, there is an increase in the dopamine (evolution’s pleasure drug) sensitivity in their brains. As a result of this increased dopamine sensitivity, monkeys at the top of the heap no longer enjoy cocaine (a drug that hijacks the dopamine system). When offered cocaine versus salt water, these top monkeys show no preference between them. In contrast, monkeys at the bottom of the status hierarchy have low dopamine sensitivity and become avid coke users. Data such as these confirm the common wisdom that high status makes us happy and low status makes us sad.
With regard to money, once people get out of poverty, the relationship between wealth and happiness is not as strong as you might think. Much more important, if all of society rises in wealth at the same time, increases in wealth beyond poverty provide no increase in happiness. Zippo. This effect can be seen by plotting life satisfaction against purchasing power over the last fifty-five years in the United States (Figure 10.2). As is evident in this graph, dramatic society-wide increases in real wealth (i.e., controlling for inflation) led to no associated increases in happiness.
Figure 10.2. Real income (controlling for inflation) and life satisfaction in the United States.
These data suggest that my home cinema, granite countertops, and convertible don’t actually make me any happier unless I have them and you don’t. In other words, I want these things only to put myself above others. Moreover, whether I know it or not, the reason I want to rise to the top of the heap is because that gives me a better chance of getting the partner I really want. The TV, countertops, and car are just trivialities, but because I don’t know this, I spend my time coveting them, working to acquire them, and eventually becoming the disinterested owner of them.*
Unfortunately, getting off this hedonic treadmill is no easy matter. Millions of years of sexual selection have etched status concerns into the deepest levels of our psyche, so turning them off or even ignoring them is impossible for most of us. But awareness of the problem probably helps, particularly since it can allow us to focus our attention on other aspects of our lives that have the potential to provide more lasting happiness. Awareness can also help us be better parents or friends. We may be unaware of our own underlying status strivings when we lunch with the boss or try to improve our tennis game, but we are gifted with the ability to see through others. When we see our friends and family worrying about how they stack up against everyone else, we can be a bit more sympathetic to their insecurities rather than asking why they care so much about what other people are getting and doing.
Ignoring our ingrained status concerns may be impossible, but one solution is to spend money on activities rather than material goods—buy things to do rather than to have. If you’re like me, this possibility will strike you as counterintuitive, mostly because expensive experiences seem so self-indulgent. I remember feeling pangs of guilt in graduate school when I decided to spend my savings on a ski vacation despite the fact that my only couch had been rescued from the side of the road. Even as I left for the airport, I asked myself if furniture might have been a wiser and longer-lasting purchase than a trip to Aspen. But it turns out that I had it exactly backward: the ski trip was a longer-lasting purchase than the couch. My ski trip from 1987 still makes me happy when I think about it today, my friends and I still talk about what a great time we had, and my wife would have long since tossed out the Naugahyde sectional I was considering in place of that trip.
Figure 10.3. The happiness effects of material versus experiential purchases. (Adapted from Van Boven and Gilovich, 2003)
Research by Leaf Van Boven and Thomas Gilovich of Cornell shows that I’m not alone in this regard. As you can see in Figure 10.3, particularly when people move from buying necessities to buying luxuries, their experiential purchases make them a lot happier than their material ones. This relationship holds even when the same object is bought for material reasons (I want to own a fancy car) versus experiential reasons (I love to drive my new Jag down winding country roads).
The next time you have money burning a hole in your pocket, keep in mind that experiences are a better hedonic investment than material purchases. The things we own lose their allure as soon as we reset our status goals, but the things we do become a part of us. Positive experiences give us the stories we tell friends and family—our most important memories—and continue to provide satisfaction long after the experience has ended.
Happiness and Survival
Survival goals are basic to all living beings, and many of our emotional responses evolved due to their survival value. We enjoy eating fat, sugar, and salt because they were rare in our ancestral environment, but critical for survival. We feel anxious and afraid when we walk through the woods at night because our reliance on our eyes over our ears and nose means that we are far more likely to be prey than predator once darkness falls. We are hypersensitive to the possibility that our friends or neighbors might reject us because expulsion from our group was an existential threat for our ancestors. We gain comfort and security from home and hearth because they provided our ancestors protection from the elements and predators. All these preferences have been around far longer than we’ve been Homo sapiens.
