Impractically Happy

March 19, 2024March 20, 2024

FOMO vs the Moment

There's something I don't really understand about my students.

To be honest, there's a lot of things about Gen Z that I don't understand. For one thing, I don't really get why they care about the whole "Gen Z" thing. When I ask friends my own age they impart only a vague sense that they actually belong to a generation, and just a few of them seem to know that it has a name. "X," if you're curious. (That was supposed to be a place-holder until we figured out something better, but we never got around to it.)

I suspect all the attention to Gen Z's generation has to do with where they keep their identities - and that relates to the way they think about happiness. Not necessarily how they're happy, but where happiness is.

Our identities are always shaped by other people. But I think there's a subtle shift going on. Living so tied to tech, younger people's identities are not just being shaped by others. They are getting a little more shared with other people. As people spend more time measuring themselves - and things like happiness - through one another's eyes.

And this is the source of the fear of missing out on what other people are doing: it's less the experience that people are worried about missing, than the recognition of it from others.

As I've pointed out in Fifty Ways to Be Happy, not all types of happiness are compatible with one another. You can't feel schadenfreude and loving-kindness at the same time.

But can you lose yourself in a moment of beauty while also have your picture taken in it? I found out, the hard way, one day not long ago in Laos. You can read all about it here.

February 15, 2024March 19, 2024

Is Maslow’s Hierarchy a Hierarchy?

It's fair to say that Maslow's Hierarchy is central to the internet world of happiness. People often reference it as a way to think about universal human needs. But the conversation about his hierarchy has been floating around in popular culture for decades now. And when ideas become popularized, they get passed around year after year, like a game of telephone, except with occasional nods back too the original source. That means that the edges get sanded down, and oversimplifications set in. When you oversimplify a good, complex idea, you don't just get get a simpler version of it. You end up with a misleading idea that seems deceptively useful. So I wanted to nod back for myself, and take a look at the source the idea. I discovered that what Maslow was doing was actually quite different from what we normally associate with his hierarchy – including the fact that he didn't really mean for it to be a hierarchy.

You can find out what he was doing, and what he was saying about universal human needs, and what we learn from our cultures and circumstances here. Give it a look.

February 5, 2024March 19, 2024

Buddhism’s Conundrum

Jeff (who runs the temple and was raised Jewish) asked if there were any Buddhists in the pews. The room was full but only three of four people raised their hands.

Some of Buddhism's parts have found a place in American society, but the whole thing hasn't really come along. It seems to be more a piece of culture for many Americans than a full-blown religion.

This is interesting, all things considered.

There's a question that a lot of people who think about Buddhism, at least its earlier forms, which are still practiced in Southeast Asia, have found themselves asking:

Why does it seem to be two religions?

Two Sides

One version is all about karma. It's about reaping what you sew, with the implication that if you do good, you'll get what you deserve. And it comes with the idea of reincarnation – that if you live a good life, you'll be rewarded with another life that you can do good with, ad infinitum.

Outside of temples, this version exists in the west, largely in the form of labels on tip jars.

The other religion involves the notions that life is suffering, that desires defile us, and that the final good for human beings is to seek nirvana and stop existing in any way that most of us can make sense of.

This is the one that has taken a foothold in the US.*

Why is this?

Why would people focus the decidedly less fun elements of the religion while letting the do-good-and-enjoy-your-rewards part slide away? I have a well-worked-out explanation for how these two parts work together in Thailand (described in my possibly-forth-coming book on the mechanics of belief). But why would Americans, with their interest in optimism and quick fixes, choose the harder, longer, less cheerful path to happiness?

A lot of the language around Buddhism in the US is about learning to give things up. This is something that almost all forms of Buddhism share, and that few other traditions have embraced: that happiness can be found by moving away from desire.

This emphasis on giving things up, quite unusual in the US in itself, is actually part of the draw. This isBuddhism's useful niche, considering that most other theories of happiness involve picking and choosing, and then satisfying, some sets of desires.

So it's more an antidote than a palliative to other popular approaches to happiness, like finding one's authentic self, or retail therapy, or the weather-beaten grandness of the "American Dream."

