Barry's Blog

"There are two tragedies in life. One is not getting what we want. The other is getting it." -Oscar Wilde

In Jonathan Clements' most recent column for The Wall Street Journal, "No Satisfaction: Why What You Have Is Never Enough," he tackles this age old problem of finding happiness. He observes that, "We may have life and liberty, but the pursuit of happiness isn't going so well. As a country, we are richer than ever. Yet surveys show that Americans are no happier that they were 30 years ago. The key problem: We aren't very good at figuring out what will make us happy."

We can all identify with the elusive pursuit of happiness. We invariably hanker for the fancier car, bigger stock portfolio, or fatter paychecks. And some of us have, or have friends, who have "cashed out," selling their businesses, and we admire them, thinking to ourselves, "If only that could be me." Yet, as we sometimes observe, some of the most miserable people in the world are those with the greatest net worth. And even in our own lives, when "having more" may initially boost our happiness, soon the glow of satisfaction fades, and we find ourselves yearning for something more.

Clements mentions two explanations, supposedly from the "experts," on why we keep striving after things. The first is that "we aren't built to be happy, but rather to survive and reproduce."  This is a kind of "evolutionary" take on our quest for happiness, and sees our pursuit of happiness as a biological "tease," a trick to jolly us along. Terry Burnham, a Boston money manager and co-author of "Mean Genes," suggests that the promise of happiness "is an incentive scheme for the benefit of our genes...it's a very fundamental trick that's played on us, this lure of perpetual bliss." 

The second explanation is that we're just bad at forecasting, or predicting, what will make us happy. Two academics, Daniel Kahneman and David Schkade, conducted a study where they asked university students in the Midwest and Southern California where they thought someone like themselves would be happier--and both groups picked California, primarily because of the weather. Yet, when asked how satisfied they were with their own lives, both groups were equally happy. 

A third explanation for our helter-skelter pursuit of happiness, not mentioned in Clements' article, is borne out of a wisdom that comes from the ancients. To pursue happiness is in part to ask ourselves, "what is the greatest good, the final end, the summum bonum, of life?" According to Toynbee, ours, the modern West, is the first of twenty-one great civilizations that have existed on our planet, that does not have or teach its citizens any answer to the question of why they exist. And when ultimate ends disappear, only toys remain.

Perhaps our futile search for happiness has nothing to do with our "mean genes," or our poor forecasting of what we think will make us happy. Maybe the search for happiness is elusive for the very reason that we were not made to be happy in this present world. Perhaps this world's happiness, so transitory in nature, serves as a signpost for another world awaiting us. I find C.S. Lewis' words on this matter quite instructive:

For FinishingWell,

Barry Morrow