7th
Happiness
My good friend Shri posted recently on the subject of success and happiness. I responded to her post by quibbling about her opening statement:
“What does every person on earth want? To be happy. But how people define happiness and therefore how they define success…”
I found it interesting that she assumes a connection between the two, and said that I think of the concepts as mainly orthogonal. (Happiness is an emotion; success is an assessment. Of course, succeeding at something might lead to happiness. Happiness might be correlated to some kinds of success, too. … but at a fundamental level, they’re very different things.)
Let me take her assumption as an axiom, though, and contrast it with an ongoing conversation I’ve been having lately with another close friend, who has been increasingly engaged in a sitting meditation practice in the last year and is developing a Buddhist outlook on happiness and living.
Shri’s statement seems to imply the following idea: much of happiness comes from various kinds of success, which we can vaguely define as achieving a goal or desired outcome. I’d interpret her post as asking the question “what kinds of goals are effective in promoting happiness”? In particular, are goals promoted by other people - or “society” - suspect? Is adopting (what one perceives as) “society’s expectations for success” helpful or harmful to one’s happiness?
My friend’s mindset starts from a completely different point: that goals, or any notion of success, are inherently anti-happiness. Human suffering, in this view, basically comes from mentally castigating ourselves for failing to meet an aspiration (where “aspiration” can range from “I want to achieve career success X” to “I want to be a nice person”). Goals - or, perhaps, expectations of oneself - are mainly a setup for self-flagellation. Even putting actual failure aside, anxiety over failure - or tension between desired outcome and the state of I’m-not-there-yet - is good fodder for tortuing oneself endlessly.
My perspective differs from both. As before, happiness is an emotion. There’s no inherent need to tie it to, or separate it from, success/goals/aspirations. Lots of things can lead to happiness - e.g., certain sensory experiences, the right kind of intellectual stimulation, social interactions, or achievements. For me, the key is simply figuring out what makes you happy, and steering your life toward those things.
That can be hard, of course. Life presents tradeoffs, constraints, and risks, so it’s usually not just matter of driving straight toward your happiness target. Even more, figuring out what really makes you happy requires being pretty good at introspection, and a lot of people are pretty bad at that. It’s an ongoing process, of course; your sources of joy are a moving target, as you encounter new people, try new activities, experience new sensations, and, of course, as you change. (A really interesting academic article I read a few weeks ago in an economics journal suggested that, on average, the relative values of “excitement” vs. “serenity” with regard to promoting happiness changes predictably and steadily as we age.)
So the simple answer is “steer toward what makes you happy”, which isn’t quite as tautological as it sounds. The more complicated addition is “… and figure out how to take calculated ‘happiness risks’ (which every sports fan does), how to gauge short-term vs. long-term tradeoffs, and how to manage unhappiness when it’s not plausibly avoidable”.
This last point is pretty important. There are many times when the cost of avoiding something unpleasant is worse than the thing itself (dealing with a stressful project at work may not be as bad as losing your job, for instance). I think this is where the “don’t make yourself suffer” technique comes in particularly handy - namely, in enabling you to divert your thoughts away from the source of stress.
Where I’d end up, therefore, is something around taking Shri’s and my Buddhist friend’s perspectives and thinking of them as techniques, rather than foundations. If you know something that makes you happy, steer toward it - that’s a goal, right? (Depending on your tastes, it may be lots of tiny goals or a few big ones.) Not torturing yourself and mentally managing more unpleasant situations? That seems to be pretty close to what one learns to do in sitting meditation.
Shri’s probably thinking of something a little more tangible and a little less philosophical, so let me make this a bit more concrete about myself. First, a story:
When I worked for my first “real company” (after grad school and consulting), HR asked me to fill out a “career goals” form after a few months. I told the head of HR that my goal was to survive until the weekend, which didn’t go over well - apparently I was supposed to have the goal of being a CEO someday, or something. The thing is, I didn’t really have career goals; I was trying to figure out what kind of work I liked, and what I didn’t like, and how to manage my stress.
I still don’t think of myself as having goals; I have “things that are, or would be, fun”. I’d like to be a Stanford basketball season-ticket holder someday, but I don’t think of it as a goal; I think of it as “that would be really fun to have the tickets and the time to go to all the games”. I really like playing chess and poker, and I expect that I’ll be enjoying playing them for a long, long time; it would be fun to get a master rating in chess, but it’s not a goal (though I’ll certainly celebrate it if it happens), and I’d love to play in the WSOP Main Event again, but there’s no timetable and no regret if it doesn’t happen. Fortunately, a lack of things that I enjoy doing is not one of my problems. :)
My career perspective is pretty much the same. There are various professional activities I enjoy doing, and I’d like to keep doing them: I like meeting with startups & VCs; I like thinking about interesting strategic questions; I like learning about new products and technologies. There are other things that I’d enjoy learning about, and doing, that aren’t part of my current role. I don’t have a goal of achieving a certain job or a certain title, and I never have. (That’s not to say I haven’t sought promotions - I have, but not out of a goal-oriented mindset; I’ve done so because I thought I deserved the promotion and its accoutrements.)
So, Shri, how do I define success? I don’t. What I do is try to live my life in accordance with what I believe and what I like, which includes a healthy mix of hangin’ with my wife and with my friends and family; watching and playing various sports; playing chess and poker and other games; doing puzzlehunts; reading interesting articles and books; travel; interesting work that includes the things I mentioned above; having interesting discussions with intelligent people; learning about certain favorite topics, including physics, psychology, economics, and Greek; musical theater; and surely other things that I’m forgetting at the moment. (… and I try to avoid things that will annoy me, bore me, or make me stressed or upset.) I suppose that success, for me, is living a good balance of all of these joys.
