There's More to Life Than Being Happy
http://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2013/01/theres-more-to-life-than-being-happy/266805/?google_editors_picks=truehttp://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2013/01/theres-more-to-life-than-being-happy/266805/?google_editors_picks=true
By
Emily Esfahani Smith
"It
is the very pursuit of happiness that thwarts happiness."
I
n
September 1942, Viktor Frankl, a prominent Jewish psychiatrist and neurologist
in Vienna, was arrested and transported to a Nazi concentration camp with his
wife and parents. Three years later, when his camp was liberated, most of his
family, including his pregnant wife, had perished -- but he, prisoner number
119104, had lived. In his bestselling 1946 book, Man's Search
for Meaning, which he wrote in nine days about his experiences
in the camps, Frankl concluded that the difference between those who had lived
and those who had died came down to one thing: Meaning, an insight he came to
early in life. When he was a high school
student, one of his science teachers declared to the class,
"Life is nothing more than a combustion process, a process of
oxidation." Frankl jumped out of his chair and responded, "Sir, if
this is so, then what can be the meaning of life?"
As
he saw in the camps, those who found meaning even in the most horrendous
circumstances were far more resilient to suffering than those who did not.
"Everything can be taken from a man but one thing," Frankl wrote in Man's
Search for Meaning, "the last of the human freedoms -- to choose one's
attitude in any given set of circumstances, to choose one's own way."
Frankl
worked as a therapist in the camps, and in his book, he gives the example of
two suicidal inmates he encountered there. Like many others in the camps, these
two men were hopeless and thought that there was nothing more to expect from
life, nothing to live for. "In both cases," Frankl writes, "it
was a question of getting them to realize that life was still expecting
something from them; something in the future was expected of them." For
one man, it was his young child, who was then living in a foreign country. For
the other, a scientist, it was a series of books that he needed to finish.
Frankl writes:
This uniqueness and
singleness which distinguishes each individual and gives a meaning to his
existence has a bearing on creative work as much as it does on human love. When
the impossibility of replacing a person is realized, it allows the
responsibility which a man has for his existence and its continuance to appear
in all its magnitude. A man who becomes conscious of the responsibility he
bears toward a human being who affectionately waits for him, or to an
unfinished work, will never be able to throw away his life. He knows the
"why" for his existence, and will be able to bear almost any
"how."
In
1991, the Library of Congress and Book-of-the-Month Club listed Man's Search
for Meaning as one of the 10
most influential books in the United States. It has sold millions of
copies worldwide. Now, over twenty years later, the book's ethos -- its
emphasis on meaning, the value of suffering, and responsibility to something
greater than the self -- seems to be at odds with our culture, which is more
interested in the pursuit of individual happiness than in the search for
meaning. "To the European," Frankl wrote, "it is a
characteristic of the American culture that, again and again, one is commanded
and ordered to 'be happy.' But happiness cannot be pursued; it must ensue. One
must have a reason to 'be happy.'"
According to
Gallup , the happiness levels of Americans are at a four-year high
-- as is, it seems, the number of best-selling books with the word
"happiness" in their titles. At this writing, Gallup
also reports that nearly 60 percent all Americans today feel happy without a
lot of stress or worry. On the other hand, according to the Center for
Disease Control, about 4 out of 10 Americans have not discovered a
satisfying life purpose. Forty percent either do not think their lives have a
clear sense of purpose or are neutral about whether their lives have purpose.
Nearly a quarter of Americans feel neutral or do not have a strong sense of
what makes their lives meaningful. Research has shown that having purpose and
meaning in life increases overall well-being and life satisfaction, improves
mental and physical health, enhances resiliency, enhances self-esteem, and
decreases the chances of depression. On top of that, the single-minded pursuit
of happiness is ironically leaving people less happy, according to recent
research. "It is the very pursuit of happiness," Frankl
knew, "that thwarts happiness."
***
This
is why some researchers are cautioning against the pursuit of mere happiness.
