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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.

 

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Is Maslow’s Hierarchy a Hierarchy?

I keep coming across charts that look like this:

maslow, maslow's 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.

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Buddhism’s Conundrum

Buddhism, Buddhism's Buddhist shrine, Angkor Thom, Cambodia, Buddhist

On Tuesday evenings in what used to be a church on Campus Avenue in University Heights, someone – usually a man who goes by Ajjarn Jeff - gets up and gives a talk on meditation and surrendering one's desires. One night not too long ago, someone asked whether it was important to be a true believer to benefit from Buddhism's teachings at the Dharma Bum Temple.

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.

*This is about Buddhism's Theravadan tradition, practiced mostly in places like Sri Lanka, Thailand, and Cambodia. Later versions – like the Mahayana tradition, common further north in Asia, and its Indo-Tibetan forms – are somewhat different, having found ways to reconcile those two distinct Theravadan versions.

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Apple Watched

Apple watch, watch, apple watch activity app

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.

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Back to Reality

karsts, limestone karsts, limestone karst, Ha Long, Ha Long Bay, Ha Long Bay Vietnam
Karsts in Ha Long Bay, Vietnam

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.

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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.

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

gamify yourself

 

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.

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Uncanny Cats: Why is the Movie Disturbing?

After reading a series of scathing reviews, I saw Cats last week - and liked it. In fact, I found the movie just about as entertaining as the reviews.

Especially the bad ones.

The film had hit a nerve. Reviewers seemed to be questioning all the life decisions they had made that lead them to the theater. The thing is, as much as they hated it, a lot of them really liked to, too. And they had a good deal of trouble making sense of the experience. (I loved this YouTube review - it's great entertainment in itself, but it's full of spoilers.)

What's this about? I think it has to do with our ideas about sex, animals, and the way our brain processes ambiguous information. It gave me an opportunity to

in an essay not so much on the film, but on the critical reception.

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Impractically Busy

This site has kept me busy. It has kept me so busy, in fact, that it looks like I haven't actually been working on it all. That's just how busy it's kept me.

If you look around, you'll notice some new things. They may be small, but they took an inordinately large amount of time to develop.

My dive into history continues – reading up on the history of emotions. Here's a comment on the rather unique history of Dandyism. Many dandies, apparently, were in the British military:

[T]he Duke of Wellington's officers, whilst maintaining a commendable sang-froid in the face of danger, even to the extent of being able to react to the loss of a leg as if it were hardly worth mentioning, were so concerned about maintaining their uniforms in immaculate condition as to want to meet the enemy carrying umbrellas."[i]

Bigger and Better

 

You may notice a line of buttons down the left side of the page, tastefully coordinated with the color scheme around the title, which will make it easier for you to pass what you find here on to anyone who might find it interesting.

You'll also find a few new articles.

I wrote Fifty Ways to be Happy as a way to help with emotional literacy. It defines and describes the different terms we have for happiness in English. There are a few more than fifty on the list, actually. In what ways are you happy? Take a look and give it a think.

You'll also find a review of a television show, Once Upon a Time which, of course, is bookended by "happily ever after." The program has an interesting take on happiness as being determined by morality. Although it looks Disneyfied on the surface, it actually reflects an old, deep set of American preoccupations – old enough to predate the Grimm fairytales and their Romantic-era sensibility.

I've also been busy making myself visible on social media – not something a private person is especially good at. But you can find and follow me now on Twitter (s_g_carlisle) and, as everyone else is shutting down their accounts, I've opened one on Facebook, which is very good to follow because it'll alert you when there's something new to learn about here.

And there's been a lot of the work done search-engine optimization, adding little bits of data behind the scenes to make the articles and reviews more appealing to Google and that one guy searching for "happiness" on Bing.

And that is something you shouldn't notice at all.

 

[i] Colin Campbell, The Romantic Ethic and the Spirit of Modern Consumerism, p. 165

 

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Demanding Ideas from the Past

I’ve spent the last few weeks delving into history. Some of the ideas about happiness from the past, it turns out, were very demanding – and went far beyond the world of ordinary experience. I’ve added two new pages recently, both of which deal with issues that transcend life as we usually know it.

To the Reviews page I’ve added an article about Nature, by Ralph Waldo Emerson. Although the Romantic movement never really caught on in the US, his work as a Transcendentalist (an American spin-off of that school of thought) has helped shape contemporary ideas about happiness, especially the ones relating to the idea of authenticity. Have you become the sort of person who can perceive God? Emerson tries to describe the state of mind you’d need to do this – and the sort of person you’d have to be.

I’ve also added an essay about Nietzsche’s conception of the Eternal Return of the Same. (That’s the latest entry in Happiness HQ, my little encyclopedia of happiness.) Would you be willing  to live your life over and over again, exactly as it was, is, and will be? Because, Nietzsche suggests, you might have to. If not, what would get you to that point of self-acceptance? This is at the heart of Nietzsche’s thinking about the Eternal Return.

I’m still working through the Transcendentalist period. I’m not really looking forward to Walden; it looks like it’s about 15 hours on LibriVox,  but that’s next on my list.

Anything you think I should read? Let me know.

-Steve