All approaches to happiness come with a theory the says something about what it means to be human, and how to live a good human life. Some argue for simplicity, others emphasize self-actualization (and explain what having a "self" is). Buddhism provides a theory of self in the form of "no-self." This popular conception does a couple things:

It answers these other ways of thinking about life by encouraging people to think about their theories of self as just that – theories.
Then, it encourages you to set them aside, and practice kindness, empathy, and relaxation.

Basically, this type of Buddhism provides a reply to every other theory of happiness. You want to get rich? Fine - but spend a little time wiping away the excesses of your material desire. You want to find the real you? OK, but don't cling too tightly to the idea that there is a real you. or that you can find it. Working too hard? Feeling listless and lazy? Here again, these curated elements of Buddhism can provide a little relief.

This isn't exactly what the Buddha had in mind. Fair enough – nothing in the modern world is. But it seems to work. So when Americans have had enough pursuing happiness in a variety of different ways, many end up at places like Dharma Bum Temple not intending to find nirvana, but to cleanse the pallet.

The mechanisms that bring this all together are a bit complex, but I've explained them – and the way that the idea of no-self leads to happiness – here, in the latest entry in my little encyclopedia of happiness.

January 28, 2024March 19, 2024

The Meaning of Life, and How to Find It

At some point during my teenage years, I got an idea in my head. I wanted to live my life as well as possible, and I realized I had no idea how. I had an vague notion that I would be able to do that once I had figured out the meaning of life.

Things were different when I started college. This was back in the 80's – long before the Great Recession put people in mind of the bottom line when they thought about what to study, and before the escalating costs of an education created the student debt crisis. In those days, if you came from a middle class family or got good financial aid (I did both) you could learn to become a better person, not just a particular kind of person with particular kinds of expertise. This is a way of saying that I chose what to study because I wanted to study it.

That was it.

If I had a question – one big enough to devote a couple of months to – I'd take a class and try to answer it.

People often ask this question in college, and then, for some reason, seem to forget about later on without ever actually finding an answer:

What is the meaning of life?

At first, it seemed to me that all the chaos and disappointment I saw the world was obscuring some great order I just hadn't figured out yet. If I understood the order, I'd understand the meaning.

So when I turned up at Haverford College back in 1987, I went right to the religious studies department. Where else would you go to learn about what the great thinkers had discovered about life, the universe, and everything?

Religion

I learned a lot about what great theologians thought, like how Aristotle's version of god – the unmoved mover, without change or, really, anything like a human personality – got consolidated with the God of the Old Testament I'd learned about as a kid in Sunday school, who, as I understood it, spent His time stomping around the middle east, favoring some people, smiting others, then smiting lots of the people He'd favored, and favoring the people He'd been smiting.

There's a solution to this problem. It's complicated. In fact, over a couple of centuries the early church fathers, and a few of its mothers, came up with several different solutions, all of which were complicated.

And that was just Christianity.

Religious studies took my questions and gave me more answers that I knew what to do with.

And that's what was supposed to happen.

It made my world richer and more complex, but in the process it multiplied my questions instead of giving me clear answers.

What I did learn, though, was just how varied, mysterious, and complicated real life was – and how important it is to see it in all its complexity. I also learned that all the different angles and ideas and visions I studied weren't directly about the universe. They were about people's perspectives on it. I realized I wasn't studying the actual order out in the universe – it was about the order inside people's heads.

So I moved on to step two:

Psychology

If the meaning of life wasn't out there, it must be in here instead. I learned about the Oedipus complex (dubious) the collective unconscious (mind-blowing) and the idea – which was revolutionary in some circles back then – that morality was related to how people relate to one another, so women often had different answers to moral questions than men did.

So, wait. Men and women have different kinds of minds?

The idea isn't hard to grasp. But if meaning comes from minds, and people have different kinds, it throws a wrench in the works if you're trying to find the single meaning of life.

So: What, exactly is the mind? I wondered.

Philosophy

Majoring in philosophy was basically a product of intellectual musical chairs. When the music stopped and the College expected me to choose one, I was next to the philosophy chair, and that was that. I wasn't great at it, as it turns out, but it did teach me to think rigorously.

