Pursuit of Happiness

 

Chasing A Mirage or A Misguided Quest

 

Is happiness an emotion which has to be painstakingly cultivated?

Or is it a state of mind like fear, anger, love, affection, empathy, and anxiety that is one of the many essential elements of mind’s vast repertoire? Literature on none of these, if at all there is some, is as huge as on happiness. Happiness has overwhelmingly occupied the minds of thinkers in every age.

A new-born knows what makes it happy: mother’s soft breast brushing against its cheeks and a soft warm cradle for uninterrupted sleep. A toddler knows that candies and presence of parents bring him unbridled happiness. A child learns without being taught that a day spent away from school and at play is the happiest day. Adults intuitively seek happiness in security of a well-paying job, a loving partner, and a secure environment at home and work. Urge to seek happiness is as natural as the desire to quench a parched throat. It is no less strong than life’s craving for air.

Happiness evolved to motivate our ancestors to seek those activities that enhance survival and reproductive success. A look at some of the sources of happiness shows its evolutionary role: food, shelter from inclement weather, sex, a new born child, contentment in job, love for kith and kin. This happiness, though the source of much that is pleasant in our daily lives, is not the ultimate aim of the activities that generate it, but a proximate goal. Ultimate objective is preservation of individuals and propagation of their genes. Thus, this happiness is not the end-goal but a means to an end.

Not only positive emotions like happiness, but also negative emotions like anxiety, fear, depression, pain – emotions that cause distress – evolved with happiness and offered species a Darwinian advantage in evolutionary race. A person who is depressed after a failure is motivated to try harder next time, pain informs sufferer to avoid certain injurious stimuli, anxiety about a situation spurs people to be better prepared for the event.

When seers, philosophers, and psychologists speak about man’s perpetual quest for happiness, this is not the variety they imply. The word which comes nearest to describe their concept is the Greek word, Eudaimonia. Though commonly translated as happiness, the word 'fulfilment' explains it better. Eudaimonia is what Plato and Aristotle surmised men strive after. It can also be translated as good-spirit, flourishing of people, a life well-lived. Activities that spawn eudaimonia are many, and people choose what suits their temperament and their station in life: leading a virtuous life, quest for knowledge, excellence in arts, or dutifully living the role life has placed them in.

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Neuroscience now suggests that activity in certain areas of brain and changes in neurotransmitters that regulate these activities may affect happiness. But to aver that these biochemical processes in brain are the cause of happiness is to assert that a dog wags its tail to be happy. A number of factors in the external environment and internal milieu combine to weave the web of mental state that we feel as happiness.

Like the redness of a rose happiness is a subjective feeling of an individual. I can’t explain to you how red is my rose. I can only compare it to other red-coloured objects and get trapped in the loop of a circular logic. I can take recourse in the belief, that the photons of the specific wavelength of light, being reflected from the rose and exciting the neurons of my optic nerve, and consequently certain specific neurons in the visual area of my brain, are activating the same area in your brain too. But the subjective feeling of redness that this activity of my brain cells generates is only mine and cannot be measured objectively. How brain creates subjective experience – known as qualia – from sensory stimulus is an unresolved query. Happiness is a qualia, and alike the redness of a rose, a subjective experience - only vastly more mysterious.

If it is agreed that people universally and incessantly seek happiness, then why should thinkers quibble over the meaning of the word? This is because philosophers and preachers, over the ages, have confused the subjective emotion of happiness with the activities that engender it. Leading a principled life of high morals is a cause of happiness as is securing a well-paid job with a promise of more money in the bank. Causes are different but state of mind they produce is same. There may be reasons to believe that happiness produced by these may not be of the same duration, but happiness nevertheless, both are.

There is no good or bad happiness. If a person says he feels happy in bullying his subordinates at work, he may be thought a scumbag, but none can argue that he doesn’t know what happiness is. It is not the world that decides how happy an individual is, but only the individual. Philosopher John Stuart Mill wrote, ‘It is better to a be a human being dissatisfied than a pig satisfied; better to be Socrates dissatisfied than a fool satisfied’. He was being obnoxiously overbearing. He can decide what makes him happy. But a satisfied pig or a fool in his narrow world of thoughts, are as or perhaps more happy than a dissatisfied philosopher.

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Every animal steers its life, with a view to maximise happiness. This objective is attained through automatic and instinctive behaviour in animals.

Humans differ from their animal ancestors in one major aspect. They not only see what is in front of their eyes, they cast their mind’s eye ahead to predict how they will fare in future. No other animal suffers apprehension about an unforeseen catastrophe in future, despair because life hasn't tuned out as rosy as one had expected, regret for what one did or did not do in past, craving for a past that now feels golden.

About 80,000 to 100,000 years ago brains of hominids, our distant ancestors, swelled immensely. Frontal lobe enlarged the most. An area of frontal lobe, prefrontal gyrus, is the seat of mind’s eye, which projects its vision in future. It gives us the unique ability to plan. It is also the seat of reason. Patients who have lost the function of this area of brain, in a stroke or trauma, live an apparently normal life. But their friends and family members say they are not the persons they were before the injury. They are also incapable of seeing ahead and planning anything for future action.

