I've been a terrible blogger and writer this week. There's a lot on my mind. Decisions, choices, opportunities, worries, and a moody boy who turns 13 today. I spent a lot of time playing a stupid, stupid, stupid video game that will go unnamed, because it is so so stupid.
When I was a kid, my parents often dumped me at my grandfather's apartment in the Bronx. My grandfather, who had many good qualities, was also a chain-smoking alcoholic who played solitaire for hours on end. When he wasn't taking me to the corner, old man bar, I sat at the kitchen table quietly playing solitaire next to him. When I'm thinking, I revert back to my four year old self and play repetitive games of strategy.
Recently, I spoke with a perpetually unhappy person. She tried to spread some of her unhappiness my way, because unhappy people like to share their unhappiness. According to all the pseudo-scientific happiness studies, she possesses all the key variables for a happy life, but she was unhappy. Really, being happy has nothing to do with quantifiable variables and everything to do with attitude – recognizing good fortune, savoring the quiet, beautiful moments, and detaching one's self from material possessions.
In between all this thinking time, I have been soaking up all the good things in my life, because it's so obvious that my concerns are GOOD concerns. How lucky am I?
Apt. 11d 
I give myself a lot of credit for having grasped that essential choice in college; happy people choose to be happy.
(more recently I added the concept of clinical depression, which can ,make people unable to choose happiness).
Good luck with your choices and moody 13 year olds.
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A good friend of mine had panic attacks for years. Her attacks were so severe that she went to a psychologist. The shrink taught her to make a list of the most terrible things that could happen if Event X occurred and to estimate the chances that Event X would actually occur. After she starting making the lists, she realized that even if Event X really did happen, and the likelihood was extremely remote, that the results would be very bearable. After six months of learning to make these lists, my good friend stopped panicking. She no longer need the shrink.
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And then she became an actuary.
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“Really, being happy has nothing to do with quantifiable variables and everything to do with attitude – recognizing good fortune, savoring the quiet, beautiful moments, and detaching one’s self from material possessions.”
Above a certain basic level of physical comfort, yeah.
“…happy people choose to be happy.”
There’s a very small minority (I’ve met only 2 or maybe 3 my whole life) who are at the same time very good and very happy, and in their case being happy barely seems to be a choice, more simply their usual mode of being. (My daughter’s old 3rd grade teacher, the angelic Miss D, seems to be one of them.) On the other hand, my possible 3rd example is a person whose normal state for decades has been to be very happy and good, but was lately crushed by circumstances beyond her control. She’s been fighting her way out of it as circumstances moderate, but I think it unfair to expect bubbling enthusiasm from someone suffering severe misfortune. I think there is a very close relationship between happiness and virtue, (that is a big idea in Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics, which I haven’t read, but have absorbed via spousal osmosis), but particular circumstances can make it impossible for a virtuous person to enjoy the happiness that is the proper result of virtue.
In general, although I understand that there is an element of choice in not jumping into resentment and rage, I think the idea of choice or choosing is overplayed (although the idea may be very important to help budge someone who is trapped by depression or vice). When I go into a store and don’t shoplift, I’m not choosing to do that. In fact, the more element of choice there is in my not stealing, the more likely it is that I am a thief. The more I think about the fact that I am choosing not to steal, the closer to being a thief I get. For a very virtuous person, there is almost no choosing going on–the decisions make themselves.
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Tonight I drive down to NY for the weekend for a family event. I’m not looking forward to seeing my sister, the one who was diagnosed with breast cancer last fall. Physically she’s great. Her numbers are good, the cancer vanquished, at least temporarily. Mentally, she’s a wreck. She lives every day in fear of the next. She has the feeling of a lump in her throat constantly, and no amount of testing can persuade her that she doesn’t have a tumor there. Meanwhile, if you look up “feeling of a lump in your throat” on any internet symptom finder, the number one cause is anxiety and panic attacks. I want to tell her that line from Shawshank, “You gotta get busy livin’, or get busy dyin’.” Unfortunately, she’s always been this way. It’s how I know there is no merciful god*–no merciful god would have given cancer to a hypochondriac depressive.
*I’m kidding. I never believed in god to begin with.
Wish me luck today: 5 hours with middle schoolers at a swim club, with no internet and possibly no diet Coke, only diet Pepsi.
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I’m torn on the current pop research focus on happiness. I mean, I like being happy, I just don’t think it’s the best overall concept when assessing my life. I prefer something more along the lines of contentment or acceptance. I read recently that the Danes are considered the happiest people on earth (don’t even think of asking me by what measure!) even though outwardly they seem sullen to most Americans. The article writer speculated that it is because they have low expectations; they’re easily pleased by the small things because they don’t expect the big things.
I somehow came to own a new-agey book called Wherever You Go There You Are and it has been surprisingly interesting read for this staunchly anti-newage person. It’s a series of short lessons on meditation with the overall message that it is normal to let yourself feel the entire range of emotions and the key is to not let any one emotion dominate all of the others.
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I think I’m using a weaker definition of “choice” than Amy posits. By choice, I just mean to say that happiness isn’t a result of circumstances (though unhappiness might be, at different points in a life).