However, despite their importance, survival goals are often trumped by reproduction goals. The most fundamental example of this trade-off can be seen in the aging process itself. We grow old and die largely because we spend precious biological resources on our efforts to attract, retain, and reproduce with mates rather than on tissue maintenance and repair. If we passed on our genetic material through longevity rather than reproduction, evolution would have ensured that we spent enough resources on tissue maintenance to enable us to live for centuries rather than years. In principle, such an outcome is possible, as longevity enables longer periods of reproduction and hence more offspring, but the prevalence of predators and parasites made any strategy based on longevity an unlikely prospect. Because our ancestors rarely had the opportunity to die of old age (recall Figure 8.1), efforts spent on living longer were largely wasted, and thus biological resources were better spent on more immediate mating goals. For this reason, a trait that helps us reproduce when we’re young will typically have a selective advantage, even if it kills us when we’re old.
Such an effect can be seen in the ε4 allele of the ApoE gene, which is associated with an increased likelihood of developing Alzheimer’s late in life. Ironically, this allele is also associated with better cognitive functioning early in life. As a consequence of the benefits it brings when we’re young, this killer gene is widespread in the population. Evolution’s tendency to sacrifice survival in service of reproduction means that we have numerous self-destructive tendencies that might be considered the psychological equivalent of the ε4 allele of the ApoE gene.
Perhaps the most famous example of a psychological ε4 allele can be found in male risk taking and conflict. Often referred to as testosterone poisoning or just male stupidity, the biggest demographic risk factor in most industrialized societies is the combination of being young and male. Figure 10.4, based on research by biologist Ian Owens at Imperial College London, uses mortality data from the United States in the late 1990s to show that once men hit puberty, they are much more likely than women to die in conflicts with one another, car crashes, and pretty much every other type of accident.
Figure 10.4. Male and female accidental death and homicide rates in the United States. The y-axis shows annual deaths per 100,000 people per year. (Adapted from Owens, 2002)
What many people don’t realize is that male stupidity is actually an adaptation to female choosiness, as male risk taking and conflict seeking are products of sexual selection. This may seem counterintuitive, as women are often the first to point out that they’re not attracted by male stupidity, so let me explain what I mean.
You can trace your male ancestry through your Y chromosome (or your father’s Y chromosome if you’re female); you can also trace your female ancestry via your mitochondrial DNA, which is inherited only from your mother and traces your female line. If you were to conduct these analyses in a large enough sample, you’d find that there were many more females than males in your ancestry. At first glance this imbalance seems impossible, as it takes two to tango. But, of course, some men have lots of partners and father many children; other men not so much. Men are far more likely than women to have a very large number of children, and also far more likely to get left out of the mating game altogether.
Risk taking provides an opportunity to shift from being a monk to a Casanova, so men have evolved a tendency to take risks if those risks might pay off in reproductive opportunities. Because men have greater variability in their reproductive success (i.e., many men bear no children, and some men bear a large number), they are more inclined to take risks than women. In contrast, risk taking is imprudent for women, as they are highly likely to have a similar number of offspring whether they play it safe or take outlandish risks.
Male stupidity is further enhanced by the fact that risk taking itself is an honest signal of male quality. Thinking back to chapter 4, you’ll recall that this means that risk taking communicates reliable information about how robust and skilled a person is. If you succeed at the risk, then you’re skilled. If you fail but survive, then you’re robust. If you fail and don’t survive, well, that’s indicative, too. For this reason, women can use male risk taking as a sign of quality, suggesting that men are likely to evolve a tendency to take risks when they have the opportunity to attract a woman. This idea had been widely demonstrated in the animal kingdom, but my PhD student Richard Ronay and I were keen to see if we could find any evidence for it in humans.
