The Walk 2.18.22

What is Happiness?

I recently took a long walk with my son. There was little conversation at first.  During the first mile, I may have spoken more words to our dog Emmy Lou, who was with us, than I did to him. I knew he was unhappy and hurting, which made me hurt.  However, I also knew that I could not push the conversation.  Thankfully, if you walk long enough, the conversation will come.

I have heard that moms are only as happy as their most unhappy child. That may explain why my own mom was often unhappy.  Her four children were, quite simply, a very unhappy bunch. But to be honest, I don’t think the cause of my mom’s unhappiness was her children. However, when one of your children is hurting, you hurt with them. 

So, why do we hurt? And on the flip side, what creates happiness? We might think of happiness as an emotion. But as Leland explains in his book “Happiness Is a Choice,” it’s really a mental state of being that is influenced by emotions.  And based on his observations of six households over the course of a year, he believes that we have some control over whether we are happy. So, how do we effectively create this sense of happiness or well-being?  A recent podcast that I listen to asserts that to be happy you need three main ingredients, like the three ingredients of a healthy diet – carbs, fat, and protein. And to be happy we need all three – enjoyment, satisfaction, and purpose – in balance. 

I would also add another ingredient – human connection.  I think this is required to blend the three ingredients to create true happiness. Without human connection a happy life is impossible. I expand on this need for social connection in a paper I wrote several years ago – “Social Connection – The Science.”

The movie “Cast Away” illustrates this basic need in a creative and wonderful way when the protagonist, Chuck Noland, who is alone on a deserted island due to a plane crash, turns a volleyball into a persona. He is so starved for human connection that he must create a pretend person by painting a face on a ball and naming it Wilson. To him, Wilson is no longer a volleyball. Wilson has become the person he talks to, that he protects. And that need for human connection draws the viewer into Chuck’s world, where we see his need for Wilson. Later in the movie, in a very moving and poignant scene, Chuck becomes distraught when he loses Wilson, as if he has lost his closest friend.

If we accept enjoyment, satisfaction, and purpose as the main ingredients to happiness, how do we define them?  The first ingredient, enjoyment could be defined as pleasure that is elevated. What brings us true pleasure? Many of us are confused as to what brings us true pleasure or joy.

Many of us pursue things or activities that society tells us will bring joy.  We let others tell us what we should want. And this consumerist and “keep up with the Jones’” mentality can be very destructive to our ability to experience joy.  So, we must be brave to do what we want to do, not what we should do.  This requires courage. And it also requires discernment.  And discernment is not figuring out what you should do, but what you truly want.

Even if we know what brings us joy, many of us are too afraid to pursue it.  We have forgotten what it is like to have fun. Our society looks down on fun as frivolous. And so, when we try to take time to have fun, we experience guilt, even thinking that it is a waste of time. Yet just the opposite is true.  It has been proven that taking time to have fun increases productivity. 

As we continued our walk, we talked about joy.  Like many people, my son has not discerned what brings him true pleasure or joy.  It is not an easy thing to do. Even for those that have discerned what brings them joy, it helps to go back occasionally and go through joy discernment. You may find out that what brings you joy does change.  Even if we figure out what brings us joy and we are brave enough to pursue it, it should be balanced with satisfaction and purpose.

So, how do we create satisfaction? Many of us do not experience satisfaction, or maybe we experience it, but it does not last. Some of us can be satisfied or content with very little. Others have trouble being content with what they have, even if they seem to have a lot.  As the Dalai Lama says, “The secret to enduring satisfaction is not to have what you want, but to want what you have.” What does this “wants management strategy” look like? It starts with a “satisfaction ratio” that is calculated by dividing what you have by what you want. The higher the ratio the better. So, the more you can decrease the bottom number, the higher your rate of satisfaction, and the higher your level of happiness.  The more you increase the top number, the higher your satisfaction ratio and your happiness. The trick is recognizing and valuing what is truly important, and usually abundant, in your life and want those.

But how do we do this – lower our level of what we want and recognize the value of what we do have? Many have a difficult time increasing their satisfaction ratio because they can never get enough.  If you are one of those people, you will never be satisfied and cannot experience true happiness.  Many of us have a very low level of tolerance for those who do not seem satisfied, especially if they seem to have a lot. Well, maybe they do not have what truly brings joy and satisfaction. Or even more sad is that they have those things but have failed to recognize their value.

Kate Bowland, a professor at Duke Divinity School, recently wrote a book, “There Is No Cure for Being Human,” in which she describes her struggles in dealing with cancer. During her struggle, she lost all sense of enjoyment, satisfaction, and purpose. Before cancer, she was a hard charger and perfectionist. And as she realizes that she might quite possibly survive, she is still not happy. And I must admit, I was a little angry with her. It is obvious that she survived in large measure because she had the financial means and the human network of professionals, friends, and family to create the opportunity to survive. And when people pointed that out to her and that she should be grateful, she scoffs at them. She eventually gets out of that dark place, but it was not easy.

