As I mentioned earlier, I’m taking an intro to psych course through The Great Courses. The third lecture starts a recurring theme in the series from the professor who is very interested in the “positive dimensions of psychology”, going beyiond the classic “how do we recover from trauma or disorders” to focus more on well-being, aka “a science of happiness”.

There are a ton of books by psych professors out there; some make best-seller lists, others create lists for popular tabloid magazines (“Five things to be happy today!”). The classic summary of almost all the approaches is that happiness depends on a combination of pleasure (a seemingly obvious component), engagement (friends and family), and purpose or meaning. If you look at smaller behaviours to help boost happiness, the advice often focuses on exercise (on the basis of a release of hormones), sleep (for better health), or expressions of gratitude (reinforcement of blessings). And finally, after looking at all of those macro factors for “everyone”, the analysis often goes to the individual for personality type — mainly dividing between optimists and pessimists. Overall, most approaches say the Big Three make up 50% of the equation (including little and big things to improve things) and personality makes up the other 50%.

I confess that I am often very unsatisfied with the first half of that model, including the dozens of tweaks that various pop psych books suggest, like “don’t sweat the small stuff” or “the art of not giving a f***”.

For my own take on the subject of happiness, pleasure seems almost a no-brainer as a starting point. Do what makes you happy, right? And I’m generally okay with that premise. If you do more things that make you happy, you should theoretically be happier. If you spend more time doing things that you enjoy, you should become happier. Yet there are limitations in there that most of the texts NEVER talk about. Some things that give you pleasure may not actually make you happier. Some of this is just a limitation on the phrase, “If you do what you love, you’ll never work a day in your life.” Because work won’t feel like work. And thus, the conclusion is to follow your dreams. Great fodder for a bumper sticker, but it doesn’t pay the bills.

There is a very stong aspect of privilege there that you have a way to cover your living costs while doing all that…I have a much stronger resonance with the idea of first meeting the basics of Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs, particularly for physiology and safety, before having the room for the more social needs of love, self-esteem and self-actualization. There are a lot of unemployed artists out there who are “following their dreams” with no reality check on their abilities, and they are FAR from happy. You still have to have shelter, you still have to put food on your table. And much of the “self-actualization” advice out there doesn’t often take into account that some people NEED a structure around them to function; not everyone can be a successful entrepreneur, they don’t have the right mindset for it. Not to mention questions of over-indulgence with addiction and the impact of too much of something “pleasurable”. Or people defining something as giving them pleasure that actually doesn’t make them happy, chasing the wrong things. Pleasure is a performance indicator, not a variable to me. I think it can help you know what can help you be happier, I don’t know that pleasure alone makes you happy. There’s still a requirement to understand HOW it makes you happy and WHY, for how long, when, etc.

I also hate the idea of connection as a framing element, or at least how it is presented. The argument is simple…man is a social creature, and thus needs to be part of a community of friends and family. You need connections, you need to engage with others. Otherwise, you stagnate. Or you start to become the crazy hermit or the man from Hobbes’ Leviathan, living a life that is nasty, brutish and short. Overall, I’m okay with the premise. I don’t know if I would tie it to “happiness” per se, more just good mental health. Catalysts to evolve, perhaps.

Yet what I really don’t like is the assumption that more connection is better or that specific connections are required. Phrases like “blood is thicker than water” or “forgive family” or “family is forever” suggests that the most important connection is family. And that such a connection is paramount to happiness. And for thousands of years, that mythos hid a multitude of sins and the reality that not all family connections are healthy. Some are simply dysfunctional, cancers that should be excised, not nurtured. In the last 20 years, there’s been greater recognition that there is such a thing as hurting yourself by maintaining certain relationships just because they’re family, or suffering “friendly fire” that you wouldn’t tolerate from any other person if they weren’t related to you. I find it somewhat antithetical that someone should “excuse bad treatment” from family, because they ARE family, rather than expecting MORE from them. That you would excuse or tolerate rude insensitive behaviour that you wouldn’t accept from a friend. That you should somehow expect MORE from friends and LESS from family? That seems bonkers to me.

Equally, when you overlay personality types for things like introversion and extroversion, or an overlay of emotive/intuitive vs. analytical, you find that certain personality traits do NOT in fact all need or create the same types of interactions with a community. I feel like “not being alone” is valid as a potential contributor to happiness or absence of unhappiness, but beyond that, it is more like the goal should be “enough community connection for you.” For certain types, myself included, over-connection leads to negativity, aka unhappiness, not simply that more is better. Put differently, there’s a calibration aspect to connection that I don’t see mentioned very often, unless focused on introverts. You need the right kind and level of connections that is right for you. It’s definitely not one-size-fits-all.

Finally, when I turn to purpose or meaning as the third element, I’m not sure it’s a valid variable. If you look at philosophy, you often see references in Puritan ethics and elsewhere, almost every religion perhaps, that you should do good deeds for others. In almost all modern psych references, they talk about that purpose or meaning almost universally as service to others. Making the world a better place somehow for the rest of mankind. Yet, I can’t help but wonder:

• If you define service to others as “doing good”
• If you equate “doing good” as being rewarding/pleasing to you too
• If you equate doing things that are rewarding/pleasing to you as increasing happiness
• And then you conclude “increasing happiness” means meaning / purpose in the form of service to others

isn’t that just a circular definition? If you assume serving others is good, and that good things make you happy, is it a surprise that you’ll be happier if you serve others?

Which isn’t to say they’re completely wrong. For a large number of people, serving others MAY give them a sense of purpose which is better than being directionless, AND the act of service itself can be rewarding. But I’m not sure it’s a component. At best, I see it as a possible tool, a contributor. Just as pleasure was an indicator, not an actual component on its own.

Finally, where I often go off the rails of their line of argument of what “leads to happiness” is that most of the approaches are looking for evidence of something that leads to something they can call happiness. So, if you have X, it will lead to an increased quantity of happiness Y. It makes sense. If X, then increased Y. A positive value for X is assumed.

But is the positive value of “X” actually required? Could it be simply the absence of negative X? For example, for pleasure, instead of something giving pleasure, could the absence of acute or chronic pain be an equal or even stronger motivator? Or perhaps a fundamental prerequisite? I often think so, until I see people in pain who are quite happy overall. Negative X is present but they’re still happy. Or if I look at connection, is it connection that is important or the absence of isolation? If you eliminate the sense of isolation, or chronic pain, does that take you back to the idea of Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs, however outdated, and let you return to climbing the pyramid? Is there richer fodder to be found in Amartya Sen’s work on human and social development, instead?

Or should we turn the notion of “purpose” inward and make it less about service to others and more about service to whatever goals you set for yourself, as long as they aren’t destructive? Some people set goals like visiting all the countries in the world or running marathons. And it gives purpose and meaning, or direction at least, to their lives, without any sense of “service to others”. And they are happiest when they set a new personal best or are in the throes of a run. No benefit to anyone else. No service. Just a purely selfish goal for themselves that gets them up early in the morning, that gets them out in their Nike’s saying “Just Do It” even when it’s raining at 5:00 a.m.

I can’t help but feel with all the research and thought on happiness, we’re still missing some base elements in the definitional framework. I like aspects of the big 3, and I believe strongly in the aspects of personality determining “happiness”, but I don’t know what the real variables/components are…for some, in philosophy more than psychology, that search for meaning is the real source of happiness. Finding the answer isn’t really the goal, just working on the questions.