Psychologist Daniel Gilbert says that man’s unique ability for prospection, the act of looking forward in time or considering the future, is the paramount source of human suffering. Our minds are perpetually busy in predicting what will confront our senses in the next few seconds, minutes, days, and years. This is the greatest blessing of our swollen brain and also its unmitigated curse. We are the only species who can plan our lives in view of present and past; and then suffer interminable despondency when these plans do not materialise or fail to deliver the expected joys.

Robert Burns poem To a Mouse immortalises this poignant fate of a forward-seeing man.

But mouse-friend, you are not alone
In proving foresight may be vain:
The best-laid schemes of Mice and Men
Go oft awry,
And leave us only grief and pain,
For promised joy!

Still, friend, you're blessed compared with me!
Only present dangers make you flee:
But, ouch! behind me I can see
Grim prospects drear!
While forward-looking seers, we
Humans guess and fear!

 

The trouble is not that humans try to look into an uncertain future. Issue is: are they equipped to make valid predictions about unknown distant worlds?

A small area on our retinae is devoid of light-sensitive cells. This is the blind spot of the eye. Any object in the field of vision that casts an image on blind spot is not seen by the eye. But we do not perpetually notice a blank spot as we gaze at the world, every wakeful moment of our lives. Mind automatically fills in this area from clues it gathers from the objects adjacent to blind spot.

This filling-in is not the exclusive domain of visual area of the brain. Brain’s capability to store experiences is huge. But our humungous life-experiences will overwhelm brain’s memory in no time, if they were to be stored faithfully and in totality. Instead, only salient features of an experience are stored, leaving numerous gaps. During recall mind builds a story around these skeletal memories and feeds us a coherent narrative of past. To believe that the world is as fed by our senses is an illusion. German philosopher Immanuel Kent said, ‘The understanding can intuit nothing, the senses can think nothing. Only through their union can knowledge arise’. The world as we know it is a construction, manufactured by the moulding of our sensory experiences by an overactive brain.

We employ these conjured images of past to predict happiness in future. But brain not only fills-in the gaps in memory, it leaves out much when it imagines a future. Many of us remember that it always rained on the days we forgot to carry our umbrellas. Mind is notorious for ignoring absences of an event, especially when it recollects past or imagines future.  It factors only the occurrences. We do not recollect the innumerable occasions when we didn’t have an umbrella and it did not rain.

Absence-neglect makes the image of distant future smooth and past sepia-hued, robbing them of the granularity of daily experiences. I and my wife, long ago, visited Kardang gompa, a Buddhist monastery, when we were holidaying in Lahaul valley. Hike to the gompa was through stunning views of mountains and valleys. It was a bright sunny day; sky was spotlessly blue and air was crisp and cool. Tourist season had ended and we were the only visitors at the monastery. Monks invited us for a cup of tea in their dwellings, a shabby clump of few tiny mud hovels in the wilderness of high mountains. I was filled with awe for the simple, spiritual lives of monks, in these idyllic surroundings. Senior monk, offered us salty tea with dry, stale bread and asked what we did for livelihood. We informed that we were doctors. ‘You both are so young. You must be rich. You will have everything you need in life’, he commented in a low, sad voice. I was stunned and crestfallen. In imagining life of these monks, I had only seen the beautiful Himalayas and the apparent ease of their frugal lives. I had not considered other amenities, that were absent, but essential for satisfaction in life: good food, comfortable lodgings, accessible health services, social security. With so much filling-in and leaving-out, is it a surprise that vacation in that remote beach-village is rarely as enjoyable as it was in the past or the new job with much increased salary, more leaves, does not consistently improve the quality of life?

Present overbearingly influences recollection of past and imagination of future. When old people are asked how did they view premarital sex, teen-age drinking in their youths, their answers are close to their present opinions on these issues. Most people find the idea of life after losing their child or spouse horrendous- 'We wouldn't be able to live another day'. But millions of widows, widowers, and people who have lost their child, interviewed years after the event, report leading a normal life. Idea of eating out is disgusting when one’s stomach is overstuffed. Yet, in no time craving for good food returns.

When we imagine an object like a whale or a flower, we picture it in our mind. Our imagination stimulates same areas in brain, that are excited when actually viewing these objects and thus we can conjure a true picture. In an attempt to cut off external stimuli that interfere with this process of imagination we close our eyes. Mind is also capable of constructing an image of our emotions in imaginary situations. Psychologists call this prefeel. But prefeel is not as true to the real emotions as the image of an imaginary object is to the real object. Mind, unlike eyes and ears, cannot stop feeling the real world. Our present emotional state influences prefeel. On a bad-weather day when people are asked how they feel their lives are, they find it much poorer compared to another group of people in the same locality, who were asked the question when the weather was good. A depressed mind sees the future bleak. A happy mind finds much to be sangine about future.

A mind that cannot accurately recapitulate its past; that sees the present only piecemeal; is hopelessly inadequate to look far ahead in time; but continuously speculates how happy it would be in future. If all this is true, how can one then find fulfilment in life, joy in the act of living, happiness that is the legitimate goal of every breathing creature?

