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What is the Secret to Happiness?
I love Discover magazine. If you like to keep abreast of
developments in science, including the science of
human behavior, Discover magazine is certainly one of
the best ways.
The June 2003 issue had a small item about a couple of
English economists, Andrew Oswald and Andrew Clark.
They developed a system for calculating the monetary
value of happiness and surveyed various populations
throughout the world. They found that "a poor, black
South African surviving on $200 a year is, on average,
as happy as an upper-middle-class American earning
$70,000"! How is this possible?
Think of it this way. Now that we have cellular phones,
we would feel miserable if suddenly we had to give
them up. Yet we are no happier today than we were
before there were cell phones. Thirty years ago, we
would have been miserable if we had to give up TV. But
we were no happier then than before the days of TV.
Seventy years ago, we would have been miserable if
we had to give up indoor plumbing. But we were no
happier then than we were before the days of indoor
plumbing. And so on and so on. We can strip away
convenience after convenience, and we will realize that
we are no happier today than our ancestors were
thousands of years ago. In fact, if you read
anthropological studies of human tribes living in the
forests (a great source is The Forest People, by Colin
Turnbull, about the Pygmies), you will find that they
are the happiest people in the world. That doesn't
mean that their lives are easy. They're not. They can
never be sure where their next meal will come from.
Most children born into nature die before they
are old enough to have children of their own. People in
nature exist by virtue of all their sharpened senses,
enabling them to survive indefinitely in the wild without
the benefit of modern technology.
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The Sin of Taking Things for Granted |
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Does this mean we should drop all our earthly
possessions and return to life as hunter gatherers? Of
course not. First of all, the planet could not feed six
billion people without modern agriculture. Secondly,
without having been brought up in nature since birth, it
would be almost impossible for us to develop the skills
to survive in the wild. And third, even if it were possible
to survive, we would be miserable with longing for the
luxuries we once had.
Just because Pygmies in the forest are happier than we
are, they don't disdain our technological advances.
Whenever primitive people are exposed to more modern
technology, they admire and desire it. Our
hunter/gatherer relatives would much rather wear our
comfortable factory-made clothing than their bark
loincloths. They eagerly go on hunting runs so they can
trade up for modern goods. Once they have
experienced something better than what they are used
to, they don't want to give it up.
The problem with us today is that we take what we
have for granted. To quote from the great Joni
Mitchell, "Don't it always seem to go/ That you don't
know what you've got till it's gone/ They paved
paradise/And put up a parking lot." We suffer through
our unbelievably comfortable lives, guided by the
illusion that we will only be happy when we have
enough money to buy a higher level of comfort. I'd bet
one of the reasons we in the Western world are
despised by people in poorer countries is that
we have so much luxury and have no appreciation for
it. They see us as decadent and degenerate, and I
wouldn't argue with them about that. Billions of people
in the world would be overjoyed to eat our garbage,
while we get upset when our cell phones can't get a
proper connection.
To read the previous newsletters... »
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Ancient Wisdom About Wealth |
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The secret to happiness is nothing new. Wise people
have understood it for thousands of years. The secret
is encapsulated in a Jewish saying found in the
compilation of law and wisdom called the Mishnah,
Ethics of the Fathers, written almost two thousand
years ago. The following is the Mishnah's ultimate
definition of wealth. (By wealth is meant the material
possessions necessary for contentment). It
reads, "Who is the wealthy person? He who is happy
with what he has."
You will never feel wealthy and happy as long as you
believe that what you have is not enough. Your net
worth can be 10 million dollars, but you'll feel poor if
you believe you should be worth 11 million. However, if
you are happy with what you have, regardless of how
little it may be, you automatically feel rich.
While I should probably feel grateful every moment
of the day, I don't think I'd accomplish much if I were
constantly focused on gratitude. However, I do feel
intense gratitude at least once a day. That is because
I am particularly grateful for indoor plumbing. Since
I shower at least once a day, this means that I feel
gratitude at least once a day. I am grateful to whatever
Higher Powers put me on the planet in a time and place
when ordinary people can live more luxuriously than
kings have lived throughout most of world history. What
a marvel it is to be able to strip naked and take a
long, hot shower even when the temperature is below
freezing outside. My mother grew up in Poland in the
first half of the century, and she's too embarrassed
to tell me how infrequently she got to have a bath.
Can you imagine what it was like when we were living
as hunter/gatherers and you wanted to wash your body
in the cold of winter?
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Getting More of What You Want |
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There is a paradoxical side benefit to appreciating what
you have: you tend to get more of what you want! You
can't use this principle like a scientific formula, and it
won't work if you fake it. Otherwise it is likely to
backfire. If you are anxiously waiting for your rewards,
you will be unhappy as long as they haven't arrived,
and your unhappiness is likely to breed failure. Only
when you are genuinely happy with what you have,
with no ulterior motive, will you be likely to get more of
what you want.