When testing a new idea, we typically begin as inexpensively as possible, so in our initial lab studies, we asked men to pump up cyber balloons on a computer. Every pump earned them money, but every pump also increased the risk that the balloon would pop and they would lose everything. Consistent with predictions, we found that men pumped the e-balloons larger after seeing pictures of attractive women. Chances are you’re thinking the same thing we were: that’s a perfectly good start, but it’s not very impressive evidence of risk taking.
For our next experiment we bought ourselves some “shock balls” on eBay. This delightful game involves an electrified ball that randomly lights up and simultaneously shocks whoever is holding it. We decided to use the shock balls to create a game similar to the one we used with the cyber balloons. Men would get paid for every second they held the ball, but if they held it for too long they would lose all their money and get shocked as well. We thought that men might hold the shock ball longer if they were exposed to attractive women. Sure enough, that effect emerged as well, but we remained underwhelmed with the magnitude of the risk taking involved in this task. Shock balls don’t really put a premium on skill or robustness.
The problem we faced is that it’s not easy to study serious risk taking in the lab, as it’s unethical to put people in a situation in which they might genuinely get hurt. We struggled with this problem for a while before Richard came up with a great idea: why not study skateboarders? They are taking some pretty serious risks already, and all we have to do is show up with an attractive woman and see if that makes a difference.
So, we hired a beautiful research assistant and headed off to skateboard parks. In the first stage of the experiment, a male researcher approached a skateboarder and asked if he could film him making ten attempts at a trick that he was working on but hadn’t yet mastered. In the second stage of the experiment, the same skateboarder was either approached by the male experimenter or by the attractive female we had hired, who asked to film the same ten tricks. After the skateboarders completed their second round of tricks, we took a saliva sample to measure their testosterone.
Just as we expected, testosterone went up in the presence of the female experimenter, and the higher the testosterone levels, the more risks the skateboarders took. As a consequence of their greater risk taking, they crashed more often but they successfully landed more tricks as well. Both outcomes serve a purpose as far as the skateboarders are concerned. Successful landings display skill, and crash landings show robustness. Sure enough, our participants shrugged off bleeding elbows and knees, and also declined our ethically mandated offer of helmets and kneepads at the onset of the experiment.
What can we infer about happiness from this conflict between survival and reproduction? The first lesson is that risk taking and other foolish things that young men do are not “pathologies,” signs of their disconnection from the modern world, or other labels often provided by social commentators. Rather, they are evolved strategies that made perfect sense for our ancestors and probably continue to make reproductive sense today.
The second lesson is that trying to prevent our sons, brothers, or friends from taking unnecessary risks is a bit like pissing into the wind. Removing the opportunity for young men to engage in competition and risk taking is a bad idea, and likely to lead to unpleasant blowback. Young men feel millions of years of evolutionary pressure, emanating from their testicles, pushing them toward risk and competition. For this reason, the best bet is not to eliminate risk entirely, but to replace truly dangerous risk and conflict with more benign opportunities for thrill seeking and competition. Sports in which you can’t get hurt at all are unlikely to fulfill such goals, but sports in which you won’t get hurt too badly are a great substitute.
Cooperation and Competition
As I discuss in chapter 1, our enhanced capacity for cooperation was the key adaptation that allowed our ancestors to survive the move from the trees. Because we evolved to cooperate with one another, we also evolved a cheater-detection system and a strong emotional response to free riders. We all know the feelings of anger and righteous indignation when others take advantage of us. This evolved response explains why one of the continuing arguments surrounding our welfare system is whether recipients are lazy people making suckers of the rest of us or disadvantaged people who deserve our sympathy and help.
Our outrage and anger when we are cheated ensure that others in our group cooperate with us, but our emotions have also been shaped by the underlying cooperation goal itself. We don’t really like people who cooperate with us only to reciprocate our earlier help, or to gain our later cooperation in return. Rather, we like people who are friendly, kind, and generous, who enjoy cooperating for cooperation’s sake. That, of course, means that other people like (or dislike) us for the same reasons, which gave a substantial evolutionary advantage to our ancestors who genuinely enjoyed cooperating. This is why we often share resources with strangers who will never be able to help us in return.