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Jonathan Haidt, a psychologist who has studied happiness for many years, finds much truth in ancient wisdom. Various religions and philosophies converge on the kernel belief that human desire is the source of human sorrows. Haidt postulates that desires originate in the oldest region of animal brains, i.e., limbic system. Limbic system is responsible for the behavioural and emotional responses of animals, especially when these are linked to survival of individual: feeding, reproduction, caring for young, fight and flight responses. The youngest part of our brain that grew during the inflationary growth I alluded before, is the neocortex. Other than its role in foresight, it seems to be the seat of our self. Self has its own ideas of how to achieve happiness. This is the eudaimonia: A sense of having led a worthy, meaningful life. Haidt uses a metaphor to distinguish the old from the new brain. Old brain is the elephant and self the rider. Elephant has strong desires. Rider cannot control the elephant when it is pursuing these. These desires fuel the drive for survival and hence override the goals of reasoning self. Self can persuade elephant to be a passive witness as self realises its goals, only when the elephant is sated.

Psychologists working in the field of happiness think a simple formula, ‘the happiness formula’, captures the important factors contributing to individual happiness (H).

H = S + C + V

 

‘S’, is the biological setpoint that varies in individuals. It is the most crucial determinant of how happy a person will be in life. Experiments have shown that there are people who are happy in their situation and others, who in similar circumstances are unhappy. ‘S’ is perhaps like a thermostat and is set for each individual. It may be determined by the interaction of individual genome with its environment. Certain activities like meditation and cognitive therapy may alter ‘S’ a little. Drugs like Prozac might change the mood of a person who is depressed, by changing the ‘S’ point.

 

‘C’, the conditions of life, also influence happiness. Majority of people are tied to the circumstances in which life has placed them. Few who can change these may be able to claim more happiness. Diminishing noise at work and at home; reducing commuting time to work-place, unless the drive is through soothing locales; taking control of events in your life; changing self to find greater acceptance in community; are some of the ways one can alter ‘C’ to increase happiness. But the condition that leads to largest raise in happiness is having, seeking, and nurturing good relations in life: Spouse, friends, or relatives.

Psychologist Mihalyi Csikszentmihalyi (pronounced ‘cheeks sent me high’) has researched happiness for more than three decades. He devised an ingenious method to record the happiness content in daily activities of his subjects, ‘experience sampling method’. People carry with them a pager that beeps randomly several times a day. At a beep subjects take out a small note book and note down what they are doing at the moment and how much they are enjoying it. Mihalyi has collected hundreds of thousands of data over the decades. These reveal an obvious fact. People enjoy activities like eating, sex, and leisure spent with friends and family. But one can’t eat or indulge in sex for long.

The most intense joys, some people reported in Mihalyi’s research, were in certain absorbing activities. These are the states when people are completely immersed in a task. Many subjects called this state as ‘being in the Zone’. Mihalyi called if flow, and wrote a book by the same name, to explain his hypothesis. He called it flow, as the state felt like an effortless movement. When people find flow, they go with it. Flow is reported in diverse activities: playing, skiing, climbing, running, writing, music, art, etc. Attributes of a flow-activity seem that the activity should be challenging to grab your undivided attention; you should have skills to meet the challenge; and activity should provide immediate feedback about how you are doing the job. When in flow, subjects report one flash of joy after another: each move played in the game, each step taken in the arduous hike, each note strung in music, each thought captured in appropriate words.

Another psychologist, M.E.P. Seligman expands on Mihalyi’s research and offers distinction between pleasures and gratification. Pleasures are ‘delights that have clear sensory and strong emotional components’, such as one gets from food, sex, viewing a nice landscape. Gratifications are activities that engage you completely, demand your strengths, and allow you to lose self-consciousness. Mihalyi says these are autotelic activities. Dictionary defines autotelic as, 'having a purpose in and not apart from itself'. When the task becomes its own goal, it offers unbounded joys.

Voluntary activities that provide gratifications and flow are the ‘V’ in the happiness formula. These enhance happiness considerably and consistently. Unlike pleasure-activities that are automatic and only sate cravings of self, gratifications enhance self.

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Buddha, and the ancient sages, were right when they decreed that striving after desires does not lead to lasting happiness. But their wisdom does not encompass the whole truth. Their counsel for renunciation of worldly joys is impractical and unphysiological - against the grain of the earth that makes us human. One must look for fulfilment in life as one lives it, not by abdicating the world. Pleasures and passionate pursuit of these, define our lives. This pursuit brings much joys; and grief too. Both make and complete a life. Happiness comes from within and also from without. Blind attachment to only one of these is life only half lived. Neuroscience research of last few decades might nudge a few to tweak their choices in life as they screw up their eyes to peep into a misty future and predict what would make them happy.

As I look back and read my words, I realise that instead of presenting a simple picture of an essential emotion – the pursuit of which, we are told, is a ‘self-evident truth, an inalienable right’ of every human – I have only stirred the muddy waters. Perhaps I bit more than I can chew. My only consolation is in the knowledge that exalted religious souls and consummate thinkers in past, often floundered when confronted with the nature of this ubiquitous human quest – search for happiness.