Happiness and Culture Archives - Impractically Happy

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.

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.

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.

July 22, 2019July 22, 2019

The Expanding World of Social Prescribing

Take Two Aspirin, and Call Me in the Museum

If feeling good is most often about the relationship between your inner thoughts and your outer context, then why do so many treatments for unhappiness involve working on the inside alone?

This is a question that many doctors have begun asking, apparently. They have started a move toward social prescribing – giving prescriptions that involve getting their patients out of the house and into the community. At least, this what some doctors in Britain and Canada are doing. They are writing prescriptions for free admissions to museums, as well as recommending things like dance classes and chess clubs as treatments for people whose low moods are the product of disengagement from meaningful activities.

The idea that the world around us can be used as a tool for well-being shouldn’t come as much of a surprise. But social prescribing does tell us something about the ways professionals are thinking about happiness.

Why does this matter?

Although a person’s context has always been seen as important to their happiness,* for a long time happiness was categorized as a psychological phenomenon. Your mood could be managed in one-on-one psychotherapy sessions or in private with your journal. And this means that the broader sociological or cultural environment wasn’t viewed as particularly significant.

And that opens the door to many other ways to deal with issues around happiness, and allows people to combine philosophies and schools of thought in the way they handle them.

If context matters for happiness, then how, exactly, did it become something handled psychologically in the first place? A small slice of the answer might have to do with the notion of baseline happiness (see the footnote below). But there’s much more to it than that. The answer to that question is long and complicated – and best saved for another time.

* To some extent. Some theories of happiness involve a version of the notion of baseline happiness, the idea that people are biologically engineered to return to their typical level of happiness after a major change. Those theories suggest that, in the long run, your level happiness is unrelated to the world around you. Myself, I don’t buy this. I’ve experienced happier and less happy periods in my life as my circumstances changed, and that doesn’t seem to be at all unusual. It also suggests that, since it can’t be changed, as a society, we hold no responsibility for the happiness of others. So this isn’t just wrong. As I’ve been arguing throughout this blog, it’s pretty irresponsible as well.

June 5, 2018June 16, 2018

Been to Paradise

I've written a bunch about work, money and time – but what about what people do with their time and money when they're not working? A recent trip to Hawaii got me thinking about the nature of vacationing. Now that summer's coming, it's time to consider what you want out of your time off. Just how helpful is escape? And what makes someplace "paradise?" Check out Paradise: Lost and Found for some answers.

The writing style is a little different here: a bit less fact-based than, say, the last article on time, and a bit more personal.

February 15, 2018April 9, 2018

Happiness When Times are Tight – or Just Feel That Way

In David Brook’s column earlier this week, he talks about the emergence of a “scarcity mentality” in Donald Trump’s Republican party. Scarcity mentalities are non-starters, he writes. It
“seems like a shift in philosophy. But it’s really a shift from a philosophy to an anti-philosophy. The scarcity mind-set is an acid that destroys every belief system it touches.”
Historically, though, those philosophies have existed, and they worked pretty well – Trump’s handling of them aside.
This got me to thinking about the metaphors that people use to figure out the path to well-being. In times when economic resources are scarce, there seems to be a tendency toward thinking that psychic resources are scarce, too. People took what they knew about the world, and applied it to the mind as well. Scarcity in the 19th century lead to beliefs that seem odd today, like the idea that the emotional exhaustion of a failed love affair could destroy your health, and the notion that children should be kept away from excitement if they were going to grow up strong.
By the early 20th century, though, the metaphor had changed: as the economy began to expand as a result of more efficient human work – aided by the advances of the industrial revolution – and so the idea that minds worked that way as well came into vogue: exertion was suddenly good for you. You could work your way to happiness.
So if ideas about minds are reflections of our worlds – adaptations of the metaphors that appear in our cultural environments – where are we today in our thinking about happiness? Are we wrapped up in computer metaphors, or something else? Is the outside-in approach, where you “fake it ’til you make it” actually the Facebook model of happiness, where you present your ideal life and hope it trickles down?
I’ve given those historical ideas a better exploration in today’s article, which you can find here.
What do you think?

February 14, 2018April 9, 2018

I’ve got a new bathroom

At least, parts of it are new. And it’s much, much better than the one I had before.

That got me thinking about a classic happiness problem: Why do we like the things we like?

Thinkers like the philosopher and social critic Theodor Adorno argue it’s because we associate nice things with being “classy” in a very literal sense – because the things we own tell us who we are, and that comes with a social class label.

For several hundred years, people have been pursuing the American dream – and conspicuous consumption has been a part of that. Why? One argument explains it by saying that consumption tells other people – and ourselves as well – what we’re worth.

The modern minimalism movement rebels against that: you don’t need good things to convince yourself that you’re a good person. (Or, rather, if you do then you’ve got bigger problems to deal with than storing your shoe collection.) In this, they’re following after Adorno – but there’s a difference.

People in the 21^st century still succumb to the desire to keep up with the Jonses, but it’s easier to get yourself out of that head-space because there are more points of view you can look at our culture from, if you’re willing to seek them out.

I’ve got this new bathroom, and I’m trying to figure out what, from Adorno’s point of view, it’s saying about me.

And I’m not sure that it matters. I explore this question in greater depth in an essay I’ll post soon.

Owning nice things can feel good in a lot of different ways. Are some ways better than others? Let me know what you think.

January 18, 2018April 9, 2018

It’s still not about the stuff.

I came across a classic 2012 editorial from the New York Times this afternoon called “Don’t Indulge. Be Happy.” It makes the same point that so many Times editorials, and advice columns and research summaries do: that having more stuff doesn’t make most people that much happier. Having more interesting experiences and being more generous both have that result. While material goods can provide a certain amount of comfort, experiences and relationships are also vital if you’re going to lead a fulfilling life. And while there’s no really practical limit to interesting things you can do or meaningful relationships you can create, most of us have satisfied our quota of stuff. (You really don’t need that much.)

This probably isn’t going to surprise anyone. What I find more curious, though, is why writers continue to feel the need to point this out.

Consumerism and materialism – these are tied deeply to Americans’ instincts about what will make us happy. They’re connected so deeply, it seems, that we need to be reminded over and over that there’s more to life than just owning things.

The fact that these articles keep coming out, each as though it were for the first time, seems to suggest that we have a collective amnesia about the other sources of happiness. Or maybe we’re so preoccupied with work that those other goals just fade from view.

I have some ideas about the historical foundations of this preoccupation, which I’ve posted in a column here. Let me know what you think.

Category: Happiness and Culture