Most of the philosophers I've known are verbal thinkers. They think best in words. I learned this when a number of my students came into class complaining about their philosophy professor who made them close their notebooks and just listen. It drove many of them nuts. They were like me – I am very much a visual thinker. I organize everything into pictures in my head. If I can't see it, I don't remember it. And if the students couldn't ink things into shapes on paper, it wouldn't stick. None of my philosophy teachers did this, but I think the mismatch in thinking styles didn't help.

That said, I enjoyed it.

Lots of philosophers, as it turns out, spent their days trying to figure out what the mind was, and how that gave life meaning.

I liked getting into the heads of the philosophers, trying to see things from their perspectives. By the time I was done with philosophy (before the college was ready to let me be finished with it), I had a pretty good idea about what some very smart, very white, very dead men has to say about the how to get at the meaning of life. I just wished that there was a way to do it with people substantially more alive.

So naturally, I hopped to

Literature

The last semester of senior year I read James Joyce's Ulysses. In it, Leopold Bloom wanders around his home town, visiting actual places over the course of an actual day. I dived into the book outside of Philadelphia in 1991 and came up for air in Dublin on June 16, 1904.

And that was amazing. Ulysses' trick tapped in to empathy and imagination, two of the great tools, toys, and gifts that make being human worthwhile.

And through them, I was getting closer to the meaning of life.

Where philosophers explore the big questions stepping back and reasoning things through, though, novelists like Joyce put the meanings in the lives of their characters.

So I realized I'd been looking at it wrong. The meaning of life isn't something that's above or beyond us, or even some great mystery or ineffable truth that applies to us all. The meaning, Leopold showed me, meandering around Dublin, is in life.

This is what Leopold Bloom taught me. It's just too bad, I thought, that he wasn't a real person.

The meaning of life appears in the living. If meaning comes out of your own experience of living in a great big world, then maybe part of doing it well involved doing it a lot.

And That was That.

In 1991, the college handed me a BA and sent me out to try and be an adult.

I was not successful.

For the first few years I didn't live especially well, but I did live fully. Four years after I graduated I was delivering pizza, painting houses, and renting my old room back from my parents. I was recovering from learning how overwhelmingly full a life could be.

I hadn't found the meaning of life, but I was far from where I'd started.

I'd learned how to think rigorously and empathically, how to play with ideas and build them together, and how to see the different meanings and values in the lives that were described to me.

One More Step

Around that time, I discovered a field that studied this sort of thing. If you torque it enough, it lets you explore the meaning of life through other people, and see it, in contrast, reflected in yourself. It was like literature, without the fiction. It was like philosophy, but it looked at the thoughts of ordinary people. It was like psychology, but out in the open instead of the lab.

I figured that if I lived my life fully it would be a good step toward living it well. And I wanted to spend my life actually living it, so I became an anthropologist. It appealed to me because it's a way of looking at life as you experience it, and the meaning in it, as you go along.

Karma, Ghosts, and Capitalist Invaders

I've written a book about this. It starts at the end of the tale I've told here – a few years after I moved into the life of an anthropologist. It explains the processes that bring meaning into lives. It's being published by Macmillan, under the Palgrave imprint, and it should be out later this year. Narrative Practice and Cultural Change: Karma, Ghosts, and Capitalist Invaders in Thailand is based, as you might have guessed, on the years I lived in Bangkok, the stories the my friends there told me, and how they put their lives together there – moving through a world shaped by forces seen and unseen, and making sense of what they know.

You can read the first few pages of it here.

The stories are all drawn from my time abroad, but the theory that goes with it is applicable to everyone. To understand your own life, I find, it helps to see things explained about other people first. A little distance is a useful thing.

I'll keep you posted on when the publication date is. In the meantime, I'm back to using the system I pioneered in that book to help understand happiness in the US. The results of that are what you find here.

November 23, 2023March 19, 2024

Why Wait? (Why Not Wait?)

He hasn't gone yet.

There are down-sides to this, of course. He's given up so much potential earning power at this point that he'll probably never be all that wealthy. That doesn't really matter, though – his decision was in tune with his desires.