Economists are sometimes surprised when people share with strangers, but this surprise emerges from a misunderstanding of our evolutionary history. It may seem that we’re setting ourselves up to be suckers, but even though generous people do get exploited, in the long run, they win far more than they lose. Generous people are more popular than stingy or calculating people all over the world. When Hadza hunter-gatherers in Tanzania break camp and go off in different directions, the generous ones have lots of people who want to be with them, while the stingy ones are at constant risk of being left alone. When the Martu people of western Australia head off on morning hunts, the generous people are always chosen as partners even if they’re not the best hunters, while the stingy ones are often forgotten and left behind. The same effects hold among the Quechua pastoralists in the Peruvian Andes, and every other people on earth for whom we have the necessary data.*
As a consequence of these evolutionary pressures, we evolved to be mindlessly helpful, automatic cooperators: we cooperate without thinking because cooperation is our default reaction when people need our help. When people participate in experiments in which they must choose whether to cooperate with others or defect, cooperation is chosen more quickly than defection, even if the sensible choice is to defect. The same effect emerges when people are forced to make snap decisions; they are far more likely to choose cooperation.
I remember being delighted when this research on mindless helpfulness was first published, as it explained my completely idiotic behavior when I risked a child’s life for a forty-cent ice-cream cone. About a dozen years ago I was riding down an escalator with my wife and two small children while carrying a McDonald’s ice-cream cone that I had just purchased for them. As we started the ride down, I heard a woman screaming at the bottom. When I looked toward her, I saw the hands of a small child gripping onto the handrail of the upward escalator, but the child himself was out of view. I realized that he was riding up on the outside of the escalator and had apparently been carried too far up and was now afraid to drop off. This was a major problem, as the top of the escalator was two stories high, and three-quarters of the way up there was a decorative pole abutting the escalator that would soon dislodge the boy from his rather tenuous hold.
It was an easy matter to jump over the handrail to the other escalator, so I ran down and reached the little boy a few yards before he got to the pole. He weighed almost nothing, and I easily picked him up by his arms from the far side of the escalator. But here’s the stupid part: I risked gumming up the whole operation by virtue of the fact that I was on autopilot, in a mindlessly helpful state.
As I ran down the escalator, rather than chucking my ice cream to the ground below or dropping it on the escalator, I transferred it to my pinkie finger so I could continue to hold it while I reached over the handrail to grab the boy’s arms. I’m sure that this process slowed me down a bit, and I’m also sure that it was harder to grab him while I was simultaneously trying to avoid dropping my ice cream. The ice cream also nearly got me punched in the face, as by now the boy’s father had heard his wife screaming and saw me riding the escalator away from her, holding their small child and carrying an ice-cream cone.
I can only imagine what was running through his mind, but thankfully, he decided to withhold judgment and simply ran down the escalator and grabbed his child from me. When the rush of the event was over, I sat there looking at the ice-cream cone in my hand and wondering how I could have been so stupid. In retrospect, my effort to help the little boy was clearly conducted on autopilot. Without the cognitive wherewithal to weigh the costs and benefits of holding on to the ice-cream cone, I automatically followed the standard rules of politeness not to throw food on the ground. Indeed, cases of helping gone awry are so common that many countries (and U.S. states) have adopted “Good Samaritan Laws,” which protect would-be helpers from lawsuits if they make matters worse.*
The desire to cooperate is a powerful force, and the outcome of these evolutionary pressures is a motivational system that is highly attuned to helping others. We want the grandkids to come over for Sunday lunch, and we gain genuine satisfaction from helping family and friends. In a recent World Values Survey of nearly a hundred countries, people around the world rated family as the single most important thing in their lives, and this makes perfect evolutionary sense. But the altruistic satisfaction we gain from cooperating extends beyond kin and even close friends to our entire community.
