Rare is the philosopher who doesn’t give happiness a significant place in the good life. Even Kant, often caricatured as making no room for happiness, still says both that it is a duty to secure one’s own happiness in this world, and that one needs to hope for happiness in the afterlife. Happiness, then, is a topic of key philosophical importance, whether by “happiness” we mean the pleasant mental state aimed at by Bentham or the broader conception of human flourishing in Aristotle’s eudaimonia; and most accounts of the latter include some element of the former.
We would do well, then, to pay attention to the burgeoning field of psychologists’ empirical research on happiness. The field faces a number of methodological problems, but comes to interesting insights in spite of these. One deservedly popular book in the field is Daniel Gilbert’s Stumbling on Happiness, a well written and engaging summary of current research. Gilbert does a good job of summarizing many psychologists’ counterintuitive findings about happiness.
The problem is that some of Gilbert’s conclusions contradict not only common sense – which isn’t a problem, because contradicting common sense is the point – but each other. He concludes at the end that we are not as different from other people as we think we are, and that therefore in order to be happy we should ask other people what makes them happy. Yet elsewhere in the book he acknowledges that people don’t themselves know what makes them happy. The most obvious example is children: ask anyone who has children and they will tell you their children are their key source of joy, yet every study on the subject concludes we get less happy when children are born, and happier again when they leave. Which is to say that according to Gilbert’s own data, other people’s self-report is not the best place to find out what will make you happy.
I’ve been meaning to read that book for a while, so my expertise on the subject is thinner than I’d like.
For what it’s worth, from my background, both of those seemingly-contradictory ideas seem “intuitive”. (In this sense, I mean, “with the intuitions of a scientist, that have been substantially trained to avoid some of the traditional pitfalls, though are surely still far from perfect.”) Many people are consciously incorrect about what makes them happy, about why they do what they do. Yet surely we are more similar than we think, and can learn much from each other. I should probably read his argument fully before I comment too much, but I suspect some array of these factors:
1) There’s a happiness/satisfaction conflation here, maybe from Gilbert or maybe from the research or maybe the surveyed parents. Children can make a life very satisfying, but not make it happy.
2) Some things may produce misleading happiness results (like children), but enough things don’t, that there is still a lot of useful info.
3) Statistics are your friend. Individual claims may be error-prone, but once you get lots of advice, a big sample will be very valuable.
As I said, I can only say so much without reading the book and the full arguments. While those two statements do argue in opposite directions, they don’t seem to be at complete logical loggerheads.
Indeed, Gilbert could probably claim that asking other people is in most cases the best way to learn how to be happy, that having children is an exception. I’m skeptical about that, still – so much of the book is about how we, we in general, get things wrong about what makes us happy and doesn’t. That’s why the point about statistics doesn’t seem to help: it’s not just that a few people get children’s effect wrong, but that they’re reliably misled about that effect, at a high degree of statistical significance.
I suspect that if there is a way to put the two together more consistently, it might be this: try to observe what, as far as you can tell, actually makes people happy, rather than what you think makes them happy. Look at the situations where people are smiling, where their body language conveys relaxation and energy at once, where their vocal tone indicates contentment and not worry or anger. Observe this as often as you can, in as many people as possible; and try to get a sense of which situations seem to you to make them happy, and which don’t. Also, perhaps, look at the kind of people who seem most often to convey happiness in this way, and then ask whether there are steps you can take to be more like them.
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