I recently came across an article that brought him to mind. This article is on a site called Tiny Buddha, which, as you might expect, has a lot to say about happiness from a particular perspective. (By the way, so do I...) Author Amaya Pryce makes a good point: there's a difference between making a decision based on a schedule, and making one based on your own personal sense that it's right.

She recommends waiting.

There are times when it isn't possible to wait. Deadlines loom and clocks tick. But Pryce makes a strong case for the idea that we should hang out and wait for inner certainty when we can.

Chronological Mismatch

Behind that argument is another more subtle one: in living our modern, busy lives, we often overlook the possibility that we could wait until we were sure.

Although she doesn't say it, Pryce's article hints at the fact that the way we structure our lives around time is very artificial, and that this system – relatively new, and definitely not invented to make us happy – can cause problems without our realizing it.

These days, most of the conventional wisdom about happiness share a basic assumption that didn't exist in the past. In the 19^th century, for example, a lot of the talk about happiness involved either compromising with society, or out-and-out flouting expectations. (Think of Henry David Thoreau – or, at least, "Henry David Thoreau," the rather fictional character who had to leave society in order to "live deliberately" by Walden Pond, or Ralph Waldo Emerson, who found social niceties pointless.)

By the early twentieth century the desire to win friends and influence people became one of the main themes in American happiness. It was indicative of a larger trend:

Happiness comes from learning to be comfortable conforming.

These days, articles that recommend nonconformity, or even compromise, are relatively rare. Learning to accept complete surrender is more the mode. By recommending a course of action that specifically doesn't conform, Pryce's essay on Tiny Buddha is one of the minority that buck that trend.

The Big Assumption about Happiness

Like almost all the stuff written on happiness lately, Pryce's article begs a very basic question. When she says it's OK not to conform to the timetables dictated by society, she's giving people permission to avoid the norms. But by making it personal – about you and your relationship to time – she overlooks the fact that our cultures are built to make it hard to question those time-tables. They have shaped our personalities to accept them. Most of us don't really know how to question them. By focusing on the psychology of happiness, she overlooks the social and structural challenges that block it.

So by all means take her advice if it suits you – but after that, ask yourself a couple other questions. For example:

Why is it so hard to wait? That is, how did we get so disconnected from our own pace? Why do we accept the idea of living by someone else's artificially-imposed sense of time?
Who would we be if we didn't live by the clock?

My Answer (Or at Least Part of One)

In On the Clock: Trapped in Time? You're Not Alone, I explore these questions. What was life like before the clock was invented, before the tight schedule, being on time, and guilt over showing up late was invented? And just how did our society become so obsessed with time?

My friend, by the way, recently decided to go to college. After many years as a paralegal, he has ruled out the law as a career. He's decided to become an interpreter.

It took a while to get there, but he says it finally feels right.

October 31, 2023March 19, 2024

The Marketplace of Emotions

I began my research into happiness – and emotions in general, the ways we use them in our culture – not long before Trump was elected. Since then, I’ve been paying attention to the decisions I make based on what I want to feel. And as it turns out, I make a lot more of them than I thought that way.

Most other people seem to do it, too.

When you watch a comedy or read a romance, it’s pretty clear that you’re choosing what to feel from a marketplace of emotions. We choose a lot of other leisure activities – including things like fishing and watching football – because of the particular emotions the particular emotions we expect to experience.

At the same time, we live in a society that still places Enlightenment values on a high pedestal. We don’t always use those values, and they don’t always match up with the way the world works, but we value them anyway. Back during the Enlightenment (the 17^th and 18^th centuries, give-or-take), a lot of the philosophers who ended up shaping American thought for the long run believed that people were fundamentally rational creatures. Your emotions were in there, but the best men were the ones who knew how to keep their emotions in their place. And women were seen as having a problem in part because it was thought that they couldn’t. (As it turns out, no one really does, of course.)

God gave us emotions to provide data points to help us make rational decisions. Not the other way around. Emotions shouldn’t influence your reasoning, Enlightenment thinkers figured.

That would be bad.