In a new study, which will be published this year in a forthcoming issue of the
Journal of
Positive Psychology, psychological scientists asked nearly 400
Americans aged 18 to 78 whether they thought their lives were meaningful and/or
happy. Examining their self-reported attitudes toward meaning, happiness, and
many other variables -- like stress levels, spending patterns, and having
children -- over a month-long period, the researchers found that a meaningful
life and happy life overlap in certain ways, but are ultimately very different.
Leading a happy life, the psychologists found, is associated with being a
"taker" while leading a meaningful life corresponds with being a
"giver."
"Happiness
without meaning characterizes a relatively shallow, self-absorbed or even
selfish life, in which things go well, needs and desire are easily satisfied,
and difficult or taxing entanglements are avoided," the authors write.
How
do the happy life and the meaningful life differ? Happiness, they found, is
about feeling good. Specifically, the researchers found that people who are
happy tend to think that life is easy, they are in good physical health, and
they are able to buy the things that they need and want. While not having
enough money decreases how happy and meaningful you consider your life to be,
it has a much greater impact on happiness. The happy life is also defined by a
lack of stress or worry.
Nearly a quarter of
Americans do not have a strong sense of what makes their lives meaningful.
Most
importantly from a social perspective, the pursuit of happiness is associated
with selfish behavior -- being, as mentioned, a "taker" rather than a
"giver." The psychologists give an evolutionary explanation for this:
happiness is about drive reduction. If you have a need or a desire -- like
hunger -- you satisfy it, and that makes you happy. People become happy, in
other words, when they get what they want. Humans, then, are not the only ones
who can feel happy. Animals have needs and drives, too, and when those drives
are satisfied, animals also feel happy, the researchers point out.
"Happy
people get a lot of joy from receiving benefits from others while people
leading meaningful lives get a lot of joy from giving to others,"
explained Kathleen Vohs, one of the authors of the study, in a recent
presentation at the University of Pennsylvania. In other words, meaning
transcends the self while happiness is all about giving the self what it wants.
People who have high meaning in their lives are more likely to help others in
need. "If anything, pure happiness is linked to not helping others in
need," the researchers write.
What
sets human beings apart from animals is not the pursuit of happiness, which
occurs all across the natural world, but the pursuit of meaning, which is unique
to humans, according to Roy Baumeister, the lead researcher of the study and
author, with John Tierney, of the recent book Willpower: Rediscovering the Greatest
Human Strength. Baumeister, a social psychologists at Florida
State University, was named
an ISI highly cited scientific researcher in 2003.
The
study participants reported deriving meaning from giving a part of themselves
away to others and making a sacrifice on behalf of the overall group. In the
words of Martin E. P. Seligman, one of the leading psychological scientists
alive today, in the meaningful life "you use your highest strengths and
talents to belong to and serve something you believe is larger than the
self." For instance, having more meaning in one's life was associated with
doing activities like buying presents for others, taking care of kids, and
arguing. People whose lives have high levels of meaning often actively seek
meaning out even when they know it will come at the expense of happiness.
Because they have invested themselves in something bigger than themselves, they
also worry more and have higher levels of stress and anxiety in their lives
than happy people. Having children, for example, is associated with the
meaningful life and requires self-sacrifice, but it has been famously
associated with low happiness among parents, including the ones in this study.
In fact, according to Harvard psychologist Daniel Gilbert, research shows that parents are
less happy interacting with their children than they are exercising,
eating, and watching television.
"Partly
what we do as human beings is to take care of others and contribute to others.
This makes life meaningful but it does not necessarily make us happy,"
Baumeister told me in an interview.
Meaning
is not only about transcending the self, but also about transcending the
present moment -- which is perhaps the most important finding of the study,
according to the researchers. While happiness is an emotion felt in the here
and now, it ultimately fades away, just as all emotions do; positive affect and
feelings of pleasure are fleeting. The amount of time people report feeling
good or bad correlates with happiness but not at all with meaning.
