Stumbling on Happiness

Emotional happiness is like that. It is the feeling common to the feelings we have when we see our new granddaughter smile for the first time, receive word of a promotion, help a wayward tourist find the art museum, taste Belgian chocolate toward the back of our tongue, inhale the scent of our lover’s shampoo, hear that song we used to like so much in school but haven’t heard in years, touch our cheek to kitten fur, cure cancer or get a really good snootful of cocaine. These feelings are different, of course, but they also have something in common. A piece of real estate is not the same as a share of stock, which is not the same as an ounce of gold, but all are forms of wealth that occupy different points on a scale of value. Similarly, the cocaine experience is not the kitten-fur experience, which is not the promotion experience, but all are forms of feeling that occupy different points on a scale of happiness. In each of these instances, an encounter with something in the world generates a roughly similar pattern of neural activity,7 and thus it makes sense that there is something common to our experiences of each–some conceptual coherence that has led human beings to group this hodgepodge of occurrences together in the same linguistic category for as long as anyone can remember. Indeed, when researchers analyse how all the words in a language are related to the others, they inevitably find that the positivity of the words–that is, the extent to which they refer to the experience of happiness or unhappiness–is the single most important determinant of their relationships.8 Despite Tolstoy’s fine efforts, most speakers consider war to be more closely related to vomit than it is to peace.

Happiness, then, is the you-know-what-I-mean feeling. If you are a human being who lives in this century and shares some of my cultural conditioning, then my pointing and comparing will have been effective and you will know exactly which feeling I mean. If you are an alien who is still struggling with yellow, then happiness is going to be a real challenge. But take heart: I would be similarly challenged if you told me that on your planet there is a feeling common to the acts of dividing numbers by three, banging one’s head lightly on a doorknob, and releasing rhythmic bursts of nitrogen from any orifice at any time except on Tuesday. I would have no idea what that feeling is, and I could only learn the name and hope to use it politely in conversation. Because emotional happiness is an experience, it can only be approximately defined by its antecedents and by its relation to other experiences.9 The poet Alexander Pope devoted about a quarter of his Essay on Man to the topic of happiness, and concluded with this question: ‘Who thus define it, say they more or less / Than this, that happiness is happiness?’10

Emotional happiness may resist our efforts to tame it by description, but when we feel it, we have no doubt about its reality and its importance. Everyone who has observed human behavior for more than thirty continuous seconds seems to have noticed that people are strongly, perhaps even primarily, perhaps even single-mindedly, motivated to feel happy. If there has ever been a group of human beings who prefer despair to delight, frustration to satisfaction and pain to pleasure, they must be very good at hiding because no one has ever seen them. People want to be happy, and all the other things they want are typically meant to be means to that end. Even when people forgo happiness in the moment–by dieting when they could be eating, or working late when they could be sleeping–they are usually doing so in order to increase its future yield. The dictionary tells us that to prefer is ‘to choose or want one thing rather than another because it would be more pleasant’, which is to say that the pursuit of happiness is built into the very definition of desire. In this sense, a preference for pain and suffering is not so much a diagnosable psychiatric condition as it is an oxymoron.

Psychologists have traditionally made striving toward happiness the centrepiece of their theories of human behavior because they have found that if they don’t, their theories don’t work so well. As Sigmund Freud wrote:

The question of the purpose of human life has been raised countless times; it has never yet received a satisfactory answer and perhaps does not admit of one…We will therefore turn to the less ambitious question of what men show by their behavior to be the purpose and intention of their lives. What do they demand of life and wish to achieve in it? The answer to this can hardly be in doubt. They strive after happiness; they want to become happy and to remain so. This endeavour has two sides, a positive and a negative aim. It aims, on the one hand, at an absence of pain and displeasure, and, on the other, at the experiencing of strong feelings of pleasure.11

Freud was an articulate champion of this idea but not its originator, and the same observation appears in some form or another in the psychological theories of Plato, Aristotle, Hobbes, Mill, Bentham and others. The philosopher and mathematician Blaise Pascal was especially clear on this point:

All men seek happiness. This is without exception. Whatever different means they employ, they all tend to this end. The cause of some going to war, and of others avoiding it, is the same desire in both, attended with different views. The will never takes the least step but to this object. This is the motive of every action of every man, even of those who hang themselves.12

Feeling Happy Because

If every thinker in every century has recognized that people seek emotional happiness, then how has so much confusion arisen over the meaning of the word? One of the problems is that many people consider the desire for happiness to be a bit like the desire for a bowel movement: something we all have, but not something of which we should be especially proud. The kind of happiness they have in mind is cheap and base–a vacuous state of ‘bovine contentment’13 that cannot possibly be the basis of a meaningful human life. As the philosopher John Stuart Mill wrote, ‘It is better to be a human being dissatisfied than a pig satisfied; better to be Socrates dissatisfied than a fool satisfied. And if the fool, or the pig, are of a different opinion, it is because they only know their own side of the question.’14

