happy 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.

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.

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.

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 15, 2018June 16, 2018

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?

March 5, 2018October 10, 2019

What you want the most is the hardest to find

Why is it hard for so many people to control their appetites? I came across an interesting theory, proposing that it's the result of natural selection.[1] What we want the most, the theory goes, is what's hardest to find. Those earlier hominids that went for the big calories and rare nutrients like fats and salts instead of low-cal, common veggies when they had the chance, were more likely to live to fight another day, and also have sex later, and pass those proclivities on to the next generation. So when you're looking through the pantry, an ancient voice in the back of your brain, passed down through the long eons before the rise of Nabisco, whispers, There will always be broccoli, but this may be the last Oreo you ever see… The traits we want the most in ourselves are the hardest to find.

The same, I think, is true of empathy, and calm, and many other things: what we want the most is the hardest to find – in ourselves and in others, too.

I was reminded of this recently. Someone I know seemed to be working really hard to pick a fight with me, and it pissed me off enough that I was just about to give it to him.

My friend Benton kicked my butt about it. "What do you think he's going through?" he demanded.

Yes. Right. Like I said, empathy is hardest to find when you need to find it the most. And failing that, mellowness.

This is one of the realizations that spills over the side when someone practices meditation.

One sultry night in Bangkok many years ago, just before the turn of the millennium, I was hanging out with the sister of a friend of mine, and his young nephew. My friend – let's not mince words here – couldn't be trusted. Still, she kept him on at her shop, selling trinkets and little statues at the market down by the Jao Praya River.

"He steals from me," she told me.

"Then why is he still working for you?"

Yes, why? Continue reading...

"To teach me Odtoan," she said.

Sensing my confusion, she whispered to her little son, "Pretend to annoy me."

The boy danced around her and made little mocking gestures while trying not to giggle.

Awn closed her eyes and held up her hand in the gesture that, in the US, means "stop." It means "stop" in Thai Buddhist iconography, too – but, as a gesture of the Buddha's, in a much deeper, longer-lasting sense.

Odtoan: patience, forbearance, endurance, tolerance. Important virtues if one wants to find peace, as Buddhists think of it.

How she measured the value of patience against the loss of merchandise I don't know. (After I returned to the US, she did send her brother to a monastery for a season, to improve himself.) But the emotions and states of mind that loosen tensions require practice.

It wasn't until I'd been meditating for several years that that revelation spilled into awareness. I began to see how much discipline it takes to not get angry, to make use of empathy and calmness to defuse tense situations – to be care-free. It can take more discipline than a person can muster sometimes.

And because the currents of our culture push us so quickly toward individualism and taking personal responsibility, it can be hard to ask for those things from others.

But I think Awn was right, in a round-about way: we do inherit these feelings - empathy, mellowness, anger, frustration, and many others - from the people around us. (I hesitate to say learn – these are often nothing other than emotional reactions.) Sometimes it's an intentional response to an irresponsible brother, but often we also experience them by mirroring the way others feel. This is all part of an environment of circulating feelings

What people want the most can be the hardest to find in those environments - but sometimes practice does help.

Notes:

[1] This comes from a secondary source I taught in my days at UCSD, a book called Human Natures: Genes, Cultures, and the Human Prospect, by Paul Ehrlich (published Penguin Books in 2002), p. 287.

Tag: happy