It is a devastatingly beautiful spring afternoon. The sun is out and gently creating skin cells in trauma, there is not a worry in the world, and to top it all off, there are pictures of Scarlett Johanssen naked, leaked and widely available at anyone’s convenience. What a fantastic day. In spite of these miracles, there are masses of people who still have the nerve to be unhappy.
I recently stumbled upon an interview between famed comedian Louis CK and host Conan O’Brian in early 2009 about how “everything’s amazing and nobody is happy”. Fulfilling Shakespeare’s stereotype of the jester, Louis spoke with great wisdom about the absurdity of people complaining about their mobile phone’s terrible service, the delay on their international flights, or the accent of the customer service provided at 2AM. To summarise, Louis CK argued that people have so much - more than ever before - but still are unhappy.
Common sense suggests that we’re just becoming more spoilt. Everyone has seen the over-indulged, lazy child sulking about their (extravagant) presents at Christmas – we take this stereotype and extrapolate it to Generation Y and the wonderful gifts of technology, social profession and the like that has been gifted to us.
Gregg Easterbrook in his book The Progress Paradox breaks this down into two separate phenomena; revolution of the satisfied expectations, and collapse anxiety. Revolution of the satisfied expectations refers to the increasingly hard to satisfy hunger for new conveniences - whether this be the iPhone 9.6GS or KFC’s Quadruple (bypass) Down. The flip side of this immense expectation is the constant fear that what we possess could be taken away from us.
But do we even know what makes us happy? Dan Gilbert, a neurologist and author of the book Stumbling on Happiness, argues that humans are very poor at guessing what will make us happy. This effect – called the “impact bias” – is the tendency to overestimate the hedonic impact of future events. For instance, it would be safe to assume that a millionaire lottery winner is happier than a recent paraplegic? Wrong! In this case – and with most life events – changes to our lives rarely affect our happiness three months after the fact.
In Stumbling on Happiness, Gilbert goes on to talk about what we perceived as “natural” and “synthetic” happiness. Natural happiness refers to the generic, sought after, daytime movie happiness where the protagonist wants something, and then receives it – like an impoverished individual winning a raffle cash prize and finding happiness. Synthetic happiness, on the other hand, is happiness created by justifying circumstances as positive and wanted - like the same person winning a Pedegg in a raffle and finding happiness.
The interesting thing is that despite most people’s assumptions, there is no difference between synthetic and natural happiness in affecting happiness levels. In fact, synthetic happiness may have a greater effect due to accepting the circumstances (“I won a Pedegg – at least I won something!”) rather than having more choice and expectations which, in studies have been shown to have a dampening effect on happiness (“I won all this money – it’s actually not that much, I spent it on the wrong things, etc.”). Certainly, most people in Australia have no shortage of choice and expectations.
The role of narcissism in this must be acknowledged. The persistent self-interest in the face of reason points to nothing other than a widespread feeling of entitlement, stemming from the inability to understand the plights of others. While this certainly has always been present, its predominance has really been established in the last few decades. Lasch in The Culture of Narcissism links this to multiple socio-cultural factors such as the rise of commercialism, the obsession with appearance, ingrained need for independence and the cult of personality present in the media. In fact Twenge and Campbell (2009) in The Narcissism Epidemic showed that 10% of Americans in their twenties have full-blown narcissism, and huge amounts of others have traces of it – attributed to feel-good parenting, social networking, easy credit and the power of celebrities. All we do is focus on what matters to us – and what matters to us, is how happy we feel.
We live in such fantastic times. The progress that we’ve enjoyed in the last decade alone - let alone the two millenia - boggles the mind. Instead of always looking for something bigger and better, looking out for ourselves, or doubting your our own happiness, we should be grateful for what we do have. In fact, we should be helping those who don’t have what we have. We have everything, so there is no good reason not to be happy.