Reason and Rationalization

With some minor modification, we’ve carried this idea through to the present. There are certain parts of life where it seems natural to assume that emotions would take a back seat to rational thought.

It may seem natural – but that doesn’t mean we actually do things that way.

Along the line we came up with the word “rationalization.” We had done it before, but now we have a word for it. As Ben Franklin famously wrote:

“So convenient a thing to be a reasonable creature, since it enables one to find or make a reason for every thing one has a mind to do.”

We are every bit as “reasonable” today as Franklin. The range of sources for news (or maybe I should say “news“ in some cases) has broadened. There is a growing marketplace in which people can decide not just what they want to learn, but how they want to feel. There is now a de facto marketplace of emotions in the news business.

Some outlets keep the emotional temperature low, aiming for a patina of objectivity. Some play off curiosity and irony. Some aim straight for negative emotions – giving a place to validate them, but also an echo chamber to create them.

At the same time, even outlets that claim to be serious, rational purveyors of news have taken to reporting on the theatrics of the debates instead of the substance, and focusing, often without context, on the Twitter-performances Trump offers up.

Your Choice of Emotions

So here we get to today’s study, from a team lead by Amit Goldberg. You can find the original in The Journal of Experimental Psychology: General, but here’s an accessible, non-fire-walled explanation.

It shows, basically, that people have some ability to select their emotions in social situations. If you’re around angry people but don’t want to become angry yourself, you’ll probably stay calm. But if you’re open to being angry, they can act as an accelerant.

So what do you want to feel?

If someone asked, you might opt for “calm” – that’s a pretty typical notion in our society. We often talk, after all, as though it were still the Enlightenment.

At the same time, calmness can be a bit dull. We often opt to be piqued. A little bit of anger (if it’s aimed at people you don’t know) or something to explain the fear you seem to feel – there’s pleasure in these.

I’m certainly not going to say that people shouldn’t participate in the marketplace of emotions. It is, after all, one of the things that makes being human fun.

But it’s good to pay attention when you’re doing it – when you’re shopping for feelings rather than news.

August 8, 2023March 19, 2024

Apple Watched

For the last few months, I've been wearing an Apple Watch. At first I thought it was my friend, offering good advice and cheerful encouragement. But over time I've come to realize that it had other motives.

The Apple Watch – and especially the built-in activity-tracking app – uses many of the same attention-keeping tricks that social media does, and it can be addictive in a similar way.

But how do these techniques fit into our world? And what does thinking in the watch's terms (you need to do this to get the little bursts of pleasure that it offers) do to a person's way of thinking?

Going for its constant stream of little rewards causes us to overlook the bigger picture of the larger rewards life has to offer.

I explore that bigger picture – and the plusses and minuses of the Apple Watch activity app – here, in The Apple Watch’s Peculiar Kind of Happiness.

July 24, 2023March 19, 2024

Back to Reality

I'm back from vacation - a month in South East Asia. People who know me know that I travel there often. Bangkok is the site of my research, but since my intellectual attention has turned (about 50% of it, at least) to happiness in the US, I didn't go to gather data.

Instead, I caught up with old friends, and did some actual touristing, something anthropologists are pretty ambivalent about.

It also gave me the chance to think about the meaning of travel in our culture, and how we make sense of the world when it doesn't feel like our own.

I took the picture above at dawn in Ha Long Bay, in northern Vietnam - this was a place I'd never heard of until it came time to plan the trip, but found otherworldly, and interesting in a bunch of ways.

I've been thinking about the nature of time lately, and how it relates to our ideas about happiness. I've posted an article on the difference between being in the moment and being in the present in Ha Long Bay. As always, I hope you find it interesting.

December 14, 2020March 19, 2024

I’m Done with “The Meaning of Life.” (Hooray!)

When people use the phrase, "the meaning of life," their language suggests the idea that there's one single meaning for every life. I'm not comfortable with that. Most anthropologists aren't. Instead, I'm interested in looking at the meanings in lives. Meanings don't come from outside and tell people what to do. They may shape our lives, but our lives shape those meanings, too.

I wrote a book about this.