The message of that book for me was that it is ok to be human and to forgive yourself. It is ok when dealing with tragedy or suffering from severe depression or anxiety to be in a dark place. And while there you may not recognize and be grateful for what you do have in your life. Or that life itself is a gift. So, there is no cure for being human.  However, at some point we must all climb out of that dark place. Kate Bowland did, eventually. And she did it one day at a time. And her willingness to let us into her darkness and vulnerability was incredibly gracious.

I shared three stories with my son as we continued our walk.  The first was relayed to me by his mother, who had visited Haiti twice on missionary trips. The first trip occurred before 2010, the year of the 7.3 earthquake that devastated what was already a poor country. The second trip occurred after 2010. On both trips Elizabeth was stunned at how happy these people seemed to be, despite how little they had, and how much tragedy they had endured. They seemed to live in light despite the darkness all around them.

The second story was relayed to me by a friend who is a money manager for one of the most prestigious boutique money management firms in Richmond.  Many of his clients are trust fund children who are now adults, some of whom are well into middle age. He and I were discussing the topic of happiness.  He turned to me and said, “You know John, some of my clients are so wealthy that they have not worked a single day of their life. Yet they are the most unhappy group of people I have ever met.” Why is this so, especially compared to the people of Haiti?

When I think of these two stories, I think of purpose, the third ingredient to happiness. And I believe this to be the most important. We can also describe purpose as meaning. As I told my son during our walk, I truly believe that a lack of purpose in one’s life leads one to question why one exists, and this eventually leads to a lack of self-love.  So, how do we find purpose?

Meaning or purpose does not have to be some grand or epic thing. It can occur daily in little things that we do. For example, reading to your child, creating a pleasant bath time, preparing dinner – these are the smaller things that can bring meaning to life – possibly because they help fulfill a larger purpose – being the best stay-at-home mom or dad one can be. Which in turn may create a child, and eventually an adult, that makes the world a better place to live. And this becomes your gift to the world. I cannot think of a better purpose. Can you?

No discussion on happiness is complete without discussing the paradox of pain. Paradox challenges our minds to think differently and through disruption to accept something we may not otherwise accept. This can help us understand why pain can create happiness.

As humans, we will suffer. If we try to turn off our pain, we also turn off our ability to experience joy. Our ability to experience emotions is like a toggle switch. You switch them on, or you turn them off.  As much as we might try, we cannot turn off some emotions and leave others on. We may be successful in suppressing some of our emotions, but they are still there.  And that leads to other problems. Another way of saying this is that if you try to eliminate emotional pain and suffering in your life by turning off your emotional switch, you also turn off the ability to feel emotional joy.  Tune out pain and you tune out joy.

And this is where the nuance of the paradox is important. You do not need to experience some form of deep pain and its related suffering to feel joy. However, the experience of pain and suffering teaches us to appreciate and acknowledge the things we do have in our life. For some reason, we must experience pain to appreciate joy.  Almost every story in the Old Testament is a confirmation of this statement. The fruit of gratitude comes from the seed of pain and suffering.

The third story I shared with my son during out walk was about me. Like others, I have experienced episodes of high anxiety and depression in my life. But during by freshman year in college, I had lots of good reasons to be depressed. Social isolation due to shame, sleep deprivation because of high anxiety, money problems, lack of dependable transportation, and struggles in my freshman physics class all led to a dark place for me. It came to a head when I scored a 47 on my first physics test, which also happened to be my first college test. To put this into perspective, I was valedictorian of my high school class and had not received an F on an assignment or test since elementary school. So, already depressed, this led me to a near nervous breakdown. 

At the end of that week, I got a six pack of beer and walked to the middle of the school’s football field, sat down, and cried. I cried mostly because I felt like a complete failure and felt sorry for myself.  The burden of everything felt so heavy. Nothing seemed to be going right in my life, and I felt like I was falling deeper and deeper into a hole with no way out.

It was probably the only time in my life that I thought of killing myself. And when you are in that dark place you do not see all that you have to live for. Somehow, I made it through that tortuous night. And taking one day at a time, I made it through the weekend, and the following week. But due to my extreme anxiety, I still had trouble sleeping and got stuck in a vicious cycle of sleep deprivation, leaving me exhausted every day. But then I discovered running and endorphins and I made it through the semester.  And I have been running ever since.

I relayed that final story during our walk because I thought my son might have the mistaken impression that I have never struggled emotionally. But we all struggle, and we all experience emotional pain. I have heard that you do not need to look for suffering.  It will find you. The question is what will you do when it comes knocking?  Will you have the grace to ask for help? Will you use that pain and suffering to learn gratitude?

Unfortunately, many of the people in Haiti that my wife met experience more pain and suffering than anyone should have to endure.  But somehow, they did and continue to endure, and they do so with more happiness than my friend’s trust fund clients, and quite frankly, more than most of us.

The people in Haiti also have purpose – it may be simply to survive each day and to help those you love to survive. She also saw gratitude and, believe it or not, she also saw joy.

I do not know how to help those I love who are going through emotional pain. All I can do is love them. And maybe tell them that I love them and walk beside them.  Unfortunately, there is no roadmap to get us through the wilderness of suffering.  If there were, there would be less suffering in the world. As Kate Bowler says, there is no cure for being human.  We just are.