Meditations on Meaning

About a year ago, a friend returned from a harrowing stint in Iraq and wanted to treat himself to something special.  So he bought a big truck.  Not one of the sissy trucks that most of his army buddies drove… No, he bought a Ford F-250 with monster wheels, suspension, and all the accessories!

Sure, he could barely afford the monthly payments… but he had always wanted a big truck and, he realized while in Iraq, that happiness sometimes takes precedence, even if it comes with big monthly payments.

The first night with the truck was great.  He parked it in his driveway, put some couches in the flatbed, as well as a barbeque and an ice box… and we partied out there until late.  Most of his friends were envious (“Dude, this is dope!” they echoed), his girlfriend was impressed (“We already broke it in this afternoon,” she admitted), and he wondered aloud whether he’d ever been so happy (“This… is true happiness!” he said).

A week later, I saw him and asked whether the truck was still giving him the ‘true happiness’ that he had expressed the week before.  “I dunno man, it’s just a truck.  It’s fucking cool… but, you know, it’s just a truck.”

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Each of us – young or old, fat or skinny, black or white, rich or poor – wants happiness!  Some of us prioritize our own happiness, some of us prioritize the happiness of others (family, friends, countrymen, etc.), and some of us prioritize the happiness of our Gods… but we all prioritize happiness in some form over everything else!

To create or sustain happiness (whether it’s our own or the happiness of others), we do lots of work!  We socialize or pray or have sex in various positions… We go to baseball games or to the beach or volunteer at the YMCA…

Or if we want to find “true happiness”, we…. umm… buy cool shit!  It doesn’t matter what it is… If we buy it, we do so because we believe that we or someone we care about will be happier for having it.

Perhaps it’s a Ford F-250.  Perhaps it’s a nice romantic dinner for your girlfriend.  Perhaps it’s a train set for your younger brother.  Or perhaps, even, it’s a self-help book for yourself – one of thousands that claim to teach you how to increase your own level happiness…

And yet, hundreds of studies on happiness have almost unanimously debunked the widespread cultural myth that long-term happiness levels increase with upgrades in our material well-being!

Happiness, according to the World Database of Happiness (a compilation of all relevant scientific studies on the subject), is largely determined by our genes and marginally influenced by romantic, social, and personal patterns that, with effort, we set for ourselves.

Provided we have access to basic necessities (food, shelter, and health care) our happiness levels don’t increase with increases in wealth or social standing.   In fact, once we have the basic necessities, every dollar we spend on ourselves – as far as long-term happiness is concerned – is wasted!

Yet that can’t be, we tell ourselves.  We buy the plasma television and TiVo subscription because it makes our living room less cluttered and our entertainment hours more fulfilling… and thus we’ll be happier.  We rent the beachfront apartment because our friends will be jealous and because the sound of the breaking waves is soothing… and thus we’ll be happier.  We buy the Ford F-250 because, simply, we deserve something nice every now and then – nice things that, we believe, will make us happier.

But though we experience short-term increases in happiness from these purchases, the long-term increases that we’re expecting simply don’t exist.  We quickly adjust our expectations to our new equipment, social standing, or surroundings… and our happiness set point returns to normal… right where it was before we made the new purchases!

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We all want to maximize our own happiness or the happiness of others.  Yet, for the most part, we’re using tactics that simply don’t work.  Science has proven that we can’t buy happiness… yet we put so much of our energy into trying!!

And who can blame us?

We live in a society with billions of products and advertisements competing for our attention almost every waking hour…. each telling us a different variation of the same story:  Buy me and you’ll be happier!

And we buy it!  Despite overwhelming scientific evidence disproving our assumptions, we continue to believe that increased social status, more sexual partners, bigger bank accounts, and younger looks will make us happier… so we pay for that perceived increase in happiness… but we don’t get what we paid for because, simply, we paid for an illusion.

Perhaps this is the cost of living in a free society!  Truth and happiness become inconsequential… and get replaced by popular conceptions of truth and happiness… conceptions based in mythology and motivated, primarily, by profit.  And perhaps this isn’t such a bad thing.  The alternative could be a kind of socialism that might endanger the free world and our own economic prosperity.

But I don’t think so.  Most people in the world are amazingly tolerant of new ideas… particularly when those ideas are helpful and can be heard above the rumble of old mythologies.  And most people in the world do a wonderful job incorporating new, helpful ideas into their lives to create balance… rather than using those ideas to promote untenable extreme behavior.

I wrote this article because I believe strongly that the real science on happiness needs a voice… particularly when potentially unhelpful and misleading mythologies dominate our lives, our culture, and our thinking.

Long-term happiness increases by orders of magnitude when we go from not having the necessities we need to live to getting those necessities.  But after that, no amount of money, no material object, and no increase in social status will make us happier… no matter how much we convince ourselves otherwise.

This is the science.  This is the truth.

What we do with it is up to us.  Perhaps we’ll rethink our priorities a little bit.  Perhaps we’ll give a little more to charity.  Or perhaps we’ll do nothing at all.  Whatever we choose… at least we’ll choose knowledgeably.

And that, I think, is a wonderful start!

Authors note:  for further research on the subject, check out the following:

1. The World Database of Happiness
2. Forbes research on happiness
3. An evolutionary psychologist’s take on happiness