Historical Happiness

Jennifer Michael Hecht, author of The Happiness Myth, has both an unusual name and an unusual take on happiness. She takes the long view on happiness, looking at it through the lens of history. Her "Happiness by Historical Perspective" approach makes her really good at spotting how contemporary ideas about happiness differ from more classical approaches. One of the things she's noticed is that our current culture has a decided bias in favor of two things -- longevity and productivity.

In terms of longevity most people assume living a long time will help make them happy. In other words they emphasize quantity over quality, sort of the Wal-Mart Syndrome applied to their entire life. As Hecht puts it, scientists study the negative impact of eating chocolate cake on life expectancy, but they never think to ask if the happiness you get from eating it is worth it. 

It's like the old joke. A man goes to his doctor for a check-up. The doc examines him and says, "You're in OK shape, but there are a few lifestyle changes I'd like you to make. Quit eating meat, quit drinking caffeine, quit drinking alcohol, and give up having sex." "If I do all that will I live to be a hundred?" the patient asks. "I can't guarantee that," says the doc, "but it'll sure as hell feel like it!"

The question we each have to ask ourselves is a re-edit of a classic one: Is it better to live 6o years like a lion or  82.3 years like a lamb?" OK, maybe it's not quite that cut and dry, but it behooves all of us to question the assumption that a longer life is a happier life. 

As for productivity, The Protestant Work Ethic was not alive and well in classical times. It was more like Mark Twain said, "Work is something a body has to do. Play is something a body wants to do." In many historical epochs, and in many cultures, the emphasis was decidedly on enjoyment or play, and people worked only as much as they had to in order to provide for their basic needs. And, no, kids, a Play Station is not a basic need! Henry David Thoreau, transcendentalist author and philosopher, devised a way of working for pay a mere six weeks out of each year, and then living footloose and fancy-free at Walden Pond the rest of the year. 

Interestingly, both longevity and productivity are now in the cultural forefront as health care and jobs are the twin bugaboos of today's economy. Did you know that over 80% of the money spent on the average person's  health care is spent in the final two years of their life? The ideal of longevity costs us all a friggin' fortune! And do the extra two years, many times spent sick and infirm, really make us happier?

As for jobs, if we all just worked less there'd be plenty of jobs to go around. Of course we'd have to quit buying all that useless crap from China, as well as all the other luxurious "necessities" that keep our over-bloated economy afloat. But the question is: Wouldn't we all be alot happier with more time to do what we love with the people we love than we are with 40+ hour work weeks, stress-related diseases, and a house full of plastic shit?

Ooops, looks like I got off on a rant there! The point is, the point that Jennifer Michael Hecht makes is, that perhaps our cultural over-emphasis on both longevity and productivity is producing less happiness, not more. As the Moody Blues said, it's "a question of balance," and a question we all need to ask ourselves in order to experience the most happiness in our lives.