Meaning,
on the other hand, is enduring. It connects the past to the present to the
future. "Thinking beyond the present moment, into the past or future, was
a sign of the relatively meaningful but unhappy life," the researchers
write. "Happiness is not generally found in contemplating the past or
future." That is, people who thought more about the present were happier,
but people who spent more time thinking about the future or about past
struggles and sufferings felt more meaning in their lives, though they were
less happy.
Having
negative events happen to you, the study found, decreases your happiness but
increases the amount of meaning you have in life. Another study from 2011
confirmed this, finding that people who have meaning in their lives, in the
form of a clearly defined purpose, rate their satisfaction with life higher
even when they were feeling bad than those who did not have a clearly defined
purpose. "If there is meaning in life at all," Frankl wrote,
"then there must be meaning in suffering."
***
Which
brings us back to Frankl's life and, specifically, a decisive experience he had
before he was sent to the concentration camps. It was an incident that
emphasizes the difference between the pursuit of meaning and the pursuit of
happiness in life.
In
his early adulthood, before he and his family were taken away to the camps,
Frankl had established himself as one of the leading psychiatrists in Vienna
and the world. As a 16-year-old boy, for example, he struck up a correspondence
with Sigmund Freud and one day sent Freud a two-page paper he had written.
Freud, impressed by Frankl's talent, sent the paper to the International
Journal of Psychoanalysis for publication. "I hope you don't
object," Freud wrote the teenager.
While
he was in medical school, Frankl distinguished himself even further. Not only
did he establish
suicide-prevention centers for teenagers -- a precursor to his work
in the camps -- but he was also developing his signature contribution to the
field of clinical psychology: logotherapy, which is meant to help people
overcome depression and achieve well-being by finding their unique meaning in
life. By 1941, his theories had received international attention and he was
working as the chief of neurology at Vienna's Rothschild Hospital, where he
risked his life and career by making false diagnoses of mentally ill patients
so that they would not, per Nazi orders, be euthanized.
That
was the same year when he had a decision to make, a decision that would change
his life. With his career on the rise and the threat of the Nazis looming over
him, Frankl had applied for a visa to America, which he was granted in 1941. By
then, the Nazis had already started rounding up the Jews and taking them away
to concentration camps, focusing on the elderly first. Frankl knew that it
would only be time before the Nazis came to take his parents away. He also knew
that once they did, he had a responsibility to be there with his parents to
help them through the trauma of adjusting to camp life. On the other hand, as a
newly married man with his visa in hand, he was tempted to leave for America
and flee to safety, where he could distinguish himself even further in his
field.
As
Anna S. Redsand recounts
in her biography of Frankl, he was at a loss for what to do, so he set out for
St. Stephan's Cathedral in Vienna to clear his head. Listening to the organ
music, he repeatedly asked himself, "Should I leave my parents behind?...
Should I say goodbye and leave them to their fate?" Where did his
responsibility lie? He was looking for a "hint from heaven."
When
he returned home, he found it. A piece of marble was lying on the table. His
father explained that it was from the rubble of one of the nearby synagogues
that the Nazis had destroyed. The marble contained the fragment of one of the
Ten Commandments -- the one about honoring your father and your mother. With
that, Frankl decided to stay in Vienna and forgo whatever opportunities for
safety and career advancement awaited him in the United States. He decided to
put aside his individual pursuits to serve his family and, later, other inmates
in the camps.
The
wisdom that Frankl derived from his experiences there, in the middle of
unimaginable human suffering, is just as relevant now as it was then:
"Being human always points, and is directed, to something or someone,
other than oneself -- be it a meaning to fulfill or another human being to
encounter. The more one forgets himself -- by giving himself to a cause to
serve or another person to love -- the more human he is."
Baumeister
and his colleagues would agree that the pursuit of meaning is what makes human
beings uniquely human. By putting aside our selfish interests to serve someone
or something larger than ourselves -- by devoting our lives to
"giving" rather than "taking" -- we are not only expressing
our fundamental humanity, but are also acknowledging that that there is more to
the good life than the pursuit of simple happiness.
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