Category: Happiness and Economics

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Is Mindfulness Bad for the Workplace, or is the Workplace Bad for Mindfulness?

The relationship between happiness and work came up again this week - and some new research gives is a particular slant: mindfulness and work, they say, don't go together.

There's a new editorial in the New York Times about mindfulness in the workplace. When employees meditation, apparently, it's not actually good for business. "Meditation was correlated with reduced thoughts about the future and greater feelings of calm and serenity — states seemingly not conducive to wanting to tackle a work project," researchers Katherine Vohs and Andrew Hafenbrack explain in their essay, "Hey, Boss, You Don't Want Your Employees to Meditate."

Authors often have no say over the titles their articles are given, and this one sends a message that might be a little too clear: the article itself (here – you can read the abstract before you smack into the paywall) is a whole lot more ambiguous in its conclusions.

In it, they argue that meditation reduces people's motivation to engage in tedious and meaningless tasks. People didn't perform any worse, though, possibly because they weren't distracted by other thoughts or worries.
Happiness in the workplace in the US is a serious issue, and one that's gotten a good deal of thought.

What I'd Like to Ask These Business Experts

The research itself, with its appropriate level of nuance, doesn't bother me – but some of the assumptions the authors make about work do., The quote up there in the second paragraph should raise some big questions about the ways businesses think about their work environments.

1. All things being equal – and since mindfulness didn't effect productivity – why wouldn't businesses want employees experiencing "greater feelings of calm and serenity?"

2. In the research article, the authors explain, "While not tested here, it is possible that being in a mindful state made people realize how unimportant the experimental tasks were to them." They seem to be suggesting that this applies to the workplace as well as the lab. Why is the focus here on getting workers motivated to do things they don't care about, rather than finding ways to engage them?

The take-away from this seems to be that an anxious, un-self-actualized employee is, in some ways, better than one who's living life with a comfortable, mindful fullness. There was a time when employee satisfaction was taken as an important goal by many corporations. That time is, quite obviously, no longer here. There's been a subtle trade. Americans have exchanged satisfaction with life at work for the  money to buy satisfaction outside of work. (And then gave up the a lot of the money, too.)

So: is the problem with the mindful worker, or with the job she finds herself in?

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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?

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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.