The philosopher Robert Nozick tried to illustrate the ubiquity of this belief by describing a fictitious virtual-reality machine that would allow anyone to have any experience they chose, and that would conveniently cause them to forget that they were hooked up to the machine.15 He concluded that no one would willingly choose to get hooked up for the rest of his life because the happiness he would experience with such a machine would not be happiness at all. ‘Someone whose emotion is based upon egregiously unjustified and false evaluations we will be reluctant to term happy, however he feels.’16 In short, emotional happiness is fine for pigs, but it is a goal unworthy of creatures as sophisticated and capable as we.

Now, let’s take a moment to think about the difficult position that someone who holds this view is in, and let’s guess how they might resolve it. If you considered it perfectly tragic for life to be aimed at nothing more substantive and significant than a feeling, and yet you could not help but notice that people spend their days seeking happiness, then what might you be tempted to conclude? Bingo! You might be tempted to conclude that the word happiness does not indicate a good feeling but rather that it indicates a very special good feeling that can only be produced by very special means–for example, by living one’s life in a proper, moral, meaningful, deep, rich, Socratic and non-piglike way. Now that would be the kind of feeling one wouldn’t be ashamed to strive for. In fact, the Greeks had a word for this kind of happiness–eudaimonia–which translates literally as ‘good spirit’ but which probably means something more like ‘human flourishing’ or ‘life well lived.’ For Socrates, Plato, Aristotle, Cicero and even Epicurus (a name usually associated with piggish happiness), the only thing that could induce that kind of happiness was the virtuous performance of one’s duties, with the precise meaning of virtuous left for each philosopher to work out for himself. The ancient Athenian legislator Solon suggested that one could not say that a person was happy until the person’s life had ended because happiness is the result of living up to one’s potential–and how can we make such a judgment until we see how the whole thing turns out? A few centuries later, Christian theologians added a nifty twist to this classical conception: happiness was not merely the product of a life of virtue but the reward for a life of virtue, and that reward was not necessarily to be expected in this lifetime.17

For two thousand years philosophers have felt compelled to identify happiness with virtue because that is the sort of happiness they think we ought to want. And maybe they’re right. But if living one’s life virtuously is a cause of happiness, it is not happiness itself, and it does us no good to obfuscate a discussion by calling both the cause and the consequence by the same name. I can produce pain by pricking your finger with a pin or by electrically stimulating a particular spot in your brain, and the two pains will be identical feelings produced by different means. It would do us no good to call the first of these real pain and the other fake pain. Pain is pain, no matter what causes it. By muddling causes and consequences, philosophers have been forced to construct tortured defences of some truly astonishing claims–for example, that a Nazi war criminal who is basking on an Argentinean beach is not really happy, whereas the pious missionary who is being eaten alive by cannibals is. ‘Happiness will not tremble,’ Cicero wrote in the first century BC, ‘however much it is tortured.’18 That statement may be admired for its courage, but it probably doesn’t capture the sentiments of the missionary who was drafted to play the role of the entrée.

Happiness is a word that we generally use to indicate an experience and not the actions that give rise to it. Does it make any sense to say, ‘After a day spent killing his parents, Frank was happy’? Indeed it does. We hope there never was such a person, but the sentence is grammatical, well formed and easily understood. Frank is a sick puppy, but if he says he is happy and he looks happy, is there a principled reason to doubt him? Does it make any sense to say, ‘Sue was happy to be in a coma’? No, of course not. If Sue is unconscious, she cannot be happy no matter how many good deeds she did before calamity struck. Or how about this one: ‘The computer obeyed all Ten Commandments and was happy as a clam’? Again, sorry, but no. There is some remote possibility that clams can be happy because there is some remote possibility that clams have the capacity to feel. There may be something it is like to be a clam, but we can be fairly certain that there is nothing it is like to be a computer, and hence the computer cannot be happy no matter how many of its neighbour’s wives it failed to covet.19 Happiness refers to feelings, virtue refers to actions, and those actions can cause those feelings. But not necessarily and not exclusively.