As I discuss in chapter 3, our communities are much larger now than the ones in which we originally evolved, but the psychological principles that link us to our community have the same effects they’ve always had. In that sense, we haven’t changed in any fundamental way from our hunter-gatherer selves. Integration with our community was and is one of the keys to living the good life. Unfortunately, as we’ve become wealthier and more reliant on technology, we have simultaneously reduced our reliance on one another and thereby unintentionally disrupted our integration with our neighbors and larger community.
Some people find it easy to enmesh themselves into new communities, and thus frequent moves don’t impinge on their life satisfaction. Extroverts are such people, as they enjoy the company of others whom they don’t know well, and view getting to know people as an opportunity. Introverts, in contrast, find meeting lots of new people difficult and unpleasant, so moving to a new neighborhood, city, or state has a major impact on their life satisfaction. Integration with one’s community is important to everyone’s life satisfaction, but how this is best achieved differs among people. For extroverts, pulling up stakes and heading across the country or around the world is of lesser consequence. For introverts, there will be a price to pay for frequent life moves, and career or schooling opportunities in new communities must be considered carefully in light of their offsetting costs.
It’s important to keep in mind that “offsetting costs” are not just temporary feelings of unhappiness. As we discuss in the last chapter, happiness is the body’s cue to allow the immune system to function at peak efficiency, and frequent unhappiness has long-term health costs. The importance of community integration for health can be seen in Figure 10.5, from research by Shigehiro Oishi and Ulrich Schimmack. This graph shows that frequent residential moves in childhood lead to accumulating damage to the health of introverts. Even though the damage occurs in childhood, the data suggest that they never fully recover. Introverts who moved frequently during childhood suffer greater late-life mortality, while extroverts are unaffected by childhood moves.
Figure 10.5. Childhood residential moves and mortality for ages 60–70 for introverts and extroverts. (Adapted from Oishi and Schimmack, 2010)
These data reflect the costs of breaking connections with our community, but of course most people are focused on creating and sustaining such connections. Life satisfaction is achieved by being embedded in your community and by supporting community members who are in need. This explains why the same people who adamantly oppose welfare are often incredibly generous in supporting downtrodden members of their own communities. When they are assured that the need is genuine and that they are not being taken for a ride, people of all political stripes endeavor to help their fellow humans.
Charity supports those in need, but feeling you have made a contribution to your community is the more important manifestation of this effect. We need to be of value to our community—our ancestors who were not of value were at risk of ostracism and hence death—and the most obvious way to be of value is to produce more than you cost. This calculus may not be conscious, but it drives us to be contributing members of society. When someone asks how you’d like to be remembered after you’re gone, what they are really asking about is the nature of your contribution to your community.
Happiness and Learning
As I’ve mentioned throughout this book, humans actively learn most of what we need to know to survive and thrive. We’re born knowing very little, with a brain that is really only half-baked but that would be too large to birth if we waited for it to be fully cooked. As a consequence, we have an inordinately long period of development before we can become viable, contributing members of our community. Unlike baby wildebeests, which can run from predators soon after they are born, we’re pretty much anyone’s potential snack for over a decade.
Our long period of development is consumed almost entirely by learning the means of survival used by our group. As discussed in chapter 2, our flexibility has enabled us to colonize the entire planet. But our flexibility also means that there is no way we can rely on inborn knowledge or instinct to survive. As a consequence, evolution has ensured that learning is tightly linked to our motivational system; humans all over the world love to learn. Curiosity is one of our fundamental drives, and the satisfaction associated with learning and mastering something new is universal.
The motivational importance of curiosity is widely understood, but there are two important forms of learning (and therefore two important sources of life satisfaction) that people often fail to recognize: play and storytelling. Play is universal in humans just as it is among our mammalian cousins. Play is most common in animals before they reach maturity, because it is a form of learning the rules and strategies of adult life. Play also helps humans and other animals learn to cooperate, as their early interactions with one another are positive and teach them who reciprocates and who does not. Play provides opportunities for young males to learn to compete for females, it teaches strategies for eventually rising in the adult hierarchy, and it helps juveniles learn to hunt prey and escape predators. Kittens like nothing better than to pounce on one another in mock battles; little boys enjoy this as well; and all human children engage in endless hours of pretend play, sport, and games. Because humans are unique in the extraordinary amount of information they must learn, the importance of play has extended beyond our childhood and into our adult lives. In the absence of play, life is a lot less fun.