Why should being grateful for what you have bring you
more? It is not necessary to seek mystical explanations
for this. When you are happy, you treat others more
generously, so they treat you more generously in
return. You make them happy, so they try to make you
happy.
I can back this up with my personal experience.
The "game" that I developed and teach at my seminars
on anger control I believe to possibly be the most
powerful therapeutic technique one can find. Part of
me has wanted to make it available to others, but
another part of me has wanted to guard it closely as
my own personal possession and be the only one using
my method. I certainly did not want to be giving it
away cheaply. I decided to ignore my possessive
instinct when I was engaged by Cross Country
University to give seminars, and this has turned out to
be the best professional decision I have ever made.
Even though I only earn only a pittance for each
seminar participant, so many people come to learn it
that I am earning more money teaching my method
than I did by merely practicing it. And I am having the
tremendous satisfaction of helping incomparably more
people this way than I could possibly haver hoped for
by selfishly keeping it to myself.
So please learn from my experience: if you want more,
give more. But without expecting anything in return.
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The Paradox of "Rights" |
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Modern society is constantly fighting for more "rights."
We believe we are entitled to a life free from worry
about food, shelter, education and health care. We
believe we are entitled to be treated with respect by
virtue of birth, without having to do anything to
deserve respect. We are currently fighting for the right
to have no one treat us in a way we don't like.
But these rights don't really bring us happiness. True,
each additional right makes our lives easier because we
no longer have to fight to get the benefit the right
gives us. And it relieves us from the feeling that life is
unfair because others have benefits that we don't. But
the pleasure is short-lived. We quickly take the right
for granted and start becoming mad when the system
fails to provide us with the goods or services that the
right entitles us to. For instance, when kids are given
the right not to be made fun of, someone has to
enforce this right. The kids have to go to the teacher
or principal whenever someone calls them a name, and
if the school doesn't succeed in solving the problem,
which it usually doesn't because telling adults makes
fighting between kids escalate, then the kids and their
parents become even angrier than they were before.
They become angry not only at the kids who are doing
the insulting, they become angry at the school for not
granting them their rights.
And there is a never-ending list of rights that we can
fight for. As soon as we obtain one, we start anxiously
looking forward to the next one, and can't be happy till
that one is obtained for us. If you have ever known
people who are busy fighting for their rights, you
probably noticed that they are constantly angry and
complaining, which is good for neither physical or
emotional health. And after a while you want to get as
far away from these people as possible.
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Rights versus Resilience |
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Another drawback to "rights" is that they take away
the need for us to develop and use our personal skills.
Part of the pleasure of life comes from the feeling of
accomplishment of satisfying our own needs and
developing our abilities. Children make it so obvious
when the gleefully shout, "I did it all by myself!"
A "right" means that someone else has to give us what
we want rather than having to achieve it on our own.
It deprives us of the opportunity to become self-reliant
and resilient.
I am not suggesting that society take back the rights it
has given us. The job of a strong society is to become
increasingly fair and generous, to spread the wealth
around to its individual members. All I am saying is that
we should not confuse societal strength with individual
strength. They do not always go together, and are
sometimes opposed to each other. The very purpose of
rights is to relieve individuals of the responsibility to
work for the benefit granted by the right. We should
keep in mind that the happiest and most resilient
people in the world are not those with the most rights,
but those with no rights at all, the people like Pygmies
who are still hunter/gatherers living in nature. What we
should do, though, is constantly appreciate our rights
rather than take them for granted. Then we will be
truly happy.
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Cats Do It, Too. |
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No, I'm not talking about reproductive functions. I'm
referring to helping their siblings. For years, I've been
contending that human siblings, despite superficial
impressions, are not biologically programmed to want to
kill each other. If they did, you can be sure parents
would be spending a good part of their lives in the
emergency room. We have the illusion that siblings
want to kill each other only because we spend so much
time and effort trying to get them to stop fighting that
it seems they would be goners if not for our efforts. As
I demonstrate in my seminars and explain in my
website, siblings actually want to get along; it's only
because of our attempts to make them stop fighting
that they fight as much as they do.
In the world of Nature, siblings in higher species of
animals are born protecting each other. Look what I
came across in a cat calendar:
"Linda Wershing of Grey Eagle, Minnesota, writes that
Bowie was the largest kitten in a litter of 10 but had a
mellow personality even as a youngster. With the
utmost graciousness, he made sure that each of his
smaller siblings had access to the food dish."
Certainly basic human nature is at least at the level of
cats. Isn't it?
To learn more about sibling relations, read Izzy's free manual, "A Revolutionary Manaul for Handling Children's Aggression" »
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