Feeling Happy About

The you-know-what-I-mean feeling is what people ordinarily mean by happiness, but it is not the only thing they mean. If philosophers have muddled the moral and emotional meanings of the word happiness, then psychologists have muddled the emotional and judgmental meanings equally well and often. For example, when a person says, ‘All in all, I’m happy about the way my life has gone’, psychologists are generally willing to grant that the person is happy. The problem is that people sometimes use the word happy to express their beliefs about the merits of things, such as when they say, ‘I’m happy they caught the little bastard who broke my windshield’, and they say things like this even when they are not feeling anything vaguely resembling pleasure. How do we know when a person is expressing a point of view rather than making a claim about her subjective experience? When the word happy is followed by the words that or about, speakers are usually trying to tell us that we ought to take the word happy as an indication not of their feelings but rather of their stances. For instance, when our spouse excitedly reveals that she has just been asked to spend six months at the company’s new branch in Tahiti while we stay home and mind the kids, we may say, ‘I’m not happy, of course, but I’m happy that you’re happy.’ Sentences such as these make high school English teachers apoplectic, but they are actually quite sensible if we can just resist the temptation to take every instance of the word happy as an instance of emotional happiness. Indeed, the first time we utter the word, we are letting our spouse know that we are most certainly not having the you-know-what-I-mean feeling (emotional happiness), and the second time we utter the word we are indicating that we approve of the fact that our spouse is (judgmental happiness). When we say we are happy about or happy that, we are merely noting that something is a potential source of pleasurable feeling, or a past source of pleasurable feeling, or that we realize it ought to be a source of pleasurable feeling but that it sure doesn’t feel that way at the moment. We are not actually claiming to be experiencing the feeling or anything like it. It would be more appropriate for us to tell our spouse, ‘I am not happy, but I understand you are, and I can even imagine that were I going to Tahiti and were you remaining home with these juvenile delinquents, I’d be experiencing happiness rather than admiring yours.’ Of course, speaking like this requires that we forsake all possibility of human companionship, so we opt for the common shorthand and say we are happy about things even when we are feeling thoroughly distraught. That’s fine, just as long as we keep in mind that we don’t always mean what we say.

New Yeller

If we were to agree to reserve the word happiness to refer to that class of subjective emotional experiences that are vaguely described as enjoyable or pleasurable, and if we were to promise not to use that same word to indicate the morality of the actions one might take to induce those experiences or to indicate our judgments about the merits of those experiences, we might still wonder whether the happiness one gets from helping a little old lady across the street constitutes a different kind of emotional experience–bigger, better, deeper–than the happiness one gets from eating a slice of banana-cream pie. Perhaps the happiness one experiences as a result of good deeds feels different from that other sort. In fact, while we’re at it, we might as well wonder whether the happiness one gets from eating banana-cream pie feels different from the happiness one gets from eating coconut-cream pie. Or from eating a slice of this banana-cream pie rather than a slice of that one. How can we tell whether subjective emotional experiences are different or the same?

The truth is that we can’t–no more than we can tell whether the yellow experience we have when we look at a mustard jar is the same yellow experience that others have when they look at the same mustard jar. Philosophers have flung themselves headlong at this problem for quite some time with little more than bruises to show for it,20 because when all is said and done, the only way to measure precisely the similarity of two things is for the person who is doing the measuring to compare them side by side–that is, to experience them side by side. And outside of science fiction, no one can actually have another person’s experience. When we were children, our mothers taught us to call that looking-at-the-mustard-jar experience yellow, and being compliant little learners, we did as we were told. We were pleased when it later turned out that everyone else in the kindergarten claimed to experience yellow when they looked at a mustard jar too. But these shared labels may mask the fact that our actual experiences of yellow are quite different, which is why many people do not discover that they are colour-blind until late in life when an ophthalmologist notices that they do not make the distinctions that others seem to make. So while it seems rather unlikely that human beings have radically different experiences when they look at a mustard jar, when they hear a baby cry, or when they smell a former skunk, it is possible, and if you want to believe it, then you have every right and no one who values her time should try to reason with you.

Remembering Differences

I hope you aren’t giving up that easily. Perhaps the way to determine whether a pair of happinesses actually feel different is to forget about comparing the experiences of different minds and just ask someone who has experienced them both. I may never know if my experience of yellow is different from your experience of yellow, but surely I can tell that my experience of yellow is different from my experience of blue when I mentally compare the two. Right? Unfortunately, this strategy is more complicated than it looks. The nub of the problem is that when we say that we are mentally comparing two of our own subjective experiences, we are not actually having the two experiences at the same time. Rather, we are at best having one of them, having already had the other, and when an interrogator asks us which experience made us happier or whether the two happinesses were the same, we are at best comparing something we are currently experiencing with our memory of something we experienced in the past. This would be unobjectionable were it not for the fact that memories–especially memories of experiences–are notoriously unreliable, a fact that has been demonstrated by both magicians and scientists. First the magic. Look at the six royal cards in figure 4, and pick your favourite. No, don’t tell me. Keep it to yourself. Just look at your card, and say the name once or twice (or write it down) so that you’ll remember it for a few pages.

Fig. 4.