The importance of play is common to all mammals (and the occasional bird and reptile), but storytelling is unique to humans. A major advantage of human learning is that our incredible communicative abilities enable us to incorporate the learning and accomplishments of others into our understanding of the world. The oldest and most important form of this type of learning is our rich oral tradition. Storytelling can be found in all human cultures, and surely began when our hunter-gatherer ancestors sat around the fire at the end of the day and regaled each other with tales of their experiences. Storytelling around the fire is still an important activity in hunter-gatherer communities; it’s a time when the immediate economic and social concerns of the day are put aside and people focus on the broader patterns, rules, and lessons for achieving a productive life in their community.
Good storytellers gained status in their group because they were valued for the entertainment and learning they provided. In our world these roles are occupied by comedians, talk-show hosts, filmmakers, ministers, imams, rabbis, authors, academics, and political pundits who entertain, inform, and transmit social norms to their listeners. Everyone evolved a proclivity to enjoy listening to stories, as hearing about the trials and tribulations of others provides a risk-free way to learn the difficult and sometimes expensive lessons garnered from their experiences. Finally, storytelling connected community members to each other through shared emotional experiences, a sense of shared reality, and a common knowledge of how to approach the world.
When I tell my story about accidentally peeing in the sink at a Springsteen concert, and listeners share my embarrassment and laughter, I feel validated, and my connection to my social group is a little bit stronger. When I listen to the wonderful, outrageous, or scary stories of my friends and discover how they turned out, I learn what to do if I ever find myself in similar circumstances. For these reasons, listening to and telling stories are two important sources of happiness and life satisfaction.
Happiness, Personality, and Development
As I suggest earlier in this chapter, there is more than one way to be a successful human, and hence more than one route to happiness. If I’m big and strong, I might attract a mate through sports or other physical competitions, but if I’m small and weak, I’d be better off using my humor or kindness. Such differences in brawn, brains, and personality can also make me suited to different types of careers. People tend to choose a strategy of best fit by pursuing activities that rely on their strengths and avoid their weaknesses. Because our motivational system is attuned to our potential for success and the degree to which our group values us, different activities make different people happy. If I’m better at art than athletics, I’ll probably find greater satisfaction from painting than from playing football.
These individual differences, in turn, also fluctuate over the course of our life span. When we are children, it’s very difficult to contribute to our group, and hence children gain most of their happiness from their activities with one another and from acceptance by their parents and peers. Because their unique features are more likely to be noticed by others than their common ones, their sense of self becomes tied to the ways they can differentiate themselves positively in their group.
Even in childhood, people start to focus on and develop the unique talents that will make them most productive when they reach adulthood, but of course their childlike worldview will often take them in odd directions. I remember when my daughter learned to read by listening in while I was helping her older brother with his homework, and I tried to get her to brag about it to her preschool teacher. “What did you learn to do yesterday?” I asked her when we sat down with her teacher. She looked puzzled for a moment, and then brightened up and announced, “I learned to slide down the fire pole!” As this example reveals, positive distinctiveness is not always achieved by children in a manner that reflects adult priorities.
Once we reach adulthood, our contribution to the community becomes important, and we start to rely on the skills we’ve learned in an effort to rise in the hierarchy and be valued by members of our group. These skills are relatively stable in most people throughout young and middle adulthood, but they begin to show notable changes in late life. At that point, physical skills typically decline. Offsetting their deteriorating physical skills, older adults tend to have a larger body of knowledge, which made them valuable in our ancestral past.
