‘Tis the season for resolutions, goal-setting, and happiness-seeking.
It’s a natural desire to want to improve yourself, accomplish new things, and bring joy to your life.
In fact, when we’re asked what our ultimate desire is, we often reply, “to be happy.”
Happiness is certainly a worthwhile life goal, especially if by “happiness” we mean the Greek eudaimonia, which Daniel Gilbert, in Stumbling on Happiness, translates as “good spirit … human flourishing … [and] life well lived.” When I use the word “happiness,” that is what I am referring to.
But too often, when we pursue happiness, we’re pursuing instant gratification (a massage! a new purse! more money!), rather than a deeper, more sustainable joy.
In All Joy and No Fun by Jennifer Senior, she boils down the difference between happiness and joy succinctly: “Joy is about being warm, not hot.” She quotes psychiatrist George Vaillant, who writes, “Excitement, sexual ecstasy, and happiness all speed up the heart; joy and cuddling slow the heart.”
While happiness is a lovely place to visit, joy is where we want to live.
Our cultural obsession with pursuing happiness, many experts would tell us, is the very thing that sabotages our efforts to find it. It calls to mind the wisdom of Thoreau:
Similarly, in his classic work Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience, psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi writes, “It is by being fully involved with every detail of our lives, whether good or bad, that we find happiness, not by trying to look for it directly.”
Happiness, or joy, if you prefer, is a byproduct of an engaged, connected, and meaningful life. Yet we still pursue happiness as if it were the ultimate goal, as if it existed somehow in a vacuum.
In The Antidote: Happiness for People Who Can’t Stand Positive Thinking, Oliver Burkeman challenges the conventional wisdom about happiness, as well as the advice of motivational speakers, for they continually persuade us to pursue pathways to happiness and joy that are not borne out by the research.
It’s a fascinating read. Burkeman advocates what he calls the “negative path” to happiness, in that it involves embracing the negative, as well as a more relaxed not-doing. I loved this book so much I want to share with you…
Instead of forcing positive thinking, practice mindful, nonjudgmental awareness of your thoughts.
Motivational speakers tell people to think positively and banish the word “impossible!” There’s no room for negativity if you want to be happy!
In response, Burkeman cites the “white bear paradox”: tell someone that for one minute, they cannot think about a white bear. What do they think about? A white bear, of course!
Tell someone to think only positive thoughts, and what do they think about? All those negative thoughts running through their mind! And then they get mad at themselves for not being more positive!
Instead of banishing negative thoughts {which is nigh impossible}, we should bring our mindful awareness to them, examining them with calm indifference. We cannot overcome our negative emotions by simply denying or repressing them – mindfulness teaches us to acknowledge them, but not be driven by them.
Despite Burkeman’s warnings, research does indicate that cultivating optimism is good for us. Taking a few moments to savor the good in our lives, or to look for a silver lining, can dramatically transform our outlook. But that’s very different than forcing positive thinking or ignoring the negative.
Instead of setting audacious goals for success, practice non-attachment to the outcome of your actions.
Have you heard of that famous study of Yale graduates? The one where they asked graduating seniors if they had formulated specific life goals, and then followed up with them two decades later? Supposedly, the 3% of graduates who had set goals out-earned the 97% who did not have goals!
Sounds amazing, right? Almost every motivational speaker and goal guru cites this study as evidence of the effectiveness of goal-setting. The problem? It never happened. It’s an academic research urban legend.
Goals can sometimes be limiting. They can have unintended consequences, such as diverting resources away from other important work or ignoring (or even covering up) evidence of failure.
If we ask people to focus on form, on practice, and not on the end result or goal, they actually perform better. If we set an audacious goal for a wonderful family Christmas, complete with caroling and a flawless meal and perfectly-behaved angel children … we’re likely to be disappointed. We’re likely to miss the many {brief, fleeting} moments of joy if, later on, a squirrel leaps out of the Christmas tree and destroys the house and the turkey deflates upon carving…. I like to call it Griswold Syndrome: the way we make ourselves miserable by holding ourselves and everyone around us to ridiculous expectations.
Burkeman argues we’re better off if we don’t “strive too ardently for any single vision of the future.”
Instead of seeking stability, dance with uncertainty and even failure.
So much of our pursuit of happiness consists of seeking stability, permanence, and “balance,” when those things don’t really exist. Buddhism, and biology, teach us that we are a constantly shifting collection of cells, thoughts, emotions, breath, sensations, and form. We are impermanent. We are always changing, flowing just like that river we can never step in twice. But our attempts to secure happiness are often attempts to prevent change and impermanence.
Good luck with that.
Burkeman advises, “The point is not to ‘confront’ insecurity, but to appreciate that you are it.”
If you fail, embrace it. If something changes, go with it. We need to think like scientists, who learn as much from the experiment that fails as the one that succeeds. Dance with your uncertainty.
Instead of envisioning your completely satisfied self, consider the worst possible scenarios.
This seems to fly in the face of the advice of much self-help advice. People are told to envision themselves holding their ideal job, or completing a novel, or running that marathon. While daydreaming can have positive psychological benefits, researcher Gabrielle Oettingen has found that “spending time and energy thinking about how well things could go … actually reduces most people’s motivation to achieve them.” Visualizing the good outcome produces relaxed and happy thoughts, which, to the brain, feel just like actually having accomplished it!
Burkeman instead recommends envisioning the worst case scenario. This will likely will remind us that 1) we can find a way to cope with the negative outcomes, and 2) most often, things rarely go as wrong as we fear they will. Daniel Gilbert writes, “anticipating unpleasant events can minimize their impact…. [F]ear, worry, and anxiety have useful roles to play in our lives … [and] motivate people to engage in prudent, prophylactic behavior.”
Instead of waiting for inspiration, just do it!
If, as Daniel Gilbert writes, happiness comes through “being effective – changing things, influencing things, making things happen,” and, as Csikszentmihalyi states, it occurs “when a person’s body or mind is stretched to its limits in a voluntary effort to accomplish something difficult and worthwhile,” then we need to take action.
Burkeman claims that the problem with much of the self-help literature, and with motivational speakers, is that they’re about “how to feel in the mood for getting things done.” But feeling like doing something, and actually doing it, are two different things. If, instead of waiting for inspiration, we take “a non-attached stance towards procrastination,” we’ll discover that our “reluctance about working isn’t something that needs to be eradicated or transformed into positivity…. [We] can note the procrastinatory feelings and act anyway.”
I’m going to say that one again because I LOVE that line, and refer to it all the time: We can note the procrastinatory feelings and ACT ANYWAY.
*****
If we want to be happy, Burkeman advises we learn to enjoy uncertainty and insecurity, cultivate a calm indifference toward our experiences, practice mindfulness, become familiar with failure, drop our obsession with goal-setting, stop trying to think only of the positive, imagine the worst possible outcomes, take inspired action, and live our lives with a sense of awe.
I happily agree.
- A Mindful Approach to New Year’s Resolutions - January 13, 2020
- Just This Next Step - December 16, 2019
- WAIT: A Mindfulness Practice for Waiting in Line - December 9, 2019