Good. Now consider how scientists have approached the problem of remembered experience. In one study, researchers showed volunteers a colour swatch of the sort one might pick up in the paint aisle of the local hardware store and allowed them to study it for five seconds.21 Some volunteers then spent thirty seconds describing the colour (describers), while other volunteers did not describe it (non-describers). All volunteers were then shown a lineup of six colour swatches, one of which was the colour they had seen thirty seconds earlier, and were asked to pick out the original swatch. The first interesting finding was that only 73 per cent of the non-describers were able to identify it accurately. In other words, fewer than three quarters of these people could tell if this experience of yellow was the same as the experience of yellow they had just a half-minute before. The second interesting finding was that describing the colour impaired rather than improved performance on the identification task. Only 33 per cent of the describers were able accurately to identify the original colour. Apparently, the describers’ verbal descriptions of their experiences ‘overwrote’ their memories of the experiences themselves, and they ended up remembering not what they had experienced but what they had said about what they experienced. And what they had said was not clear and precise enough to help them recognize it when they saw it again thirty seconds later.

Most of us have been in this position. We tell a friend that we were disappointed with the house chardonnay at that trendy downtown bistro, or with the way the string quartet handled our beloved Bartok’s Fourth, but the fact is that we are unlikely to be recalling how the wine actually tasted or how the quartet actually sounded when we make this pronouncement. Rather, we are likely to be recalling that as we left the concert, we mentioned to our companion that both the wine and the music had a promising start and a poor finish. Experiences of chardonnays, string quartets, altruistic deeds and banana-cream pie are rich, complex, multidimensional and impalpable. One of the functions of language is to help us palp them–to help us extract and remember the important features of our experiences so that we can analyse and communicate them later. The New York Times online film archive stores critical synopses of films rather than the films themselves, which would take up far too much space, be far too difficult to search and be thoroughly useless to anyone who wanted to know what a film was like without actually seeing it. Experiences are like movies with several added dimensions, and were our brains to store the full-length feature films of our lives rather than their tidy descriptions, our heads would need to be several times larger. And when we wanted to know or tell others whether the tour of the sculpture garden was worth the price of the ticket, we would have to replay the entire episode to find out. Every act of memory would require precisely the amount of time that the event being remembered had originally taken, which would permanently sideline us the first time someone asked if we liked growing up in Chicago. So we reduce our experiences to words such as happy, which barely do them justice but which are the things we can carry reliably and conveniently with us into the future. The smell of the rose is unresurrectable, but if we know it was good and we know it was sweet, then we know to stop and smell the next one.

Perceiving Differences

Our remembrance of things past is imperfect, thus comparing our new happiness with our memory of our old happiness is a risky way to determine whether two subjective experiences are really different. So let’s try a slightly modified approach. If we cannot remember the feeling of yesterday’s banana-cream pie well enough to compare it with the feeling of today’s good deed, perhaps the solution is to compare experiences that are so close together in time that we can actually watch them change. For instance, if we were to do a version of the colour-swatch experiment in which we reduced the amount of time that passed between the presentation of the original swatch and the presentation of the lineup, surely people would have no problem identifying the original swatch, right? So what if we reduced the time to, say, twenty-five seconds? Or fifteen? Ten? How about a fraction of one And what if, as a bonus, we made the identification task a bit easier by showing volunteers a colour swatch for a few seconds, taking it away for just a fraction of a second, and then showing them one test swatch (instead of a lineup of six) and asking them to tell us whether the single test swatch is the same as the original. No intervening verbal description to confuse their memories, no rival test swatches to confuse their eyes, and only a sliver of a slice of a moment between the presentation of the original and test swatches. Gosh. Given how simple we’ve made the task, shouldn’t we predict that everyone will pass it with, um, flying colours?

Yes, but only if we enjoy being wrong. In a study conceptually similar to the one we just designed, researchers asked volunteers to look at a computer screen and read some odd-looking text.22 What made the text so odd was that it alternated between uppercase and lowercase, so that it lOoKeD lIkE tHiS. Now, as you may know, when people seem to be staring directly at something, their eyes are actually flickering slightly away from the thing they are staring at three or four times per second, which is why eyeballs look jiggly if you study them up close. The researchers used an eye-tracking device that tells a computer when the volunteer’s eyes are fixated on the object on the screen and when they have briefly jiggled away. Whenever the volunteers’ eyeballs jiggled away from the text for a fraction of a second, the computer played a trick on them: it changed the case of every letter in the text they were reading so that the text that lOoKeD lIkE tHiS suddenly LoOkEd LiKe ThIs. Amazingly, volunteers did not notice that the text was alternating between different styles several times each second as they read it. Subsequent research has shown that people fail to notice a wide range of these ‘visual discontinuities’, which is why filmmakers can suddenly change the style of a woman’s dress or the colour of a man’s hair from one cut to the next, or cause an item on a table to disappear entirely, all without ever waking the audience.23 Interestingly, when people are asked to predict whether they would notice such visual discontinuities, they are quite confident that they would.24