I've been way from this site for a while now because I was finishing it. Narrative Practice and Cultural Change: Karma, Ghosts and Capitalist Invaders in Thailand will appear sometime soon with the Palgrave Macmillan imprint name somewhere on the spine.

This is my first book. It's based, as you might have guessed, on my time in Bangkok.

For a long time now, I've thought that we really didn't have a strong explanation for how people find meaning in their lives.

You can point to the things that give people meaning – family, love, charity, work, God. This is all true, but we've never had a good way of talking about the processes that people went through to God and family and work important enough to give life meaning. And we certainly lacked a good way to explain how all these things fill similar holes in people's lives.

But I think I've got a solution. I put it in a book, and now, it's done.

A Little Bit of Theory

Psychologist named Jerome Bruner realized that people remember their lives in the form of stories. Since you record what you know about your life in that form, to be human is, in an important way, to be a set of narratives. On top of that, people who live in the same cultural worlds tend to share a number of story forms – outlines that they can fit their own symbols into.

This is a good jumping-off point for thinking about the ways people use stories to get meanings into their lives.

Since the 70's, social scientists have seen meanings as coming from outside, being imposed on people by social forces. I'm arguing that the unique personal experiences people have also play in here – that social forces can't be overpowering because everyone ends up putting their ideas of the world together in slightly different ways. (I'm not the only person who thinks this, by the way – it's a common thought among phenomenological and moral anthropologists.)

So what I've tried to do here is to take Bruner's insights about stories and apply them to the ideas of Pierre Bourdieu, a sociologist who put individual experience at the center of cultural life. (A brilliant thinker whose sentences are often read like eating thistles – tasty, but you must chew very slowly, and sometimes end up wondering if it was really a good idea.)[1] Bourdieu decided that, although the meanings in life emerged from individual experience, people synched themselves up, and when individual differences came around, they tended to break the system of shared beliefs.

The thing is, though, if you take the idea that people build stories out of their own experiences, hanging them on shared story-forms like ornaments on a Christmas tree, then you can see how meanings can come out of individual lives while allowing people to go their own ways – at least a little bit.

(I've left out a bunch of steps here; this post is meant to be a quick read. The book explains the whole thing in about 300 pages, if you're interested.)

The Bigger Picture

So I thought these ideas were cool, and I don't know of any other anthropologists who've ever put them together quite like this. In fact, I'm not sure I know of any anthropologists who would have much of anything to say about the search for what we normally call "the meaning of life."

We'll see if it finds a place in the conversation.

I don't think there's much point in coming up with interesting ideas if they're only good for talking about with other anthropologists, though. For many of us here in the west, the search for happiness is a core part of the ways we make meaning, so I wanted to turn my attention to an application of the theory that doesn't rely on theoretical heavy lifting that goes on in Karma, Ghosts, and Capitalist Invaders. Now that that project has been put to bed, I can turn my attention back to my other project.

Impractically Happy is about happiness in the present – I'm using this site to make sense of what's going on in in the US today. In the next few years, I'm going to take what I learn about the present, and look at the ways those stories developed in the past. I'm working on the history of happiness in the US.

[1] I don't actually know if thistles are tasty.

March 16, 2020March 17, 2020

Gamify Yourself (This Isn’t About the Coronavirus!)

While preparing to work from home (like half of America) I took some time out to think about gamification, and the ways little internet-based games get people to rethink their identities. When people find that part of their self-worth comes from the rewards the social media gives them just for being "themselves," their identities become gamified. Yes, you can gamify yourself.

This is important. With the right kinds of rewards, spaced at the right timing, people can become at least a little bit addicted to anything. And when those rewards are for being you, you can become addicted to your own identity.

It's not just that you like your identity. You can become addicted to it. Ten years ago, if someone had pointed out that out, it would have seemed like a plot from an Octavia Butler novel. But having lived with the most interactive parts of the internet for a decade now, this fact has become sadly intuitive.

The thing is, this was going on before the internet, too.

As far back as the Gilded Age you could gamify yourself.

So I wrote an article about it. You can read about what extreme wealth can do to the people who have it.

You can also find out a little bit about my dating life.

I also explore a new concept, the dope, which is like an old concept, the util. I find it pretty interesting.