Unfortunately, in our modern and rapidly changing world, the knowledge of older adults can become obsolete. But the evolutionary pressures that push us to contribute to our group don’t change just because we have gotten older, and many older adults strive to find ways to make a positive impact on their community. Issues of legacy and care for others become increasingly important among older adults, as these are often their greatest opportunities to remain connected and helpful to their community. In our quest for the good life, we should remember that sitting back and putting our feet up may sound great, but retirement is likely to be more satisfying if we can also find a way to make a contribution to others. When we’re overwhelmed by work and other commitments and have no time for ourselves, a permanent vacation sounds like a great idea. But don’t be fooled by retirement brochures that promote only leisure activities—for most of us, that’s not as good as it sounds.
Pitfalls of a Modern World
Pondering the good life may be a uniquely modern pastime, but the ways we achieve it are by following the ancient strategies that made our ancestors successful. Sex and food, parenthood and play, mastery and storytelling, friendship and kin, hearth and home, community and contribution—these were the keys to success in our past and they remain the keys to our happiness today. Nonetheless, our modern world provides many new opportunities for happiness, and it is not always clear when the modern version is just as good as the original.
For example, movies and television have replaced many aspects of storytelling, and both are a lot of fun. But storytelling is much more than just relating a series of events, and movies and television don’t connect people to each other in the same way that conversations do (unless we talk about them later, of course). To some degree, movies and television are thus a phenotypic indulgence (like potato chips), so it is no surprise that people rarely cite television programs as an important source of life satisfaction, no matter how much they love their favorite show. Anecdotal evidence suggests that books might be more likely than TV to have an important and lasting effect on us. If that is true, a critical part of storytelling may be the imaginative and generative processes taking place in our minds when someone else tells a tale that we cannot directly experience. But even books are typically less memorable and important than the stories we tell and are told, because reading is typically done alone.
Other aspects of our modern world that mimic important ancestral experiences provide much thinner gruel and leave us a lot less satisfied. Drugs and alcohol are probably the most notable examples of phenotypic indulgences, as they go straight to the brain regions responsible for pleasure without providing the physical or experiential basis from which that pleasure was meant to emanate. After drugs and alcohol, junk food comes in a close second, as the sugar, fat, and salt that our ancestors desperately sought in the past are overabundant today. Sadly, our struggle is now against what was once a healthy goal: to eat as much sugar, fat, and salt as possible.
The price we pay when we have too much of a good thing brings us to the final lesson I want to highlight from our evolutionary history. Long-term sexual relationships were our ancestors’ best recipe for raising successful offspring, and as a result we find long-term relationships particularly rewarding. When we partner with the right person, we have our best shot at a lasting increase in happiness. But evolution also gave us a preference for novel partners, as both men and women gain reproductive benefits when they put their genetic eggs into more than one basket.
The problem is that novel partners were relatively rare in our ancestral environment, as we spent our entire lives in the same small group of people. But we now live in a world in which novel partners—like fat, salt, and sugar—are in unending supply and serve as a constant temptation for us to abandon our current relationship to try out a new and more exciting one. Of course, the new relationship will soon become old, as the allure of novelty is fleeting by definition and thus eventually unsatisfying. Rather remarkably, that obvious fact doesn’t prevent people from being serial monogamists now, just as it didn’t prevent our ancestors from adopting a similar mating strategy back in the day.
Most people are better at avoiding temptation than resisting it, and, sure enough, people who escape the lure of novelty usually achieve this goal by not exposing themselves to it. Marriages last longer in rural areas than in cities, and much longer still if you’re a nobody than if you’re a famous actor or rock star. And these findings bring us back to the German folk saying about the inevitable disappointment we experience when we achieve our goals. Universal adoration and fame are some of the most common dreams of people all over the world, but you need only reflect on the turbulent lives and repeated divorces of celebrities to realize how much happier you are being unknown.
Getting to the Good Life in “Ten Easy Steps”
If anyone who doesn’t know you tells you there are ten easy steps to happiness, you’re being taken for a ride. As I’ve just discussed, not only is there no such thing as lasting happiness, but paths to happiness differ for different people. Nevertheless, approaching happiness from an evolutionary perspective can help us achieve it, at least some of the time, and can also help us understand happiness itself. So, I’m not really offering ten easy steps here, but in service of these goals, I summarize the lessons of the last two chapters in ten essential points.
