Paradoxes of happiness

Ricardo Rato - Senior Lecturer, School of Management, Leadership & Government, USJ

While talking to a friend recently she hinted to me that she was feeling depressed, much to my shock, given that she is someone I would assume to be living a very rewarding life. She is sociable, employed, married, and talented in her profession and different hobbies. I have been reading a lot about quality of life recently, due to my ongoing research on the influence of our professional lives on life satisfaction, and couldn’t help but relate my readings to what she was telling me. In the end, I was left wondering whether her confessed propensity for being dissatisfied wasn’t due to a collective obsession, and social pressure, for us to be happy.
When comparing our lives with the lives of our parents, and especially of our grandparents, it becomes clear that the living standards in recent decades have improved considerably. My grandfather migrated from Portugal soon after getting married as a way to offer a better life to his family. He lived away for nearly twenty years, which cost him his presence during the childhood of his two daughters. Asked whether this was a difficult time for him, he just says that "well, life is hard and you do what you got to do!"
Well, life today is not that hard. At least for those of us lucky enough to have been born by the end of the 20th century in the most developed societies. We benefit from decades of prosperity and improving living standards, and instead of making tough sacrifices, we instead devote our talents and energy to being successful, wealthy, healthy, sociable and whatever more we believe will make us as happy as we deserve to be. Fantastic, but…are we really happier than previous generations? Studies, particularly in the US and Europe, where these statistics have been gathered the longest, suggest that we are not. Worse still, we have nothing else to blame but ourselves, and our increasing expectations. As life gets easier we start demanding more from our own lives. Besides these escalating expectations it looks as if our mental models about happiness are also flawed and thus, the more we strive to be happy, the more frustrated we become.
One of these flaws has been called the paradox of hedonism, i.e. the idea that an accumulation of pleasurable moments leads to a happy life. However, the problem with hedonists is that, by definition, they are self-centered and focus mostly on immediate pleasure, compromising their long-term wellbeing and the social networks that we know for sure are vital to the maintenance of healthy wellbeing levels. Besides, due to our marvelous adaptation skills, what pleasures us today will most likely bore us tomorrow, inducing hedonists towards a happiness ‘rat race’. Another misconception, which is actually intertwined with the paradox of hedonism, is the perception that having more money is conducive to more happiness. However, study after study has shown that the impact of money on life satisfaction is limited, except in situations where the difference between having more or less money is critical in enabling people to afford their basic needs. Of course having money is good, and having more money is even better, because it gives us security and freedom in the way in which we spend our time. However, the truth is that there are limits to how many things you can buy that are really important and, after a certain threshold, no matter how much more you have, it won’t make you any happier. This is made evident by studies interviewing lottery winners, showing that just a short time after winning the lottery these people are as likely to be as happy, or unhappy, as anyone else. It seems that whatever capacity money has to make us happier dilutes very quickly. Again, a result of our adjusting expectations.
In conclusion, it seems as if all studies point in the same direction: To be happy we should stop obsessing over it, and instead focus on the pursuit of meaningful activities and relationships that are valuable to us beyond their hedonistic, short-term, value. Then, as long as we are lucky in things like health and to live in peaceful times, happiness will come as a by-product.

©MDTimes/University of Saint Joseph