There’s an interesting discussion going on with the new DSM about the classification of depression, one point being whether sadness during grieving might be classified as depression (and, in turn, treated with anti-depressants). It’s clear that sadness is a normal response to loosing someone, but it can also be true that the depth of the sadness and recovery can be moderated with psychoactive drugs. So, then, does it make sense to prescribe them, the same way that prescribing analgesics & anti-inflammatories are prescribed after surgery/injury (and which help with recovery)?
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There’s a famous quote from John Stuart Mill that goes like this, “…it is better to be a human being dissatisfied than a pig satisfied; better to be Socrates dissatisfied than a fool satisfied.”
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bj said:
“There’s an interesting discussion going on with the new DSM about the classification of depression, one point being whether sadness during grieving might be classified as depression (and, in turn, treated with anti-depressants).”
If I had to map it out, I think I’d say that there’s slow forward movement in grieving, while depression means moving in a tight, circular, repetitive course with no progress. Grief is a job that has to be got through, while depression is a windowless, doorless cell. It’s probably hard to tell the difference initially, though.
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Well as someone who lost a child after years of therapy for other things I have to say I personally needed to be sad, to feel the loss and emotions around the loss, and come to terms with it and basically — proving the research — decide that happiness would be possible again, one day.
Would that have happened faster on anti-depressants? Possibly. But What I Learned In My PTSD Therapy is that sometimes if you don’t feel the emotions appropriately at the time they bite you later. Sometimes I think that’s what unhappy people really are about – they are stuck at some unhappy point in the past to which they emotionally return over and over.
Laura, hope that you find your way out of the forest. 🙂
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Oh, I’m fine. Just doing what I always do, which is to over think everything. Ian’s teacher is leaving, and his school suddenly went into chaos mode. Jonah’s upset because I yelled at him for a bad French test. Steve’s job is hugely stressful. I need to make some other decisions. But, really, everything is cool. Ian had a remarkable year and is going to start moving towards mainstreaming. Jonah made honor roll. Steve still has a job. My tomato plants grew a foot last night. I have a new book to read.
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I’ve read much of the happiness writings and research that is being discussed here today. Based on my own personal sample of kids that I come across, I tend toward the idea that there is a set point for happiness that varies. The girl’s set point is happy – she’s a glass half full person. And I’ve seen other kids at the other end of the scale who are definitely the glass half empty.
That being said, you definitely can choose how to react and catch yourself if you are going down a road of thinking that is going to end up in an unhappy place. Let’s say, making it worse than it has to be.
I agree though that we seem to want to medicate OR meditate ourselves out of unhappiness so that we can almost pretend that we have control over our lives to the extent that we can avoid all trauma and upset.
Live long enough and you’ll have your share of good luck and bad luck – what you do with it is to a certain extent up to you.
I wonder, though, if for some people who have been hit hard enough with bad luck, that being “happy” is just not possible anymore. I remember as a kid seeing friends of my parents who were so serious. Perhaps more than a few life blows like serious illness, job loss, etc. can take its toll so that you have seen a bit too much. Or however you define happy (I think of it more like contentment).
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“Based on my own personal sample of kids that I come across, I tend toward the idea that there is a set point for happiness that varies. The girl’s set point is happy – she’s a glass half full person. And I’ve seen other kids at the other end of the scale who are definitely the glass half empty.”
Half empty is still pretty good. I’ve known “glass is 10% empty” people, sometimes “glass is 5% empty” on a bad day”.
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I forgot to say that I totally agree with the “set point for happiness” and relative talent for happiness is very much a set part of the personality. Any particular individual can do a better or worse job managing their reactions to events, but the fact that Suzie Sunshine sees only rainbows is not a major moral achievement on her part.
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“but the fact that Suzie Sunshine sees only rainbows is not a major moral achievement on her part. ”
No, but it’s a talent to be celebrated, as is a talent for music, or math, or sports. I do suspect sometimes that a talent for being unhappy can correlated with a talent for achievement (that is, the person who sees the 5% empty glass, if they’re motivated to fill it, accomplishes much in the world). Of course, if they’re just focused on the emptiness, and not how to resolve it, nothing is achieved, but focusing on the emptiness can be a part of doing something about it.
Also, I’m not advocating against medication (even during grieving). I think that medications can help people smooth over their variations to live more fulfilling lives and that using them can be a crutch only in the sense that using a crutch when you’re leg is broken is a crutch, and not a form of debilitation in itself. Drugs have side effects and might become a crutch and aren’t always appropriate, but those are medical questions as far as I’m concerned, not moral ones.
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“No, but it’s a talent to be celebrated, as is a talent for music, or math, or sports.”
Right. But happiness as talent is not totally consistent with the idea of happiness as a choice. You can reconcile them (by thinking of individuals as having a natural mood range where they have some control), but they have to be reconciled–they aren’t the same thing.
“that is, the person who sees the 5% empty glass, if they’re motivated to fill it, accomplishes much in the world”
Right. I think that people with a touch of OCD can and contribute a lot to society. (A normal, well-adjusted person wouldn’t have the patience or the motivation to do thousands of trials for light bulb materials as Edison did.)
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