- Stay present. Our proclivity to live in the future disrupts our ability to enjoy the present, particularly when the present provides unexpected pleasures. If you fail to find happiness in the pleasures of daily life, then a program of mindfulness or meditation might help you. Learning to live in the present might also reduce your stress levels if you tend to worry about the future. Keep in mind, however, that living in the now is a lot more difficult than it sounds, largely because you are trying to shut down one of the most important skills that evolution gave you in your capacity to plan for the future.
- Seek out sweet moments. It’s almost impossible to become permanently happier, but that doesn’t mean you can’t have more fun in your life. Achieving our evolutionary imperatives brings us positive emotions that range from contentment to great joy. We just need to be prepared for the fact that these feelings won’t last. But who wouldn’t opt for more frequent happy moments?
- Guard your happiness to stay healthy. Happiness is critical for physical health. If you are sacrificing your happiness for something that isn’t incredibly important, you should ask yourself how long this situation has lasted and how long it’s likely to last in the future. Short-term sacrifices can be sensible, but long-term sacrifices should be avoided if at all possible. If you must sacrifice your happiness to achieve other goals, try to prepare a time line and stick to it. Otherwise, you might wake up one day to find your short-term sacrifice has been going on for years, and your happiness and health are a thing of the past.
- Accumulate experiences, not stuff. The great times you have become a part of you; the great things you own gather dust or become trash. That said, if your memory for your lived experiences is as bad as mine, you might struggle to recall many of the great times you’ve had, and then find yourself at risk of owning nothing and remembering little. A simple solution to this problem is to take pictures, and even purchase the occasional doodad from your travels or adventures. By scattering these reminders around your home or office, you can relive your great times and laugh at the adventures that went awry.
- Prioritize food, friends, and sexual relationships. These three things are the basis of day-to-day happiness. Note that there is no mention here of money or freedom. There’s nothing wrong with having lots of cash and autonomy, but their pursuit shouldn’t interfere with opportunities to enjoy good food, sex, and friends. These three things are most likely to provide the happy experiences that accumulate into a life worth living.
- Cooperate. Working together with family, friends, and colleagues to achieve mutual goals is one of the most important sources of life satisfaction. Your achievements won’t make you permanently happier, but cooperation is inherently rewarding and provides a foundation for life satisfaction. Happiness doesn’t emerge only from leisure and fun, but also from work and productivity, particularly when you are satisfying your evolutionary imperative of cooperating with others. Not all the work we do is meaningful, as life has necessary drudgery, but working with people you trust and admire lightens the load.
- Embed yourself in community. Give careful thought to any decisions that require you to pull up roots and go somewhere else. We evolved to be curious, so new people and new places are forever enticing. But you don’t need to abandon old friends to meet new people and see new places. Even if you have a strong wanderlust, you should try to retain your connections to your community.
- Learn new things. Learning is a lifelong source of happiness, and play and storytelling are two important sources of learning. At all stages of life, from childhood to young adulthood through to midlife and old age, we enjoy mastering new things. If you choose your activities thoughtfully, you can enjoy the process of learning up to your last healthy days on this earth.
- Play to your strengths. There are many roads to happiness, but almost all of them are found by pursuing your particular strengths, which are likely to change over time. Change is intimidating for almost everyone, as it requires us to move from the known to the unknown, and hence from the predictable to the unpredictable. For this reason, many people remain too long with jobs or hobbies that once suited them but do not anymore. Just because you once loved something doesn’t mean you are destined to always feel that way. Your changing sources of happiness are probably telling you that your old life doesn’t suit you anymore.
- Seek the original source. Our modern world provides numerous opportunities for happiness that resemble but do not duplicate the original sources. Some are perfectly fine (e.g., TV and movies), some probably do more harm than good (e.g., alcohol, drugs, and junk food), but none is as good as the ancestral originals. Time with family and friends sits at the top of our species’ checklist and is our best recipe for happiness.